Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland 9781108473071, 9781108564465, 2019038172, 2019038173, 9781108460941

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Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity

This book reveals the rewards of exploring the relationship between art and religion in the first millennium, and the particular problems of comparing the visual cultures of different emergent and established religions of the period in Eurasia – Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and the pagan religions of the Roman world. Most of these became established and remained in play as what are called ‘the world religions’. The chapters in this volume show how the long traditions of studying these topics are caught up in complex local, ancestral, colonial and post-colonial discourses and biases, which have made comparison difficult. The study of late antiquity turns out also to be an examination of the intellectual histories of modernity.

ś  is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Chicago since 2003, and also at the Divinity School since 2014, and was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith project on art and religion in late antiquity at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy; in 2019 he was elected to the Max Planck Society as Visiting External Member of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium, including into modernity, with strong interests in comparativism, global art history, and the critical historiography of the discipline.

Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland

Edited by

ś  University of Oxford

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108473071 DOI: 10.1017/9781108564465 © Cambridge University Press 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Elsner, Jaś, editor. Title: Empires of faith in late antiquity : histories of art and religion from India to Ireland / edited by Jaś Elsner, University of Oxford. Description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019038172 (print) | LCCN 2019038173 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108473071 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108460941 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108564465 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art and religion–History–To 1500. Classification: LCC N72.R4 E47 2019 (print) | LCC N72.R4 (ebook) | DDC 201/.67–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038172 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038173 ISBN 978-1-108-47307-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures [page vii] List of Contributors [xiii] Acknowledgements [xv]

1. Introduction [1] ś   :   

[]

2. The Gandharan Problem [27]   3. Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean [51]      4. Mystery Cult and Material Culture in the Graeco-Roman World [81]      5. The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity: Between Politics and Religion in the Forms of Late Roman Art [110] ś  6. The Rise of Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Late Imperial Russia [128]   7. Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867) and Schleiermacher’s Legacy: The Attempted Foundation of a Protestant Theology of Art [161]  

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Table of Contents

 :  :      [] 8. The Road from Decadence: Agendas and Personal Histories in the Study of Early Islamic Art [189]   9. Connecting Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies [223]   10. ‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva [260]    : - ,      [] 11. Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State (1948)    ś 

[293]

12. Whose History Is It Anyway? Contests for India’s Past in the Twentieth Century [320]   13. Acculturated Natives Who Rebel: Revivalist, Ottomanist and Pan-Arabist Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s) [361]   14. Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion [396]   Bibliography [434] Index of Names [508] Index of Subjects [510] 1st plate section: 8 pages can be found between pages 80 and 81 2nd plate section: 16 pages can be found between pages 272 and 273 3rd plate section: 8 pages can be found between pages 400 and 401

Figures

2.1 The Departure from Kapilavastu, from the east gate of stupa no. 1, Sanchi. 1st century  or , stone. Photograph by Anandajoti Bhikkhu (on a Creative Commons Licence through Wikicommons) [page 28] 2.2 Seated Buddha in the teaching posture. On the cushion below him, a seated Bodhisattva with turban and ornaments flanked by a kneeling male and female worshipper. 2nd or 3rd century , grey schist. From Jamalgarhi, Pakistan. 95  53 cm. British Museum, BM 1895,1026.1. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [47] 3.1 Raphael (1483–1520), The Sacrifice at Lystra (Acts 14:8–18, where the Lystrians offer sacrifices to Saints Paul and Barnabas after they have cured a lame man). Bodycolour on paper mounted onto canvas. Cartoon for a tapestry in the Sistine Chapel, commissioned by Pope Leo X and unveiled in 1519. Height: 350 cm, width: 560 cm, made c. 1515–16. Victoria and Albert Museum, on loan from the collection of Her Majesty the Queen. Photograph: Courtesy of the V&A [52] 3.2 Altars in the Senhouse Museum found at Maryport, UK. Dedicated in the 2nd century  by the ‘I cohors hispanorum’ and their various commanders. Sandstone. All of a square type, but no two altars are the same either in dimension or decoration. Senhouse Museum. Photograph: By kind permission of the Manager and Trustees of Senhouse Roman Museum [53] 3.3 Sandstone altar from Maryport. Dedicated by the tribune Marcus Maenius Agrippa in the 2nd century . Senhouse Museum. Photograph: By kind permission of the Manager and Trustees of Senhouse Roman Museum [57] 4.1 Fresco from the Mithraeum at Capua Vetere, Italy. From a series painted on the fronts of the benches which may show initiation rituals. 2nd century . Photograph: P. Adrych, per gentile concessione del Polo Museale della Campania [96] 4.2 Detail of the Mainz Cup, terracotta crater with Mithraic imagery. First half of the 2nd century . This side shows a scene which has been interpreted as representing initiation. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt. Photograph: P. Adrych by permission of the Archäologisches Museum, Frankfurt [96]

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List of Figures 4.3 Bronze statuette of Jupiter Dolichenus. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , found at Mauer-an-der-Url, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The statuette displays a common Roman conception of Jupiter Dolichenus in military dress, brandishing a double-axe and lightning bolt. The dedication beneath reads, ‘To Jupiter Dolichenus, greatest and best, Marrius Ursinus, a veteran, following a command, freely, gladly, and deservedly set this up’. Photograph: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna [99] 4.4 Bronze triangle from Austria featuring representations of Jupiter Dolichenus and other gods. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , found at Mauer-an-der-Url, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Found in the same hoard as Figure 4.3, this triangle still has its stand attached. From bottom to top the figures have been identified as the Dioscuri; Jupiter Dolichenus and consort; Sol and Luna; an eagle; and finally a winged Victory statuette on top. Photograph: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna [102] 4.5 Bronze triangle featuring representations of Jupiter Dolichenus and other gods. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , unknown findspot, now in the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection, Munich. The triangle, divided into four planes, features Jupiter Dolichenus with his female consort in the centre, three gods identified as Hercules, Minerva and Dionysus above, and an eagle at the very top. The so-called Dioscuri flank a male figure making an offering at an altar in the lower plane. Photograph: © Archäologische Staatssammlung München (photographer: Manfred Eberlein) [104] 6.1 N. P. Kondakov, his son Petr and Anton P. Chekhov in Yalta, 1904. © Reproduced from I. L. Kyzlasova (ed.), Мир Кондакова: публикации, статьи, каталог выставки [Kondakov’s World: Publications, Articles, Exhibition Catalogue] (Moscow, 2004) [130] 6.2 The Harpy Tomb, from Xanthus in Lycia. 480–470 , British Museum London (1848,1020.1). Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [134] 6.3a Al-Qasr, Umayyad Palace in Amman, first half of the 8th century, Jordan. Exterior. From: N. P. Kondakov, Археологическое путешествие по Сирии и Палестине [An Archaeological Journey through Syria and Palestine] (St Petersburg, 1904), 127. Public domain [140] 6.3b Al-Qasr, Umayyad Palace in Amman, first half of the 8th century, Jordan. Interior. From: N. P. Kondakov, Археологическое путешествие по Сирии и Палестине [An Archaeological Journey through Syria and Palestine] (St Petersburg, 1904), 129. Public domain [140]

List of Figures

6.4 Front page of the original copy of Ainalov’s The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art (St Petersburg, 1900). Public domain [145] 6.5 Christ and Disciples, remains of a sarcophagus from Psamathia, Istanbul. Now in the Bode Museum Berlin. 4th century. This photograph, which is the earliest publication of this artwork, demonstrates how it was originally discovered together with two thirteenth-century marble panels with Virgin Orans and Archangel. From: D. V. Ainalov, Эллинистические основы византийского искусства: исследования в области ранне-византийского искусства [The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art: Studies on Early Byzantine Art] (St Petersburg, 1900), plate IV. Public domain [147] 6.6 Icon of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, encaustic on wooden panel, 6th–7th century, one of the four early icons brought by Porphiry Uspensky from Mount Sinai. Museum of Western and Oriental Art, also known as Bogdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Art, Kiev. Photograph: author [151] 6.7 View of the St Catherine’s monastery library and Mount Horeb, Sinai. From: J. X. Raoult and N. P. Kondakov, Атлас 100 фотографических снимков с видов древностей Синайского монастыря [An Atlas of 100 Photographic Views of the Antiquities of the Sinai Monastery] (Odessa, 1883), image on page 8. Public domain [154] 6.8 Natalia Goncharova, The Virgin and Child, oil on canvas, 1911. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 150  107 cm. Photograph: author [157] 7.1 a and b Ferdinand Piper, List of topics to be covered by monumental theology, taken from Ferdinand Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie. Eine Geschichte der christlichen Kunstarchäologie und Epigraphik. Mittenwald, 1978 after original edition Gotha, 1867, pp. 55–6. [175] 7.2 Ferdinand Piper, plan of the Christliches Museum in the state of 1856, second floor of the right wing of the main university building at Unter den Linden 6, Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin. Taken from Ferdinand Piper, Das Christliche Museum der Universität zu Berlin und die Errichtung christlicher Volksmuseen. Berlin, 1856. [184] 8.1 Ernst Herzfeld (left) and colleagues at Persepolis (Iran), northern portico of the building known as the Harem of Xerxes. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Series 2.2, Box 8, Folder 2. Metropolitan Museum of Art (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943), New York. No known restriction on use [196]

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8.2 Mshatta façade, 743–4, detail showing simurgh. Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, Germany. Photograph © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0 [197] 8.3 Watercolour depiction of a wall painting with two dancers reconstructed by Herzfeld from fragments found in the main caliphal palace in Samarra (Dar al-Khilafa). Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Series 3.1 (Drawings, Watercolors and Prints: Excavation of Samarra). Metropolitan Museum of Art (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943), New York. No known restriction on use [201] 8.4 Louis Massignon costumed as a student of al-Azhar, Cairo, 1909. Public domain [213] 9.1 Gilded silver bottle bearing viticulture imagery, 5th–7th century. Height: 18.5 cm. British Museum, BM 1897,1231.189. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [226] 9.2 Charging boar relief, stucco wall panel, Ctesiphon, c. 6th century. 29.5  38.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Rogers Fund, 1932; 32.150.23. Creative Commons Licence [228] 9.3 Ivān of Khosro II (r. 590–627). Tāq-e Bostān, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author [232] 9.4 Detail of ivān of Khosro II, showing the relief of Fath ‘Ali Shāh (r. 1797–1834), Tāq-e Bostān, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author [238] 9.5 Rock relief of Ardašir I (r. 224–242), Naqš-e Rostam, Iran. © the author [239] 9.6 Details of tiles from Tekieh Mo’āven al-molk, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author (a) Āgā Mohammad Khān (founder of the Qājār dynasty, _ r. 1789–97); (b) Mohammad ‘Ali Shāh (r. 1907–9) (c) Šāpur I (r. 239–70); (d) Bahrām V Gur (r. 420–38); (e) Yazdegerd II (r. 438–57) (f) the hero Rostam. [241] 9.7 Detail of tiles from Tekieh Mo’āven al-molk, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author [242] 9.8 Rock relief of Šāpur I (r. 239–70), with relief of Kirdir on the right, Naqš-e Rostam, Iran. © the author [246] 10.1 Diagram of the relationships between sects outlined in the Āgamadambara. [267] _ 10.2 Gold coin of Wima Kadphises from Kushan (modern Afghanistan). c. 110–127 . 20 mm diameter. Reverse, with a figure holding trident and animal skin. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [273] 10.3 Limestone relief of Śiva and Parvati, his consort from the Amora hills, Northern India. c. 900 . Height: 38 cm. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [274] 10.4 Copper coin (tetradrachm) of Huvishka from Kushan. c. 155–190 . 25 mm diameter. Reverse, with a four-armed figure inscribed

List of Figures

10.5

10.6

10.7

11.1

11.2

11.3 11.4

12.1

12.2

12.3

Wesho, in Bactrian but in Greek script, holding diadem, thunderbolt, trident and water flask. The detail is of the hands holding diadem and thunderbolt. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [275] Detail from a gouache painting on paper from the Punjab. c. 1790–1800 . Śiva in the form of Bhairava, clad in an elephant skin and a tiger’s hide, with the goddess Varahi, seated on an elephant. He is pictured with his attributes of a drum, a corpse, a trident, a bowl, a stick and a deer in his six hands. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [277] Granite statue of Śiva as Bhairava from the South Indian Chola kingdom. 11th century. 108 cm in height. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [278] The Gudimallam Linga, sandstone, with Śiva standing on the dwarf _ Apasmara, from the Parasurameswara Temple in Andhra Pradesh, Southeastern India. Perhaps 1st century . Photo: Creative Commons Licence on Wikipedia [282] Gold glass base probably from Rome. Diameter 10.5 cm. 4th century . The upper tier shows a torah shrine, two menorahs and other Jewish symbols (lulab and ethrog to the right, amphora and shofar to the left), the lower tier a banqueting table with a fish platter and cushions for seating. The inscription is a funerary invocation to a family. Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Art Resource, NY (ART191276) [297] Gold glass base probably from Rome. Diameter 11 cm. 4th century . Jonah being flung into the mouth of the Sea Monster (ketos). Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais, Art Resource, NY (ART150761) [297] 500 Pruta bill: obverse and reverse, issued by the State of Israel, 1955. [309] The mosaic floor, Beth Alpha Synagogue, 6th century , excavated 1929. Photo: The Picture Art Collection, Alamy Stock Photo. [316] Flag adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1931, with the spinning wheel (charkha). Photograph: Creative Commons Licence, Wikipedia [326] Flag adopted at Independence as the national flag of India, 1947, with the wheel (chakra) adapted from Ashoka’s lion capital now in Sarnath Museum. Photograph: Creative Commons Licence, Wikipedia [326] Didarganj Yakshi, polished sandstone, Height: c. 163 cm. Third century BC to first century AD. Patna Museum, Bihar, India. Photograph: Shivam Setu on a Creative Commons Licence via Wikipedia [343]

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List of Figures 12.4 Babri Masjid, Ayodhya India. Mosque completed 1528–9 , supposedly on the site of Rama’s birthplace. Protesters scaling its domes before the building was destroyed in December 1992. Photograph: Pramrod Pushkarma, India Picture / Alamy Stock Photo [346] 13.1 Portrait of Osman Hamdi. Atelier de photographie Auguste Perichet, Paris, 1865. Edhem Eldem’s personal collection (permission granted) [376] 13.2 Mshatta. View of the remains of the façade in situ, Jordan, 743–744. Author’s photo [379] 13.3 Dome of the Rock. Interior view with mosaic decoration, Jerusalem 691/692. Author’s photo [386] 13.4 Great Mosque of Damascus, Damascus (Syria), 715. Students of the school of Damascus and Lucien Cavro surveying the mosaics between October 1928 and September 1929. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France photothèque du Département des Arts de l’Islam. © Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts de l’Islam, archives de Lorey [391] 14.1 Sam Maguire Cup, Ireland. Made by Matthew J. Staunton in Dublin in 1928. Silver. GAA Museum, Croke Park. [411] 14.2 Shield from the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship burial (fittings original, reconstructed). England. 91.4 cm diameter. Early 7th century . British Museum, BM 1939,1010.94, AN35177001. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [424] 14.3 Great buckle from the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship burial. England. 13.2 cm length, 5.6 cm maximum width, 412.7 grams. Gold with niello inlay. Early 7th century . British Museum, BM 1939,1010.1, AN1258506001. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum [425] 14.4 Gosforth Cross, Cumbria, 10th century. Photograph © Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, photographer T. Middlemass [427] 14.5 Gosforth Cross, Cumbria, 10th century. Drawing by W. G. Collingwood, from his Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age (London, 1927) p. 156, fig. 184. [428]

Contributors

Philippa Adrych has recently completed a DPhil in Classics at Oxford, for which she worked on the Roman worship of Mithras and particularly the archaeological and visual evidence of this figure. Nadia Ali is a postdoctoral researcher, based at Silsila: Center for Material Histories at New York University and studies the emergence of early Islamic art in the context of late antiquity. Robert Bracey worked as a numismatist of South Asia at the British Museum, with research projects in both Empires of Faith and the Beyond Boundaries programme on the Gupta empire in India. He has wide interests in all aspects of the material and visual culture of Asia, but especially its diversity of coinage. Katherine Cross is a Lecturer in History at Sheffield University, working on the early medieval West, particularly the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain during the sixth to ninth centuries. Dominic Dalglish is a Lecturer in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Worcester College Oxford, working on the movement of religious ideas in the ancient world through names and images. Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford and was the Principal Investigator in the Empires of Faith project, while he served simultaneously as Senior Research Keeper in the Middle East Department of the British Museum. Stefanie Lenk is postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Art History at Bern University, currently working on pre-Christian imagery in baptisteries of the fifth and sixth centuries in the western Mediterranean. Maria Lidova is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, working on Byzantine, late antique and early medieval art, in particularly some of the earliest Christian icons. Jesse Lockard is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago in art history, studying twentieth-century art and architecture, with special

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interests in architectural theory, visual rhetoric, and the historiography of material culture. Rachel Wood is a Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford specializing in the art of pre-Islamic Iran, particularly of the Hellenistic and Sasanian periods.

Acknowledgements

We begin by thanking all those involved in the Empires of Faith project: especially the Leverhulme Trust who funded us for six years; the British Museum which was our primary home and support; Wolfson College Oxford which supplied a base in Oxford for the team of postdocs and researchers represented in the authorship of this book; Corpus Christi College Oxford which has sustained the editor in many ways over many years; Michael Sharp and his excellent team at CUP who steered the production of the volume through the Press; and the three acute, critical and thoughtful anonymous readers for the Press whose many suggestions have hugely improved our enterprise. Two colleagues within the project – Belinda Crerar and Georgi Parpulov – were germane to a number of its activities at different times but are not represented within the book, although the latter compiled its bibliography. A project of this magnitude, with many researchers over many years, acquires many debts. A number of scholars made notable contributions to our thinking during the process of gestation – both in one-off seminars and in small conferences. We are particularly grateful to the following for their academic involvement: Clifford Ando, Hannah Baader, Mary Beard, Umberto Bongianino, Claudia Brittenham, Averil Cameron, Matthew Canepa, Simon Coleman, Paul Copp, Patrick Crowley, Fred Donner, Finnbar Barry Flood, Lars Fogelin, Ivan Foletti, Garth Fowden, Peter Frankopan, Richard Gordon, Zsuzsanna Gulácsi, Kevin Hector, Jeremy Johns, Catherine Karkov, Aden Kumler, Agnieszka Lic, Bruce Lincoln, Jesse Lockard, Boris Maslov, Diarmid McCulloh, Katharina Meinecke, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Fergus Millar, Margaret Mitchell, Richard Neer, David Nirenberg, Richard Payne, Verity Platt, Joan Pau Rubiés, Salvatore Settis, Michael Squire, Ben Tilghman, Christoph Uehlinger, Eris Williams-Reed, Gerhard Wolf and Wu Hung. Our colleagues at the Ashmolean Museum have been exceptionally supportive – notably Paul Collins, Mallica Kumbera Landrus, Paul Roberts, Xa Sturgis and Susan Walker (and not only in the exhibition, which proved to be the project’s grand finale). Above all, we thank those in the British Museum with the imagination, vision and hard graft to get the funding together and steer the ship while remaining

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Acknowledgements

sensitive to its many needs as it progressed. We must especially mark our gratitude to Richard Hobbs and Elizabeth O’Connell, who were seconded to the team, each for a year; as well as to Roger Bland and Jonathan Tubb, in whose departments we were looked after, to J. D. Hill (who selflessly enabled so much), Neil McGregor and Jonathan Williams in the higher management, and to so many generous friends in the curatorial team – Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, Chris Entwistle, Eleanor Ghey, Ian Jenkins, Thorsten Opper and St John Simpson.

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Introduction ś 

Let us begin – outside the scope of this volume – with a concept, a metaphor, coined in the fields of social psychology and behavioural economics. The idea of ‘anchoring’ was introduced as a result of the study of how poorly the majority of people perform as intuitive statisticians: human beings tend to use any random number that has been offered to us when we need to make an estimate, and then stay too close to that as an anchor when making revisions.1 If one applies this model to the exercise of historical understanding in dealing with a range of empirical data and with uncertainty in its interpretation, it is clear that scholarship must consistently rely on anchors – more or less random, usually in the form of a current communis opinio, inevitably grounded in initial premises, assumptions, prejudices or values – to establish the starting points for interpretation. And it is equally clear that interpretations inevitably are tied to the anchoring assumptions from which they are generated – a case of hugging close to the anchor. Obviously there are many respects in which such interpretive anchors are common-sense defences against potential rocks or shoals along the coast of scholarly travel (such as excess in speculation). But – especially when anchors are founded in starting points that may at a given time be collectively acceptable but are nonetheless fundamentally erroneous, wrongheaded, or immoral (such as that sound interpretations are possible only from scholars of certain races, a normative premise in Germany between 1933 and 1945) – then anchoring equally obviously prevents clear thought and restrains the scholarly boat from sailing the wide seas in search of truth, or in pursuit at least of new questions and answers.2 This volume is an interrogation of some of the more problematic restraining anchors that have been accumulated over the long history of 1

2

The classic paper is A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, ‘Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’, Science 185 (1974) 1124–31. See also D. Kahneman, P. Slovic and A. Tversky (eds.), Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge, 1982); D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, 2011) 119–28. For a less pessimistic account of anchoring and its application to Classical studies, see I. Sluiter, ‘Anchoring Innovation: A Classical Research Agenda’, European Review 25 (2016) 20–38.

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the study of art and religion in the period of late antiquity – by which we mean, broadly speaking, the first millennium .3 Its title, Empires of Faith, genuflects to the five-year research project whose members have produced the chapters of this book. It also describes the imperial world of the first millennium in which Eurasia from China to Western Europe was largely dominated by empires, which came and went, as well as the rise of the scriptural religions, known as the world religions today, and their visual cultures, all of which acquired their distinctive forms over the course of the period. At the same time, crucially, the title describes the two modern anchors that stand in the way of studying the art and religious culture of late antiquity, and are also the basis of that study. I mean the imperial systems within which Western scholarship in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was founded (alongside their colonial enterprises and their post-colonial aftermaths during the twentieth century) as well as the deep nexus of ancestral thinking about faith rooted in early modern Christian debates between Catholics and Protestants that have informed all academic approaches to the study of religion (and its art) since the Reformation, not only by Western scholars and administrators but also by native scholars from countries like India, China, Persia or the Ottoman Empire, when they wrote or thought in the European languages. One of the findings of our work is that not only are these anchors constraining, but they are also broadly incompatible – so that the assumptions that guide the study of Mediterranean polytheism (for instance) or early Christian art have very little in common, and even less in common with those that have guided scholarship largely written in the European languages or ascribing to European scholarly rules in relation to say Persian or Arab or Indian art. The study of art in late antiquity – and the long history of its study – has been constrained by three fundamental anchors: religious, political and

3

In 1999, a very distinguished trio, G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, put the dates of  250 to 800 as the book-ends of their major synopsis of scholarship on late antiquity. See G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown and O. Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), vii–ix. For good reasons (especially to include Islam), Garth Fowden has expanded the scope to the whole first millennium , taken broadly: See G. Fowden, Before and After Muhammad (Princeton, 2014) 3–5. The Empires of Faith project, although initially working with c. 200–800, eventually moved to Fowden’s model, despite the inevitable Christiano-centrism of the starting point (for instance in our exhibition: see J. Elsner, S. Lenk et al., Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions (Oxford, 2017)). In part this is because one needs to accommodate the culture of Mediterranean polytheism at the early end and allow for the development of Abbasid visual culture into at least the ninth century at the later end.

Introduction

evidential. First, religious. Late antiquity is the period in which almost all the world’s major surviving religions came into being or underwent significant transformation, including the acquisition of visual forms of communication and self-definition that have persisted to this day. This was a time when some of the dominant religious models of Eurasian antiquity from east of Iran westwards to the Mediterranean and North Africa, became extinct: the plethora of pagan cults that comprised the religious fabric of the Roman Empire collectively and swiftly died; Zoroastrianism lost its hegemony in Persia as the Sasanian state lost power, but it managed to survive. One may list Christianity, Islam, and the Mahayana forms of Buddhism as new religions in the late antique period. On the other hand, Judaism, the range of Indian religions that we now call Hinduism, and early (or Theravada) Buddhism are religions that witnessed major change during the first millennium, including the rise of characteristic iconographies. Modern practitioners of those religions are, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavily invested in them in a variety of ways; adherents of other faiths or those who have left their own often have feelings that are still more charged. There is therefore no doubt that their study – and the study of their art – cannot be separated from complex issues of polemic, apologetic, ancestral idealization, and various forms of critical condemnation from contemporary opponents. It is not surprising that these apologetics and polemics have come to crystallize around canonical monuments and major artistic masterpieces from the past, since these have acquired ancestral significance for modernity. They have become the embodiments of essential modern religious and national identities, vested at moments of origin or significant historical transformation. The problems caused by ideological investment in issues guided by religious faith (and its resistance) are huge and their history is very long; standing aside from them is all but impossible. But we can at least be aware of the problem and – in some forensic detail – of the way it has played out and continues to do so, both across the range of current religions and cultures of Asia and Europe and across the history of scholarship on their pasts in late antiquity. Religion remains one of the determining factors of modernity and postmodern identity in lived experience in the world today. The second constraint – which I have called political – derives from the historical moment when scholarly interest in late antiquity, both in relation to the West and to the arts of Asia, came to its first fruition under the imperial apogee of European powers in the later nineteenth century. These imperial powers controlled territories whose inhabitants represented ancient and non-Christian cultures – for instance British India, Muslim

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Albania within the Habsburg Empire, the Islamic world of French North Africa, and Russian expansion into Central and East Asia. There was, at the same time, the persistent presence of the Ottoman Empire to the immediate east of Europe, and beyond it Persia. In combination, these made a potent case for European self-definition by superior alterity and the insistence on difference from the foreign other, on the part of the Christian European powers. Among the colonized, in some cases, native or nationalistic positions appropriated the language of hegemonic imperial discourses in the East – whether in the dominions of the Ottoman Empire, itself independent of the European powers, or in the European colonies and conquests of India, the Far East and Africa. But the imperial discourses could also be resisted with alternative anti-colonialist and postcolonialist narratives about religion, ethnicity and nationhood, constructed in direct contradiction to standard European accounts, for instance in the thesis of a timeless and primordial Hinduism that has never been subject to historical change despite the long history of political and social transformation in the subcontinent of India, as discussed by Robert Bracey in Chapter 10. At the same time, the positivistic confidence of Western scholarship, well funded by imperial coffers and founded on a rigorous philological command, coupled with the rise of a vibrant archaeological and anthropological drive in precisely this moment of the late nineteenth century, bred a range of brilliant academic ventures. These ventures formed the basis of modern scholarly disciplines, including art history. Of course, the colonialist and imperial impetus – the urge to see foreign natives as primitive and in need of Western civilization – and the search for Orientalist primitive origins (notably Aryanism) are urges just as ideological, prejudiced and incapable of objectivity as the claims of religious polemic and apologetics. Particularly complex in matters of religion is the native attempt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to reinterpret ancient religions, like Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, in terms that made them more palatable to European ways of thinking and more like the normative Christianities promulgated by Western powers and Western missionaries; in many cases this involved fundamental transformation of ancient and traditional religious practice.4 Third, evidence. We look at what we have. But surviving visual and material-cultural data about the archaeological past depends on the vagaries and fashion of excavation. A great deal more excavation has been 4

See esp. K. Crosby, Traditional Theravada Meditation and its Modern-Era Suppression (Hong Kong, 2013) for an excellent account of Thailand, Cambodia and Sri Lanka.

Introduction

conducted in the Mediterranean world than in Africa or Asia (and often for very pragmatic and sane reasons to do with the safety of those doing the excavating in complex contemporary political and military situations). Moreover, far more artefactual material survives from religious contexts – whether local or regional or even more widely spread within an imperial system – when the religions represented were largely hegemonic and their adherents held the power to control representation than in contexts where religions were marginal, subaltern or even deliberately incognito. Jewish or Manichaean art in late antiquity – both hugely important not only in themselves but because they were disseminated over very wide distances – extending eastwards well into Asia and west into Europe, are good examples of relatively poor artefactual survival by contrast with the arts of religions supported by imperial or royal patronage, like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or the Indian cults which have become categorized as Hinduism in the modern era. An outstanding example of the evidential anchor and the way it has skewed understanding is Christian art. There are innumerable studies of every aspect of Christian art in the areas where early Christianity was hegemonic and backed by the state – not only in Europe and Byzantium but in regions of Africa and Asia such as Ethiopia, Georgia and Armenia, all with distinctive forms of the religion and distinctive styles of Christian art. But there has been very little study of the art of non-hegemonic or subaltern Christianity as it spread in late antiquity within the Sasanian empire,5 along the Silk Road and as far as the Tang capital of Chang’an, where a surviving stele (in Chinese style and language but with some Syriac) was erected in 781.6 And there has been absolutely no discussion of the differences between the hegemonic and subaltern forms of this faith, or its visual kinds of representation, let alone any comparison between them. In part this is because what we know of

5

6

On formerly hegemonic Christian sites under Islam, for discussion of churches after the Arab conquest, see R. Schick, The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantium to Islamic Rule (Princeton, 1995) 112–38 and on iconoclasm, 180–219. See e.g. P. Pelliot, L’inscription nestorienne de Si-ngan-fou (Paris, 1996) 5–170; J. Ferreira, Early Chinese Christianity: The Tang Christian Monument and Other Documents (Strathfield, NSW, Australia, 2014) 7–44 (history of research), 144–258 (text and translation), 359–75. For the monument, see Treasures Engraved on the Steles: Art of Calligraphy in the Xi’an Beilin Museum (Xi’an, 2015) no. 65, 162–5. Also E. Hunter, ‘The Persian Contribution to Christianity in China’, in D. Winkler and L. Tang (eds.), Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia (Berlin, 2009) 71–85 and L. Tang, A Study of the History of Nestorian Christianity in China and its Literature in Chinese (Frankfurt, 2004) esp. 145–204 for Dunhuang texts in translation.

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Christian art, east of the Syrian plain, is very poorly documented, excavated and reported. The problem facing this book is two-fold. First, it must clarify and undermine the untenable biases of the stories we have learned, inherited and retold, and which we too often continue to tell. These are interesting and important in their own right – formulated to construct cultural norms and identities in modernity through a kind of ancestral mythology about selective events and objects from the past. But they are mainly ideological fantasies, even if sometimes sustained by a formidable scholarly apparatus. Second, we need to begin to forge a new basis, within the context of a globalized world, where the range of cultural phenomena around art and religion in late antiquity can be treated with equivalence and a degree of dispassion, in such a way as to throw some comparative light on a range of broadly related phenomena at the junction between antiquity and the medieval world. That dispassion can of course only represent a current and contemporary position, which will in its turn be susceptible to critique from a different place or a later time. This second goal, a large project for a generation, is beyond the scope of this volume. But to begin the process of achieving it requires a long hard look at the difficulties of comparing incommensurate narratives of self and other, mainly constructed by European scholars, but often developed in colonial and post-colonial contexts by scholars from within the cultures on which they were working. The assumptions underlying these narratives – especially about religions whose scholars are also believers – were frequently designed to make the objects of their study unique or exceptional and in any case so special that they cannot be compared with others. To clarify the range of apologetics and polemics embedded as axiomatic starting points in modern scholarship is a formidable task, and we have attempted in this book at least to begin that process.

1.

Religion

A fundamental issue is that the history of the study of religions7 in late antiquity has been a history of comparison with ideal models of early 7

This volume cannot enter the complexity of debate about what ‘religion’ is, what the ‘world religions’ are, how local religions differ from ones with universal claims and so forth. For recent thought on a number of these issues, see T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993); D. Dubuisson, The Western

Introduction

Christianity; but at the same time, that Christianity is seen to be unique and hence incomparable, at least in the minds of the scholars concerned.8 All the varieties of pre-Christian religions, as well as the varieties of early Christianities, belong to a conceptual frame of complex apologetics developed by Christian theology over several centuries, whereby Christianity is unique (or absolute, or ‘wholly other’) by contrast with other cults that effectively belong in a dustbin of superstitions and misconceived fantasies.9 This apologetic – effectively a self-serving story of the emergence of Christian hegemony – is highly complex. Most significant is the implication in much of the scholarship that what is unique about Christianity is a kind of Protestant purity, so that the degeneracies of the pagan mystery cults are in fact a cypher for Catholic practices and beliefs by contrast with the purity of Reform.10 What appears as a conceptual and historical argument about late antiquity – and the historical origins of Christianity – is in fact an internal post-Reformation Christian polemic about Protestant claims to salvation. The responses of non-Christian religions to the power of missionary activity and imperial hegemony led to significant movements in the nineteenth century towards Reformed models of religious self-conception through comparison. In nineteenth-century India, as Rachel Wood discusses in Chapter 9, Parsi Zoroastrians created a reformulated model of their religion that emphasized monotheism and Scripture as opposed to ritual and sacerdotal interventions, downplaying for example the significance of fire worship.11 Similarly, Islamic reformers, like the Egyptian Muhammed ‘Abduh, as discussed by Nadia Ali in Chapter 13, working in the late Ottoman era under the influence of European thinking, attempted to create a modern, rational Islam anchored in Scripture, characterized by aniconic piety, with regulated doctrines and stripped of

8

9 10 11

Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology (Baltimore, 2003; original French, 1998); T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005); G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); B. Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013). See especially J. Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, 1990). Uniqueness: Smith, Drudgery Divine, 37–46, 52–3, 116–17. On the Protestant model, see Smith, Drudgery Divine, 13–26, 39–40, 44–5, 95–6, 114–15, 143. See D. F. Karaka, The Parsees: Their History, Manners, Customs, and Religion (London, 1858); D. Naoroji, The Parsee Religion (London, 1861) and D. Naoroji, The Manners and Customs of the Parsis (London, 1864); for discussion see e.g. M. Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (New York, 2011) and R. Wood, Chapter 9 this volume.

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superstition, myth and magic.12 In the British domains of Ceylon and Burma, and also in the neighbouring Theravada Buddhist countries of Thailand and Cambodia, significant reform movements – in response to rationalist models of religion purveyed by Christian missionaries– attempted to stamp out ‘old practices’, rituals and forms of meditation as superstitious.13 In all these cases, born of a colonial-era response to Western power, the dynamic of a unique, original and scriptural purity by contrast with decadent ritual practices that was modelled on the Protestant version of the fight between Catholicism and Reform, had potent and significant influence in the creation of modern models of these religions. From our point of view here, in dealing with art and material culture in relation to religion, the Protestant perspective is one that relegates all forms of visual and material religion to a secondary (or corrupt) position beside Scripture.14 Since part of the fight between Catholic and Protestant was precisely about whether early Christianity was a pure scriptural faith, aniconic in practice and free of the idolatrous threats of imagery,15

12 13 14

15

See N. Ali, Chapter 13 this volume with bibliography. See Crosby, Traditional Theravada Meditation, 18–45, 107–42. One critique of J. Z. Smith’s work in relation to late antiquity would go on these lines: while accepting the incisive analytic thrust of his argument, it needs extending in a number of ways. Despite his focus on the early Church, Smith makes hardly any mention whatever of its visual imagery (which was rich and copious). Moreover, Smith’s account is led by an acute nose for (and a deep resistance to) Protestant apologetics in writing about religion. These inevitably target Roman Catholicism as the ‘pagan’ enemy; but in doing so they oversimplify the complexity of the early Church. There is at least as powerful an Orthodox apologetic (both Greek and – in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Russian) which is neither Catholic nor Protestant but inevitably focused on early Christianity (see Maria Lidova’s Chapter 6 in this volume). And beyond Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, there are numerous positions in the Eastern, so-called Miaphysite, churches that add further nuance. Whether the concern is ritual practices or images (such as the rise of the icon) or early philosophical theology, when one turns to the first centuries of Christianity and especially early Christian art, the fight between modern Christianities must be at the very least triangulated to include Orthodox positions and apologetics at war with Protestants and Catholics. What all these Christianities have in common is the need to trace ancestry and confront the early period (including its art) in late antiquity as central to their enterprise, and especially the selfdifferentiation of Christianity from the other religions of the Graeco-Roman environment, including Judaism. For a Protestant view of early Christian aniconism see E. von Dobschütz, Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legende (Leipzig, 1899) chapter 2; H. Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nach den literarischen Quellen (Göttingen, 1917); W. Elliger, Die Stellung der alten Christen zu den Bildern in den ersten vier Jahrhunderten (Leipzig, 1930); W. Elliger, Zur Entstehung und frühen Entwicklung der altchristlichen Bildkunst (Leipzig, 1934); E. Bevan, Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-Worship in Ancient Paganism and in Christianity (London, 1940). This position, established on the basis of a (selective) series of

Introduction

one needs to incorporate the question of images (which would ultimately translate in the eighth century into the problems of Byzantine iconoclasm)16 as a central aspect of the issue. Any exclusion of images, or any exclusive focus on texts (both ubiquitous strategies in the scholarship), are effectively indebted to a fix about what should be the relevant evidence that was established in the arguments between Reformation and CounterReformation.17 While it is true that all surviving world religions are in fact scriptural, they differ significantly about whether they have one defining sacred canon (as in the Abrahamic religions, for example) or many (as in the religions of India), and of course they disagree within themselves as to what precisely fits within the authoritative canon and what should be excluded as potentially heterodox or even heretical. But all in fact use images and decorated buildings, and many religions (from ancient polytheism to modern local cults in Africa, Australasia and the Amazon) put visual practices and rituals around images ahead of any use of texts.

16

17

texts, was accepted by a generation of art historians such as E. Kitzinger ‘The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954) 84–150, esp. 88–9 and T. Klauser in a series of articles under the general title ‘Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der christlichen Kunst’ published in the 1950s and 1960s in volumes 1–10 of the Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum. See the discussion by H. Feld, De Ikonoklasmus des Westens (Leiden, 1990) 2–6 and P. C. Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (Oxford, 1994) 7–10. For an attack on excessive Protestant investments in the aniconism of the early Church, see M. C. Murray, ‘Art and the Early Church’, Journal of Theological Studies 28 (1977) 305–45; Sister Charles Murray, Rebirth and Afterlife: A Study in the Transmutation of Some Pagan Imagery in Early Christian Funerary Art (Oxford, 1981); M. Miles, Image as Insight (Boston, 1985) 43–8; Finney, Invisible God; R. M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London, 2000) 8–31. See for instance the discussions of Kitzinger, ‘The Cult of Images’; N. Baynes, ‘Idolatry and the Early Church’, in Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London, 1960) 116–43; M. Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of An Idea (New York, 1992); A. Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago, 2000) 11–146; J. Bremmer, ‘Iconoclast, Iconoclastic and Iconoclasm: Notes towards a Genealogy’, Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008) 1–17; J. Elsner, ‘Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium’, The Art Bulletin 94 (2012) 369–95. That is, Smith’s book effectively subscribes to a (Protestant-derived) text-centred model of what religion is. Other models are possible – for instance as espoused by the periodical Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief (first published in 2005). For programmatic statements, see e.g. D. Goa, D. Morgan, C. Paine and S. B. Plate, ‘Editorial’, Material Religion 1 (2005) 4–8, esp. 6 and B. Meyer, D. Morgan, C. Paine and S. B. Plate, ‘The Origin and Mission of Material Religion’, Religion 40 (2010) 207–11. For some extensive discussion e.g. D. Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley, 1998); D. Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (California, 2005); D. Morgan (ed.), Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (London, 2010); S. Promey, Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (New Haven, 2014).

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The uses of religious comparativism to insist on uniqueness (something that cannot be compared because it is so special, so sui generis, as to be incomparable) are a fundamental and repeated problem relevant well beyond Christianity to all forms of apologetic in any and every religion.18 Moreover, even if they are not written by overtly religious scholars, the logic of uniqueness has come to determine accounts of Islam, Hinduism and Judaism – whether as religions or as identities within various forms of post-colonial nationalism. This has extended to the arts that have come to embody national or religious cultures. Hence, for instance, accounts of early Islamic visual culture – allowing the dismissal of certain elements as syncretistic or excessively Hellenistic, and mimicking a Protestant emphasis on aniconism against figural representation – easily shift from the description of actualities to the prescription of an ideal, essential or characteristic nature of Islamic art (even when that is an exaggeration or simply untrue). The (absurd) generalization of a field like Islamic art – covering well over 1,000 years and an extraordinary geographic spread across much of southern Europe, all North Africa, and most of western and Central Asia, as well as the Middle East – alongside the emphasis on certain assumed uniquely characteristic qualities (such as decorative aniconism) allows the exclusion of much (such as the iconic) and the invention of hierarchies of normativity that may have very little historical or material reality except in scholarly dogma.19 The same has been true of Jewish art, about which a fantasy of aniconism is often repeated, against the overwhelming archaeological evidence of dozens of synagogue floors with all kinds of imagery discovered over the last 100 years. Versions of the uniqueness theme are just as powerful in accounts of Zoroastrian and Indian (particularly Hindu) arts, in contexts both of hegemonic and of subaltern politics in relation to religious identity. The bottom line here – and it is methodologically central to any nonapologetic attempt to use comparison – is that comparative work must compare equals. One element of the comparison cannot be unique, special, or exceptional by contrast with the others, or what one does is not comparative but merely a rhetorical performance of the dismissal of all the non-unique instances (chosen for that purpose) which one sets against

18

19

Smith’s model of the study of Christianity as a form of apologetic is designed to confront the roots of contemporary Christian theology as it reflects on Christian origins. It was never intended as an account of religion in general. See e.g. F. B. Flood, ‘From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art’, in E. Mansfield (ed.), Making Art History (London, 2007) 31–53.

Introduction

the exceptional object of one’s apologetic.20 The issue is pervasive and inherent in all areas of religious comparison and hardly less so in all areas of art-historical comparison, especially where either religious or cultural identities are in any sense at stake. Moreover, it is as problematic and relevant to the religious politics of today as it has been for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dominance of a textual model of religion is catastrophic for any attempt at writing an art history of religion,21 for visual and material culture are inevitably cast as the handmaiden to Scripture, the degenerate appendages to the purity of sacred text. Images and objects are regarded as material expressions of a religious culture or outlook, not as the constituents (at least in part and in some cases entirely) of a religion’s reality.22 Yet it is empirically observable that numerous religions – in prehistory, antiquity and modernity – have existed without scriptures, in a world of orality, myth, a vast range of material culture (some of it with writing or inscriptions), and a rich variety of rituals and practices. In the period of late antiquity this is true of most of the religions of the Mediterranean and the Roman Empire, with the unusual exceptions of Judaism and Christianity. A viable art history of religion – including that of the religions of late antiquity – must begin with the premise that visual and material culture in many respects constitute religious experience, and are much more than merely expressions or illustrations. In resisting the textual template for religion inherited from Protestant scholarship – a Procrustean bed that is itself an apologetic against Roman Catholicism in its origins – we need to make a place for the materialities of religious experience, including objects, buildings and images, as an equally valid body of evidence. We need to allow images not only to constitute a form of theological thinking but also to make substantive conceptual points about religion, both its theory and 20

21

22

On the problem of comparisons rhetorically designed to show one element better than the other (what was called syncrisis in antiquity) see e.g. S. Abe and J. Elsner, ‘Introduction: Some Stakes of Comparison’, in J. Elsner (ed.), Comparativism in Art History (London, 2017) 1–15, esp. 2; cf. M. Bal, ‘Grounds of Comparison’, in M. Bal (ed.), The Artemisia Files (Chicago, 2005) 129–67, esp. 129–38 on the problems of comparison in art history and p. 130 against any one term in a comparison being established as normative. For some discussion of this in relation to the textual emphasis in art history in the German tradition, see M. Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Art History (Cambridge, 2009) 15–89. See Meyer et al., ‘The Origin and Mission of Material Religion’, 209: ‘how religion happens materially . . . is not to be confused with asking the much less helpful question of how religion is expressed in material form. A materialized study of religion begins with the assumption that things, their use, their valuation, and their appeal are not something added to a religion, but rather inextricable from it . . .’

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practice, in their own right and in their own way; texts would not make such points in the same way.

2.

Art History

It is a curious matter that the history of the study of art, at least as conducted within the Western academic tradition, shadows the changes in ancestral interests within the development of modern European culture. Ancient art – notably that of Graeco-Roman antiquity – was rediscovered in a passionate rush at the inception of the Renaissance, which saw itself as the rebirth of the generative Classical moment of naturalistic imagemaking.23 The first scientific studies of early Christian art were born in the need of the Italian Counter-Reformation in the seventeenth century to resist assertions of the long accretion of idolatrous and pagan practices in the corrupt Catholic Church through a claim for authentic apostolic continuity – in this case a continuous tradition of images and visual culture reaching back to the very origins of the Church in Rome.24 The wild aesthetic and ideological love affair with Greek art and Greek culture (particularly in Germany) was born in the heady moment of the Enlightenment with its revolutionary instincts for such political ideals as freedom and democracy in the face of repressive monarchic regimes.25 The invention and construction of late antiquity as such – a latecomer to these stories – is, as we argue in the chapters below, the product of a particular late imperial moment in the nineteenth century. The European imperial powers in this period sought to create stories of self-identity, by assimilating themselves with ancestral narratives in their own imagined 23

24

25

See for example L. Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, 1999). For the history of Christian archaeology in Rome, see L. V. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome (Leiden, 1995) 5–42; S. Ditchfield, ‘Text before Trowel: Antonio Bosio’s Roma Soterranea Revisited’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), The Church Retrospective (Stourbridge, Suffolk, 1997) 343–60; I. Oryshkevich, ‘Cultural History in the Catacombs: Early Christian Art and Macarius’s Hagioglypta’, in K. Van Liere, S. Ditchfield and H. Louthan (eds.), Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012) 250–66. The work of J. J. Winckelmann is paramount here. See for instance A. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, 1994); E. Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: enquête sur la genèse de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, 2000); E. Pommier, Winckelmann, inventeur de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, 2003); K. Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (Oxford, 2013). Beyond Winckelmann, see e.g. S. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996).

Introduction

pasts and by constructing their cultures in contrast to those of the other empires but also against the pasts of the worlds they had colonized or explored. In both the Austro-Hungarian, Roman Catholic, Holy Roman Empire and the late Romanoff, Orthodox, Russian Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, the immense resources of an imperial state-sponsored scholarly positivism and archaeology were summoned to make the argument for ancestral origins respectively in the Catholic Christian Roman Empire of Constantine and in the Orthodox Byzantine Empire that followed the establishment of Constantinople in the East.26 The particular power of the late antique historiographic moment in these contexts is that it inspired remarkable and lasting scholarly works to justify its existence. Even where empires had fallen, in the wake of the First World War, the scholarly movements and accounts created by European late imperial ideologies remained in place as the principal academic basis for all later discussions of late antique art. Meanwhile, at roughly the same moment, the British in India, in association with native scholars themselves trained in European academic methods, were constructing a story of Indian religious art – Buddhist, Hindu, Jain – as both different from and dependent on that of the Greek tradition with which Britain identified no less fervently than Germany.27 The urge in the German-speaking world (already in the later nineteenth century) to search for versions of Aryan origins led to an interest in Persian art, as well as to an examination of Semitic art (both Jewish and Arab) as a negative counterpoint to the Graeco-Roman tradition.28 Effectively – although from very different nationalistic and ideological standpoints (all of them inevitably tainted with varieties of racial, Eurocentric and cultural prejudices) – the range of the arts of late antiquity from the post-Classical moment in Europe via the discovery of Islamic, Sasanian and Indian art, were all born in broadly the same moment as a result of similar drives in the academic culture of the great European imperial powers. The romance of an archaeology that could find lost worlds and dig them up coincided with this moment and was in fact at its strongest when funded by the coffers of imperial powers rich with the profits of colonialism. Just as the study of the variety of fields that make up late antique art is 26 27

28

See especially Chapters 5 and 6 in this volume, by Elsner and Lidova. See Stanley Abe, ‘Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art in the West’, in D. Lopez (ed.), Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago, 1995) 63–106 and Chapters 2, 10 and 12 by Robert Bracey in this volume. See e.g. S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009) 387–426.

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a supremely nineteenth-century phenomenon, so is the great project of archaeology – the excavation of ancient India by the British, of early Islamic and Sasanian sites especially by the Germans (with the singular glories of Mshatta, excavated in 1840 and imported wholesale by the Kaiser in 1903 to Berlin). In the twentieth century, a similar process of Zionistinspired archaeology would unveil dozens of late ancient synagogues in Palestine. However, by contrast with the history of religion, where comparativism is a very old method with a long critical history within the discipline,29 the enterprise of a cross-cultural comparison of the arts of different cultures is rather new in art history. Instead, this field is not yet at all clear whether its move beyond Western art is a turn to ‘global art’, ‘world art’ or comparative art.30 This is compounded by a very particular Eurocentric problem. The world religions, in thinking through their philosophies and theologies, have deep and explicit theoretical models drawn on their own ancient internal traditions of scholarship and exegesis, which can be compared – even if the terms used by different religions are not strictly parallel. By contrast, only European culture has developed a sophisticated and historical scholarly discourse for the discussion of art, constituted as an academic

29

30

The first congress of the International Association for the History of Religions took place in 1900: See J. Réville (ed.), Actes du Premier Congrès International d’Histoire des Religions (2 vols., Paris 1901 and 1902). For some key recent theoretical discussions of comparativism in religion, see e.g. J. Z. Smith, ‘In Comparison a Magic Dwells’, in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago, 1982) 19–35; Smith, Drudgery Divine; M. Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable (Stanford, 2008); B. Lincoln and C. Grottanelli, ‘Theses on Comparison’, in B. Lincoln, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars (Chicago, 2012); B. Lincoln, Apples and Oranges: Experiments In, On, and With Comparison (Chicago, 2018); D. Levitin, ‘What Was the Comparative History of Religion in 17th-Century Europe (and Beyond)? Pagan Monotheism/ Pagan Animism, from T’ien to Tylor’, in R. Gagné, S. Goldhill and G. E. R. Lloyd (eds.), Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology (Leiden, 2019) 49–115 and J. Sheehan, ‘Comparison and Christianity: Sacrifice in the Age of the Encyclopedia’, in Gagné et al., Regimes of Comparatism, 117–209. On world art history, see D. Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London, 2003); J. Onians, Art, Culture, Nature: From Art History to World Art Studies (London, 2006); K. Zijlmans and W. van Damme (eds.), World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches (Amsterdam, 2008); J. Anderson (ed.), Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence (Melbourne, 2009); J. Tanner, ‘Questions on “World Art History”: a discussion between Zainab Bahrani, Jaś Elsner, and Rosemary Joyce, moderated by Jeremy Tanner, with a comment by Wu Hung’, Perspective (2014) 181–94. On global art history, see: J. Elkins (ed.), Is Art History Global? (New York, 2007) and T. DaCosta Kaufmann, C. Dossin and B. Joyeux-Prunel (eds.), Circulations in the Global History of Art (Farnham, 2015). For a preliminary account of some of the options going forward, see J. Elsner, Eurocentric and Beyond: Art History, the Global Turn and the Possibilities of Comparison (Beijing, forthcoming).

Introduction

discipline. This is not to say that Chinese, Islamic or Indian traditions, for instance, lack a profound series of reflections on issues of materiality, visual culture or aesthetics; but they have simply not seen it necessary to formulate these into a scholarly language for discussing objects and images, let alone the kinds of aesthetically distinctive works that are called ‘art’. Most comparativist or global art history is therefore inevitably reduced to using the theoretical tools that have been developed by European art history and archaeology in precisely the imperial and post-imperial periods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These include concepts like ‘style’, ‘form’, the ‘picturesque’, ‘classical’, ‘archaic’, ‘mannerist’ and so forth, as well as the attendant discussion of how these qualities in the material appearance of man-made objects relate to the meanings such objects hold in the worlds of their reception and use. This means that, however careful a comparison between objects from different cultures may be, it is inevitably caught in the Eurocentric frame by which aesthetic objects are described, defined and studied.31 This is a very significant issue which will only be resolved when cultures with conceptual roots in Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic or Persian scholarly traditions choose to develop discourses from within their own intellectual traditions for the exploration of art.32 The problem in art history is much worse than in the study of religion, because non-European cultures have extremely evolved and powerful philosophical discourses of their own – quite as sophisticated as the European, and in many cases more so – for the understanding of religion.

3.

This Volume

This book attempts a critical diagnosis of some of the ideological issues – driven by nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century political and religious factors – that complicate the telling of a parallel series of comparable narratives about late antique art. It is divided into three parts. The first explores some of the contexts and legacies of the nineteenth-century imperial moment – a glorious period in the history of European 31

32

See especially Abe and Elsner, ‘Introduction: Some Stakes of Comparison’, 9–10. Accepting the Eurocentrism of comparison but arguing for reflexivity as a ‘defensible heuristic instrument’, see R. Gagné, ‘Introduction: Regimes of Comparatism’, in Gagné et al., Regimes of Comparatism, 1–17, esp. 10–11. See Flood, ‘From the Prophet to Postmodernism?’ for the difficulties of locating ‘Islamic’ art.

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scholarship, where the academic disciplines that determine so much of what can be discussed in this book came into being in something like their contemporary form. Art history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, ancient history, the critical study of religion and theology all were established as self-critical methods of practice and theory in this period. But it was also an era of colonization, conquest and exploitation in which Western goods and beliefs (not least in the missionary enterprise) were exported to the colonized cultures, which were given little opportunity to resist. The second and third parts examine some forms in which resistance took place in both colonial and post-colonial contexts, with the assertion of various kinds of nationalisms including those of the former European empires as they were reduced to nation states. All kinds of claims, some of them frankly untenable, could be made in the name of national solidarity or religious self-assertion. In Chapter 2, Robert Bracey takes an apparently simple empirical problem – when the first images of the Buddha were created – to show the deep ideological assumptions out of which Western scholars and native Indian scholars in the period before Indian independence fought out a proxy battle about the intrinsic qualities of their respective cultures on the domain of the origins of Buddhist art. In part, the position of the fine arts and archaeology in relation to imperialism is constructed as the story of how primitive natives could be civilized by foreign conquerors (which is broadly the line of those who have argued for the compelling causal influence of Greek art on early Buddhist art) or how authentic native traditions, with deep aesthetic cultures of their own, were able to resist foreign invaders, even in the distant past. Arguably, very little of this has anything to do with Buddhism, Buddhist art or what really happened in the visual culture of late antiquity in northern India. But those issues have been fundamentally appropriated to profound and much more modern cultural arguments, and no study of Buddhist art can in fact proceed without taking them on board. In Chapters 3 and 4, Philippa Adrych and Dominic Dalglish address the ways European scholarship, all of it created in the wake of Christian culture, has attempted to think back before Christianity into an antique, ancestral but polytheistic world which had no scriptural tradition. They pose the question of how we can write a history of ancient religion from the archaeological and material-cultural evidence. Ancient religion was conducted much more through objects and artefacts than it was through texts; in spite of this, scholarship has relentlessly sought out texts as the basis for its arguments. These questions are compelling for the study of

Introduction

pre-Christian religion in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean, where we have relatively little textual evidence, but they are equally relevant to the study of all religions. Even in those religions that claim a priority for Scripture, and where we have numerous texts that make up the bulk of our evidence, religion, its liturgies and its places of worship, are always defined at least in part through material culture and the intersection of material culture with people in ritual contexts. The remaining three chapters in Part I explore the fundamental argument about Christian origins that was promulgated around Christian art by the great empires of late nineteenth-century Europe. These empires were engaged in a debate about priority and precedence that not only constructed myths of origin within different branches of early Christianity, but were also engaged in differentiating the contemporary imperial cultures from each other. Since the theories and arguments produced in this period would become the dominant models for the writing of art history through the twentieth century, this would prove an extraordinarily significant time for formulating the roots of modern views. These models are grounded in Eurocentric and Christiano-centric attitudes that are fundamentally colonialist – indeed imperialist – and are therefore in very profound conflict with the attitudes of most scholars and most interested parties today. That is to say, in the writing of current art history, there is a very problematic and generally under-acknowledged friction between the kinds of ideological and political positions that most practitioners hold and the fundamental assumptions rooted in the theoretical and historical models within which they are working. Chapter 5, by Jaś Elsner, explores the rise of a history of late antique art in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, which is deeply entangled in the Roman Catholic ideological project of the late Habsburg Holy Roman Empire. Catholicism, and the art-historical turn towards Rome, were both directed against Protestant Germany (and its new Empire) which fantasized that its cultural roots were based in Greece. One of the interests of Viennese art history at this period is the conflict between those who saw the roots of the multicultural AustroHungarian Empire in a multicultural early Christian Roman Empire, and those who believed that the fall of the Roman Empire (and implicitly the risk of the fall of the Habsburgs) was caused by the barbarian invasion of migrants, especially from the East. This was a fight between those who believed that artistic change in late antiquity was a positive and healthy sign of evolutionary development within a self-confident imperial system, and those who saw it as a fundamental decline caused by the decadence of

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the Semitic East; its politics is still with us in the context of the current migration crisis in Europe, even if the areas in which it is played out are no longer art historical (and the Semitic invasion is no longer Jews escaping pogrom and shtetl towards the West but Arabs fleeing the war and the collapse of order in the failing states of the Middle East and North Africa). In parallel to the proposition of a continuous Catholic Roman Empire from Constantine the Great (r. 306–37) to Franz Josef (Austrian emperor, 1848–1916) and the image of a Roman art capable of creative change within its own resources from antiquity into the Middle Ages and beyond, the city of Rome itself in the wake of the papacy of Pius IX (pope 1846–78) developed a new vision of early Christian art. Especially German-born Roman Catholic priests working as archaeologists in Rome created an argument for symbolism and continuity in Christian art. This was specifically designed as a polemic against the assumptions of Protestants, who contested that the earliest Christians were opposed to the forms of idolatry implied by the use of images. In Chapter 6, Maria Lidova explores the ways that the late Romanoff Russian Empire developed an art history of ancestral origins that rooted Russian Orthodoxy in the rise of Byzantium and Byzantine art. Although this Russian story is significantly parallel to the Viennese, it is also in substantial conflict with the Austrian narrative; it affirms an Orthodox Christianity based in Constantinople – the inheritor of a Hellenistic system derived from Alexander and rooted in the East – as the true generative heritage of Christian art, rather than a Catholic Christianity founded on Rome. In the era immediately before the Russian Revolution, an intensely brilliant scholarly generation created a series of models for emphasizing the priority of the Hellenic East in the genesis of artistic forms, styles and subject matter. The impact of this approach is extremely interesting, since it both resists a pure Eurocentrism in being open to the positive influence of the East, and it rejects the broadly xenophobic antiSemitism of those Viennese models that saw the East as bringing Oriental decadence to destroy the Roman Empire. The late Romanoff scholarly endeavour was catastrophically interrupted by the opposition of the new Bolshevik state to any form of Christian apologetic. Those scholars who remained in Russia had to make radical adaptations to the theoretical basis of their work in line with Marxist orthodoxy – or they faced persecution and even death; the academic refugees and exiles from Russia carried versions of the late Romanoff art-historical model to cause significant influence within the field of early Christian and Islamic art in Western Europe and America.

Introduction

In Chapter 7, Stefanie Lenk takes us to the Protestant heartland of Germany in Berlin, where the establishment of academic scholarly life and research were at their strongest in the nineteenth century and against which in many ways the Austrians, the Russians and the archaeologists of the Catholic Church in Rome were positioning themselves. She explores the way in which one strand of committed Reformed theology rejected models of ideal Christian aniconism, normatively promulgated by Protestants, and discusses Protestant theologians who were engaged in institutionalizing art history as a discipline in theology departments in Prussia and beyond. The theology faculty of Berlin, founded in 1810 under Friedrich Schleiermacher, led the way, teaching ‘Monumental Theology’ by means of its Christian art collection throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Deeply rooted in the Berlin Awakening movement, ‘Monumental Theology’ stressed the importance of art for the history of Christian thought on the grounds that the faith of common churchgoers is concerned with images and objects. ‘Monumental Theology’ marks a shift in the object of investigation of theological scholarship from scholarly writing to everyday belief. Part II, ‘After Imperialism: Orientalism and its Resistances’, turns from the construction of European ideologies of artistic origin and Western aesthetic ideals in relation to religion (whether in Christianity or in dealing with pre-Christian religions) back to the colonial issues raised in the first chapter, but especially as they arose in the clash between colonialist and anti-colonialist (or post-colonialist) perspectives. These latter are multiple – arising from very different viewpoints in very different post-imperial contexts, including within the old imperial powers (themselves much diminished by the loss of their colonial possessions). The three chapters in Part II consider various resistances to Orientalism, while the four chapters constituting Part III of this book explore forms of nationalist self-assertion through arguments based on ancestral visual culture. In Chapter 8, Nadia Ali looks at different strategies for mapping a road away from the idea of Oriental decadence in assessing the rise of early Islamic art. All are European, but represent Europeans who in various ways saw themselves as non-normative, or writing from within the closet, and who thus identified with Islamic art as a way of distancing themselves from their own culture. The three strategies she describes – and of course there were many others – were all key to the development of the modern study of the visual culture of early Islam. Ali examines the ways assimilated Jews, especially in Germany before the 1930s, could use the study of Islam in relation to the West as a means of negotiating their own Oriental and

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Semitic identity in relation to Germany; the ways the arts of a spiritual Islam could be fantasized as the product of ascetic ideals from the perspective of gay but avowedly Roman Catholic scholarship; and the ways refugee scholars constructed Islamic art as a terrain divided between a normative aniconic world of the mosque and a pleasure palace of decadent visuality in the desert castles of the first Caliphs. These forms of response to an essentially negative model of Islamic art as foreign to the norms of Western naturalism, even though its aniconic tendencies were seen as positive by some Protestant-inflected conceptions, represent some of the foundational positions in establishing current approaches to how Islamic art is studied. The immensely complex freighting of the ideological constructs that underlie them indicates the weight of the ancestral baggage with which contemporary scholarship has to contend. Chapter 9, by Rachel Wood, explores the potent drives that have underwritten the history of Sasanian art – the visual culture of the late ancient Persian Empire before the rise of Islam, which espoused a form of Zoroastrianism as its official religion. Within communities significantly committed to the Persian past, attitudes to Sasanian art have been informed by various kinds of Persian nationalism in modernity. These include the ideologies of the imperial regime of the Shah in the midtwentieth century and those of the Islamic Revolution after 1979, but also significant investments from the nineteenth-century Parsi Zoroastrian diaspora in response to Christian and Muslim hegemony at the time, as well as the Iranian exilic community after 1979, especially in the United States. These may all be seen, from different angles, as internalist; but there has also been an interest in the Sasanians from the outside, which has especially involved in the course of the early twentieth century a heavy dose of Aryan ancestralism, at any rate from some German scholars. Since the Sasanian world has always been seen as the key counterpoint in the East to the Roman and Byzantine empires, as well as a core ancestor for Islam and the midpoint on the Silk Road between China and the West, the need to make sense of Sasanian art and culture as the central context of any account of Eurasia has remained compelling. In Chapter 10, Robert Bracey confronts a particular problem that arises from the construction of Hindu identity in the colonial context of the British Empire and its development into a form of religious nationalism after Independence in 1947. The dream of a timeless and primordial Hinduism that has always been present has become a fundamental axiom for a number of positions, including those that have been taken on questions of art history in India, which have become not only ahistorical

Introduction

but anti-historical. If one believes that the god Śiva has always existed and will always exist, and has throughout his existence been susceptible to representation, then one can simply ignore the historical evidence that before a certain point in recorded history this god does not appear to have been worshipped, that the images that some have attributed to him certainly did not depict him and that the cult of Śiva is itself a construct of the early centuries . The problems in terms of trying to tie rigorous scholarship, committed to critical historical analysis, to some kind of accommodation with religious apologetic in this arena are clearly huge, especially because the religious model of Hindu timelessness has a political edge both in the local Indian context and in relation to the large Hindu diaspora around the world. Part III takes the question of post-colonialism head on. Chapters 11 and 12 each deal with the effects of political autonomy in the art-historical writing of two new nation states born in the wake of the Second World War. In Chapter 11, jointly written by Jesse Lockard and Jaś Elsner, the question of Jewish art – a long and complex spectre in the history of European art, carrying fantasies of proto-Protestant aniconism and resistance to idolatry throughout the nineteenth century – is explored through the period of the British mandate in Palestine that followed the First World War, the birth of the state of Israel in 1948, and its aftermath. The impossibility of separating archaeology, warfare and Zionism is potent in a context where generals were among the principal archaeologists and where an extraordinary wealth of late antique synagogue mosaics and other remains were discovered through the course of the twentieth century to show that the story of Jewish aniconism is a myth and not a fact. The embeddedness of archaeological finds in the land itself, functioning to prove ancient Jewish habitation, became a profound implicit argument for the rights of Jews to that territory. The issues have been fraught for the last seventy years and remain so. In Chapter 12, Robert Bracey investigates parallel questions in the changing positions on Indian art, again a visual culture that was seen to exemplify both a national territory and a sacred homeland. Before Independence, British India comprised a series of cultures that were excluded after 1947 – the territories that became Pakistan, Sri Lanka, East Bengal (Bangladesh) and parts of South Asia including Burma. The new model of writing Indian art history, founded on the needs of the new state of India and committed to its territories, systematically excluded these worlds – despite the fact that the provision of any proper historical or cultural analysis cannot ignore the profound interdependence between them for

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centuries. The idea that one could write a history of Indian art that failed to account for the material from Gandhara, in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, may seem distinctly eccentric from a scholarly perspective but has been perfectly normal given the political context. This chapter examines some of the problems, many of the political appropriations of ancestral images (like the swastika) and the many polemics that have arisen between scholars and nationalist advocates, Indians and Western experts on India – debates and ‘culture wars’ that continue to rage in the present day. In Chapter 13, Nadia Ali turns her attention to the development of accounts of art and culture within the Ottoman Empire and after its demise both by Turks in the ruling elite and many of those, especially Arabs, colonized by the Ottomans. Whereas the other accounts of postcolonialism in this book deal with responses to attitudes promulgated by the Western powers, this essay shows that many of the issues in play were about competing ancestralist fantasies located entirely outside, although in dialogue with, European discourses. Early Islamic art provided actual material evidence of the early Caliphate, especially in such monuments as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the great Mosque at Damascus as well as the pilgrimage sites of Mecca and Medina; and hence it offered a sense of a direct link back to the heirs of the Prophet Mohammed himself. It is hardly surprising that this should have proved attractive to an ever weakening Ottoman Sultan in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who needed to bolster his secular power through religious authority (a strategy not so different from that of the papacy and its relations to early Christian art in the same period). But that turn to the arts of early Islam was also a turn to the masterpieces constructed by the Arabs, who in modernity were considered to be the most primitive and premodern, nomadic and uncivilized subjects of the Ottomans. For Arab nationalism before and after the end of the Ottoman Empire, the very valorization of the Arabs’ early Islamic past could serve as a rallying cry against Turkish hegemony. Finally, in Chapter 14, Katherine Cross takes us back to the context of Christian Europe and to the post-imperial constructions of nationhood in relation to ancestral Christian origins in one of the great imperial powers, the British Isles. By focusing on the ways the iconic national museum – the British Museum – has collected, represented and displayed Anglo-Saxon art and archaeology in relation to questions of race and religion over the span of the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, she examines moves within the construction and presentation of national identity from the imperial period to post-Second World War retrenchment. The cultural

Introduction

issues about British identity, Anglo-Saxons (as German settlers) and earlier Britons (‘Celts’), played out in the arena of visual and material culture are effectively a defining point for attitudes about relations with Europe and about questions of migration which have been dominant in British politics and the anxieties about contemporary British identity in the later twentieth and throughout the twenty-first century, at least to date. * Reflection on the modernity of the approaches that have governed (and still govern) the art histories explored in this book is necessary. We cannot study the arts of late antiquity without in fact studying through them the histories of modern ideological self-construction, and the still longer histories of religious self-definition and differentiation through polemic and apologetics in a series of former empires, modern nation states and old religions. That makes our theme more complex and fraught than may appear at first from any innocent, or naïve, comparison of two works of art of the same date from different cultures in a museum. At the same time, it makes things much more interesting and much more contemporary than one might at first imagine when deciding to explore the ancient past. For any act of art-historical exploration is inherently and necessarily a performance of the histories of thought, belief and prejudice in which we have been formed. When such exploration takes the form of comparison between topics whose histories of scholarly formation represent conflicts and fissures in our collective patterns of belief, prejudice and selfconstruction, then what is revealed is both urgent and compelling; it affords the potential for a potent confrontation with the contradictions that lie within ourselves.

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The Imperial Context

2

|

The Gandharan Problem  

In the earliest stone art of Buddhism there is an unavoidable empirical observation. In some cases, despite rich iconography showing scenes apparently from the Buddha’s life, the Buddha himself seems to be absent. The most dramatic example is the middle architrave of the eastern gateway of the four built around the Great Stupa at Sanchi in the late first century  or early first century  (Figure 2.1). In this depiction a horse departs from a palace, a parasol above, but with no rider, before depositing two human footprints, again beneath a parasol, and returning. Depicted four times in a composite of events which must be intended to evoke the Buddha’s abandonment of royal life for a spiritual quest, what is noticeably absent is an image of the Buddha in human form.1 Yet there are many depictions of the Buddha in early art, particularly associated with the regions of Gandhara (in modern Pakistan/Afghanistan) and the city of Mathura (in Northern India). How should we account for this? That is, for the existence – apparently simultaneous – of art in which the Buddha is conspicuously absent and art in which his depicted presence is ubiquitous? The earliest scholarship on Buddhist art resolved this with two hypotheses – both almost certainly unprovable on the basis of any independent evidence – which have shaped the subsequent discussion. First, a developmental model has been assumed in which art progresses from aniconic ‘primitivism’ to naturalistic ‘sophistication’; this postulates a movement from no image of the Buddha to his embodied visual presence that reflects chronological progress, early to late, rather than depending on the practices of differing regions, the visual expression of different Buddhist beliefs, or simply varied artistic purpose.2 There was therefore a 1

2

See e.g. V. Dehejia, Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India (Delhi, 1997) 15–16 on this frieze, 110–34 on the narrative composition of the Sanchi reliefs, 42 and 54 for her dismissal of ‘aniconism’ as a terminology for this material that carries ‘too much baggage’. The term ‘aniconic’ is obviously wildly inappropriate: the Buddha is specifically thought to be represented by icons (the tree, horse, radiance, throne, etc.) and even if ‘aniconism’ is understood as the absence of anthropomorphic imagery, then the term is certainly being stretched (footprints, which are an anthropomorphic pars pro toto symbol, being the most obvious example). It is,

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 

Figure 2.1 The Departure from Kapilavastu, from the east gate of stupa no. 1, Sanchi. First century BC or AD, stone. Photograph by Anandajoti Bhikkhu (on a Creative Commons Licence through Wikicommons)

significant historical question about when the anthropomorphic image arose. Second, at least in the early literature, it was assumed that the anthropomorphic image represents an intrusion, while representations without a physical form are a purer, more authentic Buddhism, and that the reason for this intrusion was the influence of naturalistic Greek styles that had come to India from the West in the wake of Alexander the Great. Underlying these hypotheses are deep assumptions guiding both European religious history and European art history. Among the former, is the premise that a salvific religion tied to the person and teachings of a charismatic teacher, in this case the Buddha, would have the same urge as Christianity to identify the visual form of its saviour, either by symbol or in human terms. The assumption that the development of Buddhist art can be understood by analogy with the development of Christian art is underwritten by an assumption, probably unconscious and certainly unacknowledged, of the priority and paradigmatic exemplarity of Christianity as a religion. Alongside this went an equally powerful assumption on the part however, the standard term used in Buddhist studies to mean the absence of an image of the Buddha in an otherwise highly iconic scene in a context in which his representation might be expected. The connection that the use of this term draws with models of Greek archaic primitivism, as well as Jewish and Islamic art, is interesting. On Greek aniconism, see M. Gaifman, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford, 2012); on Israelite aniconism, see T. N. D. Mettinger, No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in its Ancient Near Eastern Context (Stockholm, 1995).

The Gandharan Problem

Figure 2.1 (cont.)

of European scholars that any sophisticated visual system would inevitably aspire to naturalism. This clearly rests on an analogy with the development of Greek art culminating in classical Athens. These issues, which can only be hinted at rather than demonstrated here, form the anchoring assumptions and set the stakes in trying to explain the empirical observation that sometimes the Buddha is present and sometimes absent. Eurocentric and Christiano-centric assumptions therefore underlie the historiography and scholarly reflexes of thought in the study of Buddhist art. As will be suggested here, solving these problems is not as simple as recognizing or rejecting them. Producing a methodologically honest account of the arts of India (not only of Buddhism) has proven difficult, repeatedly. It remains one of the central concerns of the Empires of Faith enterprise discussed in this volume. The discussion here will begin with Alfred Foucher (1865–1952) and the publication in 1905 of the first volume of his Greco-Buddhist Art. The notion of a beginning is problematic. Before Foucher other scholars such as Albert Grünwedel, James Fergusson, or Alexander Cunningham had all written on aspects of what Foucher would label ‘Greco-Buddhist’ and what today is usually known as ‘Gandharan’ art.3 There has been some attention 3

E. Errington and V. S. Curtis, From Persepolis to the Punjab: Exploring Ancient Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (London, 2007) give an excellent overview of the early

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to the mental attitudes that shaped Foucher’s work,4 as well as the disputes around those that were already playing out when he wrote.5 Gandharan art as a field of study is the product of incremental steps before and after 1905 and those incremental steps have neither a beginning nor an end. However, historiographic discussions are stories and they need beginnings. Foucher was particularly influential, his step larger than others, and the publication of Greco-Buddhist Art is frequently cited within the field as the beginning of the independent study of the arts of Gandhara. Foucher was born in 1865 and visited India between 1895 and 1897. He had already begun to learn Sanskrit and his first article on Buddhist iconography had appeared in 1892. The first volume of Greco-Buddhist Art therefore falls early in what would be a very successful career. He would go on to found the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA) and was applauded for his scholarship in his lifetime. As one contemporary reviewer put it, ‘a work by M. Foucher always marks an epoch’.6 Foucher begins by weighing the merits of the terms ‘Greco-Buddhist’ and ‘Gandharan’. He prefers the former but recognizes that the geographic terminology is less loaded with assumptions.7 Gandhara has since become

4

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historiography. Of the preceding writers A. Grünwedel, Buddhist Art in India, tr. A. C. Gibson (London, 1901) and J. Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London, 1876) are probably the most important. Gandharan art is a large field; the bibliography subsequent to the First World War is summarized by H. Deydier, Contribution à l’étude de l’art du Gandhâra: essai de bibliographie analytique et critique des ouvrages parus de 1922 à 1949 (Paris, 1950) and from the second to the end of the twentieth century both by S. R. Dar, ‘Fifty Years of Research in Gandhara Art (1947–1997)’, in R. C. Sharma and P. Ghosal (eds.), Buddhism and Gandhara Art (New Delhi, 2004) 9–34, and with abstracts by P. Guenée, Bibliographie analytique des ouvrages parus sur l’art du Gandhâra (Paris, 1998). There is a great deal of literature on how European viewpoints shaped interactions with Indian history. Hagerman’s copiously footnoted article explores how perceptions were primed by an image of Alexander the Great (C. A. Hagerman, ‘In the Footsteps of the “Macedonian Conqueror”: Alexander the Great and British India’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 16 (2009) 344–392) while Mitter offers a detailed examination of the European reactions to Indian art up to the time of Foucher (P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago, 1977)). See for example T. Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York, 2004) 106–11 in which the Westerner/Native dynamic is explored in the controversy between James Fergusson and Rajendralal Mitra. Since this chapter will focus on how subtle linguistic clues reveal the ways in which deeply ingrained cultural attitudes shape historical accounts, it is worth drawing attention to how throughout that essay Guha-Thakurta refers to the two participants as ‘Fergusson’ and ‘Rajendralal’ (the family name of the European and given name of the Indian). For a biography see A. Fenet, ‘L’ouvre écrite d’Alfred Foucher et d’Eugine Bazin-Foucher: bibliographies inédites et commentées’, in P.-S. Filliozat and J. Leclant (eds.), Bouddhismes d’Asie: monuments et littératures (Paris, 2009) 12–62. A. Foucher, L’art gréco-bouddhique du Gandhâra: étude sur les origines de l’influence classique dans l’art bouddhique de l’Inde et de l’Extrême-Orient, 2 vols. (Paris, 1905) 1–2.

The Gandharan Problem

standard, but it remains problematic. The ancient province of Gandhara corresponds with the fertile plain around Peshawar bounded by mountains and hills to the north and the Indus river to the south. ‘Gandharan art’ has never meant just the art of this region. It has always included the Swat valley to the north-east (ancient Udiyanna) and usually the term encompasses the arts of Punjab, Kashmir, and Afghanistan in what is sometimes termed ‘Greater Gandhara’.8 Foucher was a more careful scholar than he is often given credit for. He recognized the dangers that vague boundaries for the art posed and that imprecise attributions made it hard to study the development of particular schools in a broad regional trend: It is all too true that the provenance of these sculptures, known in broad terms, is uncertain in the details.9

Detail, as we shall see, matters. Having surveyed the history of finds to his day, Foucher (38–40) sets out the central questions. First he is concerned with what is meant by ‘Greek’. Is this, he asks, the impact of Hellenistic culture under Alexander’s successors or of Roman trade through the Indian Ocean? This brings him, as a second but related issue, to date (40–2). Foucher favoured a Hellenistic origin for Gandharan art and thus an early date; others saw the prototypes in Roman art and thus favoured a later date. It is important to recognize that in the early study of Gandharan art opinions on Greek or Roman origins determined dates – evidence for dating was not used to test opinions on the origins. Only after exploring these central questions does Foucher consider the Buddhist context of the sculpture.10 What today often appears to be the central driving question of Gandharan art, the origin of the Buddha image, falls some way down in

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R. Salomon, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhāra: The British Library Kharosthi __ Fragments (London, 1999) 3. ‘Il est trop vrai que la provenance de ces sculptures, en gross suffisament connue, est incertain dans le detail’ (Foucher, L’art gréco-bouddhique du Gandhâra, 32; subsequent page numbers from Foucher’s work are given in parentheses in the text). This focus betrays a greater interest in the aspects of the art which appear ‘Greek’ than in those that are more Buddhist or Gandharan. This focus continues to drive some work on Gandhara: in R. Allchin, B. Allchin, N. Kreitman and E. Errington (eds.), Gandharan Art in Context: East–West Exchanges at the Crossroads of Asia (New Delhi, 1997) the first two articles revisit focus on the possibility of a Hellenistic origin for Gandharan art through Bactria while three others are directly concerned with a Roman or Western connection. In fact the subtitle for the conference, East–West Exchanges at the Crossroads of Asia, suggests that it is precisely Western influence which gives meaning (‘context’) to the study of Gandharan art.

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Foucher’s range of priorities. The question of when, and why, or possibly if, Buddhists first made images of the Buddha has become the definitive area of discussion, certainly since the 1970s.11 The problem, briefly outlined above, revolves around the relative dating of three sets of images: the middle architrave of the eastern gateway of the great stupa at Sanchi, already discussed, typically dated to the late first century  or early first century ,12 and the two earliest dated images of the Buddha in human form. One is a damaged Gandharan image from Loriyan Tangai, and the other is a monumental standing figure from Sarnath made in the artistic style of Mathura. They are respectively dated by inscriptions to the year 318 ( 144) and the year 3 ( 129).13 The style of the two images is sufficiently different that one could not have been derived directly from the other. Since the earliest image with an epigraphic date is unlikely to be the earliest image that was actually made, the dates do not tell us which of the two artistic centres, Gandhara or Mathura, first conceived of depicting the Buddha in human form in contrast to his absence on the gateways at 11

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In 2015 there were three publications on the subject, a monograph length argument by DeCaroli (R. DeCaroli, Image Problems: The Origin and Development of the Buddha’s Image in Early South Asia (Seattle, 2015)) that the creation of Buddhist images reflected pan-Indian social changes, the publication of Fogelin (L. Fogelin, An Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism (Oxford, 2015)) which spends substantial time on the issue (155–8, 169ff.), and an article by Huntington (S. L. Huntington, ‘Shifting the Paradigm: The Aniconic Theory and Its Terminology’, South Asian Studies 31/2 (2015) 163–86) restating her opposition to the research paradigm. The best summary of the debate around ‘aniconism’ is R. Linrothe, ‘Inquiries into the Origin of the Buddha Image: A Review’, East and West 43/4 (1993) 241–56, while the two most important articles in the debate on priority, Gandhara or Mathura, are probably J. van Lohuizen-de Leeuw, ‘New Evidence with Regard to the Origin of the Buddha Image’, in H. Härtel (ed.), South Asian Archaeology (Berlin, 1979) 377–400 and J. Rhi, ‘From Bodhisattva to Buddha: The Beginning of Iconic Representation in Buddhist Art’, Artibus Asiae 54/3–4 (1994) 207–25. Huntington (‘Shifting the Paradigm’, 93) does not offer a precise date but believes the Southern gateway to be the earliest and ascribes that to the period  11 to 29 based on the dedicatory inscription (itself problematic because it might refer to one of several homonymous kings whose dates are themselves uncertain). Dehejia (Discourse in Early Buddhist Art, 110–11) also sees the gateways as the last element in the stupas construction but places this event in the second half of the first century . Why these two years should correspond to the specific dates given in our reckoning is not straightforward, nor is it beyond dispute. The historiography on dating systems for this period is discussed at length in J. Cribb, ‘Numismatic Evidence and the Date of Kaniska’, in _ W. Rienjang and P. Stewart (eds.), Problems of Chronology in Gandhāran Art (Oxford, 2018) 7–34 and R. Bracey, ‘The Date of Kanishka since 1960’, Indian Historical Review 44/1 (2017) 1–41. To summarize the conclusions briefly, it is only recently that enough evidence has accumulated to establish those dates – so reading earlier accounts will reveal widely diverging opinions – but those dates are now nearly certain; and if the true date for the earliest pieces does differ, it does not differ by enough to affect the analysis of the origin of the images.

The Gandharan Problem

Sanchi. Today anyone working in the field would also consider the Swat valley as a third candidate for the earliest image.14 In the twentieth century the question has usually been phrased in this way: Gandhara or Mathura? That form of question is structurally similar to the question of whether Greek or Roman art was the principal influence on the Gandharan style. Obviously there is a cultural perspective about which of the two questions seems most important. This cultural perspective issue is widely seen as a problem with Foucher’s account, and with Gandharan studies in general. So even Rhi in defence offers no more than Foucher’s ‘arguments on the issue were not actually as heavily prejudiced as they might seem now’.15 Of course Foucher’s prejudice is so apparent because we now share so few cultural assumptions in common with him, though defining exactly how his personal experience inflected his scholarship is more difficult. It is clear that Foucher prioritized the question of influence because it related more closely to a European issue (Greece or Rome) than the question of origin. That Gandharan art must have enjoyed the priority in the initial creation of the Buddha image was to him obvious, and a matter which only became really contentious in 1927. Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), Foucher’s contemporary and a figure who enjoys a similar foundational role in the study of Indian art, took issue with the idea that the first image of the Buddha was suggested to ‘the Indian mind’ by outsiders and made by ‘Greek or at any rate Eurasian craftsmen’ on the basis of Hellenistic prototypes.16 In 1905 the evidence was hardly sufficient to draw a conclusion on the origin of the Buddha image but Foucher felt Gandharan art derived from Greek, rather than Roman, art through the Bactrian Greek settlements that had existed in Afghanistan in the third to second centuries . This necessitated an early date for the Gandharan Buddha, much earlier than the Mathuran Buddha of the early second century . Coomaraswamy argued that the slight evidence had been distorted by interpretation through Foucher’s European perspective: This view was put forward, as M. Foucher himself admits, in a manner best calculated to flatter the prejudices of European students and to offend the susceptibilities of Indians: the creative genius of Greece had

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van Lohuizen-de Leeuw, ‘New Evidence with Regard to the Origin of the Buddha Image’. J. Rhi, ‘Reading Coomaraswamy on the Origin of the Buddha Image’, Artibus Asiae 70/1 (2010) 151–72 at 156. A. K. Coomaraswamy, ‘The Origin of the Buddha Image’, Art Bulletin 9/4 (1927) 287–329, at 287.

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provided a model which had later been barbarized by races devoid of true artistic instincts, to whom nothing deserving the name of fine art could be credited.17

We shall see later the strategy Coomaraswamy adopted to overcome this problem. However, Foucher was deeply influential and his account of Gandharan art became a gateway for Europeans into other Indian subjects. Two very early attempts to define the fields of Mathuran art and Gupta art, by Jean-Philippe Vogel and Vincent Arthur Smith respectively, took this approach.18 They both sought to view aspects of Indian art through the prism of comparison with that of Gandhara. Smith’s is particularly dramatic in reading the Gupta period ( 319–500) almost entirely through chronologically and geographically remote Gandharan examples. This approach created a hierarchy with Greece at the top and Gandhara below as the conduit to the subordinate, passively receptive, arts of India. For Vogel and Smith, Greek art was an aesthetic standard against which Mathuran and Gupta art could be measured and also the direct source for all that was best, i.e. most Greek, in these two artistic schools. This problem is not some remote historiographic issue about the failings of colonial scholarship. It is still seen in recent art history that touches on Gandhara, especially that written from a classical art perspective. Take the example of Sir John Boardman’s Mellon Lectures of 1993, published as The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity, in 1994.19 There is an issue with the decision to include Gandhara at all in such a survey, as it could be argued it has no more place there than Stoke-on-Trent should have in a general introduction to Chinese porcelain. However, the particular problem in Boardman is agency, and notably how unconscious assumptions of agency frame the work even of good scholars, and even when those scholars are in principle aware of the dangers.

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Ibid. J.-P. Vogel, ‘The Mathurā School of Sculpture’, Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India (1906–7) 137–61 and (1909–10) 65–79; V. A. Smith, ‘Indian Sculpture of the Gupta Period, AD 300–650’, Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 3 (1914–15) 1–27. J. Boardman, The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity (London, 1994) 109–45, ‘Gandhara and North India’, is simply used as an example; other works could have been chosen. Boardman was selected because he is an exceptional and careful scholar, immense in distinction (subsequent page numbers from Boardman’s work are given in parentheses in the text). It is important to recognize that even after Edward Said’s Orientalism (London, 1978) these problems continue to affect good scholarship.

The Gandharan Problem

Agency is a complicated concept on which a wide variety of positions have been taken. Though it can be applied to objects, or abstract concepts like tradition or zeitgeist, these need to be framed theoretically and specifically. Without that conscious framing any attribution of agency other than to human actors, or at least conscious actors, has very good chances of being a fallacy; and attributing agency other than to those directly involved (patrons or artists) is intrinsically suspect. The issue with the work analysed here is the language of agency it employs, which suggests the same fallacy Coomaraswamy attacked in 1927: an assumption that the impetus and drive must come from an active West to a passive recipient East. When artistic elements move it is possible to imagine agency with the originator or the borrower, or some combination, though the borrower seems the more obvious default assumption. However, here Greek ‘influence’ (110, 111, 122, 126, 130) or ‘inspiration’ (128–9) are the product of an active Greek/Hellenistic agent who ‘supply’ (131), ‘introduced’ (111), ‘ensured’ (115), is ‘responsible for’ (122), ‘made acceptable’ (132) its ‘loan’ (137) of art to Gandharan (or Indian) artists, who are represented as passive subjects that ‘depend’ (120), ‘mirror’ (127), are ‘inspired by’ (111), and ‘owe’ (119, 127) the Hellenistic world for its ‘classical loans’ (132). Only occasionally do we encounter the active Indian who ‘adopted’ (130, 132) or ‘combines’ (130), ‘translated’ (126), ‘borrow or learn’ (111). This is not an accident of theory – it is not that agency is generally ascribed to prototypes and not to their imitators – for when the ‘transmission’ (130) is from East to West, from India or Persia to Greece, the artist ‘copies’ (110), ‘absorbed’ (111), ‘exploited’ (119), ‘assimilated’ (135) or ‘derive’ (136) a ‘usage’ (131). Greek artists are active even when they borrow. That the hierarchy of art with Greece at the top informs this understanding is clear when the Western artist becomes Roman rather than Greek, for the Kushan coin engraver who ‘adopted’, ‘assimilated’ and ‘copies’ (122), is clearly the agent, when Roman prototypes are involved. The actual evidence is slight and as Tissot notes, ‘we are still perfectly ignorant of the climate of artistic creation, in this particular land of the North-West Frontier of India (now Pakistan), because nothing is known of the artists and very little indeed of their sponsors’.20 Yet it is still instinctive 20

F. Tissot, ‘The Problem of Stylistic Vocabulary for Gandharan Art’, in M. Yaldiz and W. Lobo (eds.), Investigating Indian Art (Berlin, 1987) 363–8 at 363. At least three pieces, the Kanishka casket, a sculpture at Peshawar, and the temple at Surkh Khotal, have been attributed to individuals with Greek names ‘Agisala’, ‘Minanda’, and ‘Palamedes’, see A. D. H. Bivar, ‘The Historical Origins of the Art of Gandhara’, Pakistan Archaeology 26 (1991) 61–72. Mairs does offer some discussion of the mechanics involved: R. Mairs,

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within the classical tradition to ascribe agency easily to Greek art, presumably due to its intrinsic aesthetic superiority. There is no real difference here from Vogel’s account in the early twentieth century of the earliest Mathura Buddhas. Though he can find no evidence of a Gandharan prototype and admits ‘it would indeed be difficult to derive these clumsy and unwieldy figures from the graceful Bodhisattvas of Gandhāra’,21 Vogel is still certain that the Gandharan depiction with its Greek origin was the basis of the Mathuran type. The Indian art is both debased and dependent.22 The Gandharan problem is widespread; other examples could easily be added to that presented here. It is also broader than a nineteenth-century obsession with Alexander or issues of orientalism in twentieth-century academia. This discussion will focus not on the problem but on the strategies scholars have sought to overcome it. First, the idea of creating an art history not rooted in Western thought, particularly associated with Coomaraswamy; second, the approach taken by Indian scholars immediately after independence; and finally the art-archaeological approach which has largely come to dominate the small community of specialists in Gandharan studies. These strategies will be presented discretely; however, they should not be thought of as mutually exclusive but rather as particular threads which all coexist, some enjoying more prominence than others at particular times or in the work of particular scholars.

1.

The First Strategy: Coomaraswamy, the Silpashastras and an Indian Art History

The first strategy is by far the most complex and sophisticated but it is also, at least in the case of Gandhara, the most badly flawed. It identifies the root of the problem in Western art history, aesthetics, and culture, which privileges the Greeks, the Renaissance, materialism and beauty. True art

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‘Models, Moulds and Mass Production: The Mechanics of Stylistic Influence from the Mediterranean to Bactria’, Ancient West and East 13 (2014) 175–95. Vogel, ‘The Mathurā School of Sculpture’ (1906–7) 150. I am not suggesting a position as radically contemptuous of ‘influence’ as Baxandall’s (M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, 1985) 58–62). While I suggest it makes more sense to attribute agency, prima facie, to the maker/patron than the prototype, I can see how the alternative position might on occasion be a legitimate explanation. The issue here is not a theoretical construction of agency but rather the way the unspoken assumptions inflect accounts.

The Gandharan Problem

argued Coomaraswamy,23 drawing on the works of Ernest Binfield Havell and Rabindranath Tagore, sought to engage a higher spiritual plane. Indian art, like the medieval art of Europe which had also been side-lined by the standard naturalistic canon, was a true art; it did not focus on the representational but on the spiritual. Coomaraswamy wrote: ‘Secular and personal art can only appeal to the cliques: but a hieratic art unites a whole race in one spiritual feudalism.’24 The solution was to build a new, better, art history more suited to understanding the art of India by being grounded in Indian philosophical assumptions. Such an art history could be built up from the philosophical and religious texts which had informed Indian artists and patrons, and the technical treatises available for Indian artists (the silpashastras).25 This would have its own terminology and theories for interpreting the art, stripped of that Western gaze which underpins the Gandharan problem and which had caused European art history to see Greek hands in the Buddha despite it representing ‘a conception of spiritual attainment altogether foreign to European psychology, and a formula quite un-European in its indifference to natural fact’.26 Once you had this perspective it was possible to place Gandharan art in its proper position: Gandhāra sculpture is the work of Græco-Roman craftsmen or Indian imitators, working for Indo-Scythian kings who patronised Buddhism as a State religion; it is a thoroughly hybrid art in which provincial Roman forms are adapted to the purposes of Indian imagery. Thus we find Apollo as the prototype of Buddha, posing in the attitude of an India yogī. While other god-forms are taken over with even less modification. The æsthetic merits of this purely commercial art are of the same order

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There is a danger in any short presentation of caricaturing Coomaraswamy; for a lengthier and more nuanced account of his engagement with Gandharan art the reader should consult Rhi, ‘Reading Coomaraswamy on the Origin of the Buddha Image’. A. K. Coomaraswamy, The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon (London, 1913) 23. Silpashastra can refer to a specific text, a particular class of texts, or act as a short-hand for texts on artistic knowledge in India. It is meant here in the last of these three senses. Banerjea (J. N. Banerjea, The Development of Hindu Iconography (Calcutta, 1956) 11–35) gives a good account of the many different texts relating to Hindu art. Dallapiccola (A. L. Dallapiccola (ed.), Shastric Traditions in Indian Arts, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1989)) brings together a wide range of scholars to illustrate the strengths and limitations of these texts as tools for interpreting art – though several contributors comment on how rare such analysis has been in Indian art history. Parker (S. K. Parker, ‘Texts and Practice in South Asian Art: An Ethnographic Perspective’, Artibus Asiae 63/1 (2003) 5–34) provides an interesting account of how such texts function today, though there is no guarantee that this informs us on how they functioned in the past. Coomaraswamy, ‘The Origin of the Buddha Image’, 287.

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with, but scarcely equal to, those of modern Catholic plaster saints; it is as far removed from the great Greek art that lies behind it, as from the classic Indian art of several centuries later.27

Coomaraswamy stuck with this approach throughout his life and it is most highly developed in his final work The Transformation of Nature in Art. It has had some impact on scholarship of the art of India, especially in studies of temple architecture, which tend to employ a complex Sanskrit terminology derived from Indian texts, though not always texts of the same period or region as the temples it is intended to explicate. The result is neither English nor Sanskrit, but a newly emergent, crosscultural, technical dialect more or less intelligible only to a sub-culture of academic specialists.28

However, this has not succeeded in creating an Indian art history organically developed from its own texts in a manner parallel but distinct from Western art history and it has had almost no impact on discussion of Gandhara. The strategy has also played into essentialist colonial and anti-colonial discourses on the differences between India and Europe. Coomaraswamy did very little to nuance his notion of the Indian as spiritual against the European as materialist. So a Western scholar such as John Marshall embedded in Indian archaeology could write in the same tone as Coomaraswamy: To the Greek, man, man’s beauty, man’s intellect were everything, and it was the apotheosis of this beauty and this intellect which still remained the key-note of Hellenistic art even in the Orient. But these ideals awakened no response in the Indian mind. The vision of the Indian was bounded by the immortal rather than the mortal, by the infinite rather than finite. Where Greek thought was ethical, his was spiritual; where Greek was rational, his was emotional.29

Marshall’s work is generally more representative of the third strategy to be explored below but is clearly shaded by Coomaraswamy’s account. There is an irony that a critique of a problem rooted in cultural perspectives has served to reify rather than to nuance the cultures that are being studied.

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Coomaraswamy, The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon, 54. Parker, ‘Texts and Practice in South Asian Art’, 6. J. Marshall, ‘The Monuments of Ancient India’, in E. J. Rapson (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1922) 612–49 at 649.

The Gandharan Problem

In reality ‘European’ perspectives were never homogeneous, any more than the ‘Indian’ response. Two reasons can be suggested for the failure of Coomaraswamy’s strategy, one for its relative lack of success in Indian art history generally and one for its total lack of impact in Gandharan studies. The first is simply difficulty. The various artistic texts are not manuals, nor are they a fully formed aesthetic theory that the historian could learn and apply. They are an amalgam of normative descriptions of temple and idol construction written by religious practitioners, not artists, at widely different times and places. To transform them into an art history is certainly not impossible, but would be a monumental task given the lack of critical editions, firm dates and original contexts for many of the texts concerned. Initially, at least, the results of such a scholarly undertaking, properly performed, would be less sophisticated than the Western tradition of art history, which enjoys the depth that comes with centuries of development and significant critical precision as a result of long scholarly debate. Coomaraswamy and many of his intellectual successors have papered over all the problems by essentially re-dressing European theory with a sprinkling of Sanskrit terminology. The result is a polemical repositioning of the author as inside the tradition rather than a genuinely Indian art history. In Coomaraswamy’s case his theory owes more to Eric Gill and Aristotle than to the Vedas and Silpashastras. All of which forces us to consider, more briefly than it deserves, the issue of identity. Coomaraswamy was born in Sri Lanka, not the regions of North India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan being discussed here. He was largely raised and entirely educated in England and spent most of his working life at the Boston Museum for Fine Arts in the United States. This complicates the emic/etic element of the debate. There is a difference between Coomaraswamy’s sense of personal insider identity, which is not being questioned, and the rhetorical element in his emic claim to speak on behalf of the tradition. Whenever a scholar positions him- or herself to speak on behalf of the continuum of emic and etic voices there is a rhetorical element at play, either a claim to the ‘insight’ of the insider or, perhaps for Foucher or myself as author of this text, the ‘objectivity’ of the outsider. The reality is more complex than these implicit rhetorical claims. The world-experience of artists, of their patrons, of ancient viewers (believers or not, locals and visitors, members of very different classes and statuses) are not homogeneous and none of this resembles that of modern scholars, although there may be areas of some overlap. It is too simple to accept

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Coomaraswamy as an authentic insider, but at the same time we need to acknowledge that the Mathura question would probably not have occurred to Foucher. This brings us to a second issue more specific to Gandhara than Indian art more generally. Though the chronology of Gandharan art is uncertain it is rarely projected much beyond the sixth century  in Gandhara itself and not later than the eighth or ninth century in Afghanistan or Swat. This means that the bulk of what was produced and what survives predates Indian texts that discuss art, to which Coomaraswamy urged scholars to turn. The Gandhara of the art is culturally, linguistically, and religiously distinct from the regions in which those texts were written. To try and project a theory of art based around North Indian texts of a later period is simply to replace the problem of a foreign European gaze with a foreign medieval Indian gaze. To understand Gandharan art is to recognize it as Gandharan, neither European nor Indian, and that it does not belong unapologetically in a book on Indian art any more than it does in a book on Greek art (although of course it appears unapologetically in both).

2.

The Second Strategy: Removing the Western

The second strategy came to the fore around Indian independence in 1947 and though it has not been well articulated, its main outlines are clear. The period from 1850 to 1947 had seen the development of a native intelligentsia who (unlike Coomaraswamy) were born, educated, and worked in India, though within European, specifically British, frameworks of knowledge. It is not surprising that they, at least implicitly, rejected the strategy of Coomaraswamy, and embraced the academic methods they had worked so hard to adopt. The Gandharan problem for these scholars was not to be found in the tools of scholarship, which were essentially value-neutral, but in the scholars who wielded them and the subjects they chose to study. One example of this approach is evident in the series The History and Culture of the Indian People (HCIP), volume 1 of which was published in 1951 and volume 8 in 1977. Its proposed length, at ten volumes, exceeds, intentionally, the six volumes of the Cambridge History of India (CHI) published under British rule between 1922 and 1937. The HCIP borrows its structure and format from the CHI: some chapters have identical, or nearly identical, titles (Ashoka and Chandragupta being examples) while ‘The Scythian and Parthian Invaders’ becomes ‘The Śakas and the

The Gandharan Problem

Pahlavas’, a form of translation from European to Indian terminology. Others reject the framing of the original topic with a notably different title, ‘Alexander the Great’ and the ‘The Successors of Alexander the Great’ become ‘Foreign Invasions’ and ‘The Yavanas’ (a term found in Indian texts derived from the Greek word ‘Ionian’ and initially used to refer to Hellenistic settlers). Of the authors of the first volume of the CHI only John Marshall had spent a substantial period (as Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India) in a post in India. They otherwise represented mostly institutions in the United Kingdom, with foreign scholars being drawn from the USA and Sweden. Of the twenty-one contributors to the second volume of the HCIP (essentially covering the same period), the institutions represented are exclusively Indian. The HCIP volumes change the handling of topics in subtle ways. There is a great deal more space in the HCIP for the artistic, social and literary, rather than the purely political. And in the coverage of art, what is discussed alters significantly. For example in the CHI third volume account of Gupta art, Gandhara is mentioned only once; it simply plays no part in the story of Gupta art. Compare this with Smith who returns to European influence repeatedly30 and concludes that ‘somehow or other the Gupta artists drank at the fountain of Greek inspiration’. This strategy assumes the problem is purely a matter of the scholars and subject matter that is chosen. If you replace the imperial chauvinism of British scholars with the native sympathy of Indian authors, you eliminate the distorting view. Likewise if you replace a focus on the Hellenistic ‘influenced’ arts of the early first millennium with the artistically superior and better represented late first millennium Hindu arts, you cease to give undue weight to European influence in the resulting account. There is clearly an argument to be made here. The Gandharan problem seems to be rooted in cultural perspectives, but to see a particular perspective as driven by ideology is too simple a critique. It sees Foucher’s remark on who his work would ‘flatter’ and who it would ‘offend’ as a statement of a political agenda – when it is clearly a self-reflective awareness of his own position, a strength rather than a weakness of his scholarship. The same is equally true of Coomaraswamy, whose insider positioning is a genuine attempt to find a sympathetic reading, not a deliberate rhetorical ploy to mislead.

30

Smith, ‘Indian Sculpture of the Gupta Period’, 11, 15, 16, 20, 25.

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The strategy can be thought of as highlighting a difference between the individual, as a complex site of different identities and experiences, and the group, whose emergent properties tend to privilege certain positions. If an individual author is white, European, and secular/Christian, that does not, or perhaps more accurately should not, matter; but if all the scholars are white, European, and secular/Christian it very clearly does. The demographic of Gandharan studies is not so one-dimensional but it is certainly dominated by European, American, and to some degree recently Japanese scholarship. In this respect the post-independence critique remains valid. The problem of course is that the solution does not answer the critique. The writers of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) simply inverted the positioning by ensuring that all of the contributors were Indian (not just by birth or personal identity but also by institutional affiliation). This falls into the same trap of everyone sharing a particular position and concomitantly being blind to alternative questions and assumptions. The issues to which this led in the particular case of the HCIP are explored in Chapter 10 on ‘Hindu’ art. It also assumes a privileged position for those who rhetorically position themselves as insiders. As explored elsewhere in this volume, fields dominated by insiders are no more functional than those dominated by outsiders, on which see Chapter 11 on Jewish art before and after the establishment of the Jewish state. As discussed above, the claim to speak from the inside is always to some degree a rhetorical act. An Indian is as remote to a region in modern Pakistan or Afghanistan as is a European. Scholars from Pakistan might claim such a position, though there are still only two international journals with an interest in Gandharan material culture produced locally, Pakistan Archaeology which commenced in 1964 and Gandharan Studies from 2007. Pakistan is a Muslim country (as are almost all the local scholars) as culturally removed from its Buddhist past as the ‘Christian’ West or ‘Hindu’ India.31 Nor is this set of problems really specific to Gandhara, for any culture or place removed from us by a thousand or more years is foreign soil, and all critical study is, to some degree, from the outside. The real solution that this strategy suggests is that a field benefits from multiple perspectives. This ought to be obvious. Foucher and Coomaraswamy were both good scholars but they approached the same

31

It is notable that Japanese scholars are active in this field and often bring a cultural perspective rooted in Buddhism, as Western scholars are rooted in Greece and Hellenism. Japanese interest was significant enough to maintain an international journal, Silk Road Art and Archaeology, between 1990 and 2004.

The Gandharan Problem

problem with different sympathies and from very different positions. Undoubtedly the study of the Buddha image is richer and deeper as a result of both their perspectives, even if their debate is often elided today by appealing to the idea of the simultaneous development of the Buddha image in multiple locations. The field of Gandharan art in general would be richer if it had more voices, especially more South and Central Asian voices, more Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Islamic voices. And it is in this sense that the implicit critique of the ICHR can be seen as valid. At least one point from these first two strategies remains important, for the current volume if not Gandharan studies itself, and that is the question of how important Gandharan art is judged to be. Why does Gandharan art feature so strongly in current Western scholarship about South and Central Asia? From at least one perspective, that of the ICHR, it could be considered marginal or even trivial. Scholars like DeCaroli seek to embed the development of the Buddha image in much wider cultural shifts.32 If that is the case then why not study the process through the art of Mathura instead? Or, more dramatically, why study the development of the Buddha’s iconography, rather than, say, that of Śiva, whose imagery and cult see huge change in the early first millennium (see Chapter 10 in this volume)? Or Varaha, the boar incarnation of Vishnu, whose iconography and its entanglement with narratives of political power and social decline dominate a number of issues in Indian art from the mid to late first millennium?33

3.

The Third Strategy: The Art-Archaeological

For various reasons Gandhara has remained the domain of scholars from the West (and sometimes Japan), often trained in the study of Western archaeology or history. Obviously these scholars have generally rejected the idea that their training is inadequate to the task or that they themselves are the problem.34 That has not blinded them to the issues with Foucher’s 32 33

34

DeCaroli, Image Problems. Michael Willis (The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual (Cambridge, 2009)) discusses the political transformations of the mid-first millennium much more broadly, touching upon the development of Vishnu cults, including Varaha, extensively at various points. The same is true for this author. Though I have studied Gandhara tangentially for many years through its political history, my limited initial training was in the history of Europe and Africa, I visited India only subsequent to studying it, have never visited Pakistan, and trained primarily with a scholar who had never visited either country. If I reject the first strategy

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account and they have sought out strategies that avoid the Gandharan problem. The approach that has developed has been conditioned by archaeology. John Marshall’s publication in 1960 on the period is a typical early example. Marshall had excavated the site of Taxila (not technically in the province of Gandhara but in Hazara to the east of the Indus) from 1913 to 1934. Marshall’s understanding of how to proceed with Gandharan art was conditioned by this experience, and it placed an emphasis on the material over the aesthetic. This is his assessment of what future work will require: Among other tasks, the stones used for these sculptures need to be examined and identified far more systematically than I have found possible. The quarries where the stones were hewn must also be located. Then the decorative patterns and other architectural features, as well as the fashions prevailing among celestials and mortals, need to be set out period by period.35

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century much of the archaeological context, in which Gandharan sculpture was excavated or its remains found, was lost. Early excavations were often well recorded, though the records were frequently mislaid and rarely published. After 1870 and the founding of the Archaeological Survey of India, most sites were published but even then museums frequently failed to track provenance accurately, making it very hard to link isolated panels and sculptures to any kind of context. With these isolated objects an art-historical approach which focused on style, comparison between individual types, and between the corpus and other arts (particularly Greek and Roman) inevitably came to dominate. As was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Foucher realized the problem, but was unable to resolve it and had little choice but to work with the information available. As museum practice has improved, further excavations have been conducted, and increasingly methodical work on archives has recovered data from the earliest excavations, an alternative strategy has become available to scholars, one closer to Marshall’s prescription. A good example of where the trend has gone is Kurt Behrendt’s The Buddhist Architecture of Gandharā published in 2004. He rejects the ‘more speculative dating

35

which requires a training I don’t have, and the second, which disqualifies me by accident of birth, and feel more sympathy for the third, the reader is justified in the old aphorism ‘he would say that wouldn’t he’! J. Marshall, The Buddhist Art of Gandhāra: The Story of the Early School, Its Birth, Growth and Decline (Cambridge, 1960) xvi.

The Gandharan Problem

strategies that rely on style or on tracing foreign influence’36 and instead buries himself in the detail. As an example, in the second to fifth centuries he argues that patrons moved from commissioning narrative sequences which showed the life of the Buddha to free-standing life-size and monumental figures which symbolically represented moments in the Buddha’s life. To do this he first establishes where the art objects stood within the architectural structures, using both recent archaeology and photographic archives of the nineteenth-century excavations (see particularly chapter 5, pp. 109–34). Then he demonstrates how those architectural elements are superimposed in the excavations in such a way as to give a relative sequence. In the town of Taxila that sequence is related to different styles of masonry, the rubble, diaper, or semi-ashlar (his appendix A). These he cross-references against coins and the few datable inscriptions to produce a relative chronology of phases with characteristic iconographic/material trends. The devil is in the detail here, the connoisseur’s vague notions of style are replaced with corroboration through the growth rates of lichen (p. 5, fn.6). This is what Marshall called for as a strategy to unknot the problems. Here the ‘classical style’ and Greek influence largely vanish from view and agency is ascribed where you would expect it, with the people who made things (269–71). However, it is not just the problems which are missing. The Mahayana, the great doctrinal division of Buddhism, is mentioned only three times, though the period and region of Gandhara are strongly implicated in its development. Behrendt is interested in what worshippers, monks, and patrons did, not in why they did it. The obvious criticism of this strategy is that it is reductive, it makes taxonomy and chronology adequate answers to the study of art. There is no aesthetic, nothing that distinguishes the classification and sorting of sculpture from a coin, brick, or potsherd. Dry cultural phases replace the spiritual or intellectual experience of the viewer which Foucher and Coomaraswamy, in different ways, were seeking to understand. The strategy eliminates the problem by eliminating much of the subject matter. An apologetic for this model can be imagined. The reduction is necessary because the taxonomy and chronology must come first. Greek and Roman art have centuries of that task already in place, the when, where,

36

K. Behrendt, The Buddhist Architecture of Gandharā (Leiden, 2004) 269 (subsequent page numbers from this work are given in parentheses in the text).

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and by whom have been (largely) answered.37 ‘Why’ can be built on a firm foundation in those fields, but here such questions would fall back into the old problem. Everything written since the nineteenth century on whether the inspiration for Gandhara’s famous sculptures was Greek or Indian, whether this dramatic shift to the personification of the Buddha was driven by doctrine, the demands of the laity, or the impetus given by Greek thought in Gandhara, presupposes answers to the questions ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘whom’. The point Foucher and Coomaraswamy were debating with such heat turns on the question of ‘where’, Gandhara or Mathura, which requires a judgement on which was first, ‘when’, which we do not know. Figure 2.2 was chosen to illustrate this problem on the Empires of Faith project webpage but it is a cipher for the problem rather than evidence. This image was made at a time when making Buddha images was uncontroversial, to highlight a patron’s contribution, and served to embellish a sacred area whose religious experience was dictated by proximity to relics, not images.38 Foucher phrased his questions in terms of the image precisely because, as he was aware, he did not understand the details of where this image stood. His cultural preconceptions told him the accomplished stone figure of the Buddha was the centre of the problem. The evidence, specifically the detail, would have told him this image was secondary, an embellishment to the actual objects of veneration – the relics. There is obviously a risk of simplification here – relic practice, as well as the use of images varied both geographically and chronologically – but those variations cannot be reconstructed other than by painstaking classifications, site by site, region by region.39

37

38

39

J. Rhi, ‘Identifying Several Visual Types in Gandhāran Buddhist Images’, Archives of Asian Art 58 (2008) 43–85 is a similar careful typology of Buddha images in this vein and he presents exactly this sort of defence, particularly in note 11 when he says ‘in some areas, such as Gandhāran sculpture, the rudimentary work of visual assortment is far from completed, and vast quantities of material still await such analysis’. That images were secondary to relics in the religious experience of Gandharan Buddhist sites (at least in the Peshawar Basin, Swat, and the city of Taxila, since he excludes other regions frequently included in ‘Greater Gandhara’) is the principal conclusion of Behrendt’s painstaking work. Before phase III, and this image since it is made in schist is probably phase II, image shrines were largely absent. Behrendt plays down that image shrines clearly do become important in the later period, or that relics are relatively poorly represented in the Peshawar valley. He does acknowledge that practice in Swat diverges, and deliberately excludes Afghanistan due to relatively poor evidence, focusing primarily on Taxila. Whether differing practices represent trends over time, different localized practices, or sectarian differences, remains unclear though all three are probably involved.

The Gandharan Problem

Figure 2.2 Seated Buddha in the teaching posture. On the cushion below him, a seated Bodhisattva with turban and ornaments flanked by a kneeling male and female worshipper. Second or third century AD, grey schist. From Jamalgarhi, Pakistan. 95 by 53 cm. British Museum, BM 1895,1026.1. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

The study of Gandharan art today does not do what the study of late antique Roman art does. That is a problem if you wish to engage in a comparative exercise, but it is not a problem with Gandharan art per se. It does not do those things because the paradigm that dominates the field is

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interested in typological details of material culture. That there are flaws in such a paradigm, particularly that it is reductive, should not detract from the importance of that work; good scholarship is almost always a form of paradigm exploration and extension. Nor should it be allowed to obscure the fact that we know more today about Figure 2.2 not because we are better scholars than Foucher, but because of the art-archaeological approaches that have been followed for over half a century, even if that paradigm has not always been entirely successful in dealing with the Gandharan problem. A recent catalogue for an exhibition on Gandhara held in Bonn with short contributions from twenty-four scholars showed a wide mix of strategies and issues. There are still contributors making the same errors as in the nineteenth century, wondering for example how the indigenous population failed to commemorate the invasion of Alexander the Great with an era, as if Alexander’s importance to modern Europeans was an objective measure of his historical impact. There are also essays which represent all of the strategies here, mixtures of them, and others.40

4.

Conclusion

This chapter has touched on one problem in one field of art history. The Gandharan problem is essentially the tendency of scholars’ cultural positions to distort their understanding of the art. The problems of a European gaze are not a nineteenth-century problem but are still alive today. Some of the strategies to overcome this problem and their shortcomings have been outlined. We should be wary of thinking this 40

See C. Luczanits (ed.), Gandhara, the Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Legends, Monasteries and Paradise (Bonn, 2008). Kuwayama’s essay ‘The Stupa in Gandhara’ (pp. 170–8) is a careful typology of architectural types amongst stupas, notable also because of its use of technical terms – caitya, anda, harmikā – which have gained ground with the field’s maturity. In some __ cases, the tone of individual essays is determined by topic, though Bernard Andreae’s ‘Alexander the Great and His Asian Legacy’ (pp. 50–7) probably still overstates its case by giving Alexander more than a tangential connection to Gandharan art. If there is a strategy discussed here which is noticeably absent in the volume it is the second – of the twenty-four contributors most are European or American scholars, seventeen, with just four from Pakistan, two from Japan, one from Korea, and no Indian or Afghan scholars present at all. Note Falk’s remarkable comments on eras in his essay ‘Gandharan Eras’ (pp. 70–1, at 70): ‘From our point of view, it would seem obvious to see the time of Alexander’s conquests in the year 326 B.C.E as the starting point of an “Indian” era, but this thought seemed to have crossed the minds of neither the conquerors nor the native population.’

The Gandharan Problem

represents progress. Historiographic accounts accepting the limitations of previous scholarship are common. If you know about the problem surely you are less likely to repeat it, seems a reasonable argument. This risks becoming a sort of historiographic mantra whose repetition is imagined to banish faulty historical logic. For example, Stanley K. Abe’s article on the historiography of Gandhara41 looks odd in his list of publications on Chinese art. Does his clear account of the failings of European scholars (particularly Foucher) to see their own positioning with relation to Gandharan art protect him, an American of Japanese origin, from making the same errors in respect of Chinese art? The same question might be asked of Chapter 12 in this volume on the twentiethcentury historiography of India.42 Empirical observation suggests that this kind of historiographic performance is not an effective antidote. This account began by demonstrating a simple fallacy of agency in the work of a modern classical art historian to illustrate the broader Gandharan problem. This was nearly a century after Foucher, seventy years after Coomaraswamy’s intervention, eighteen years after Said’s Orientalism. A skilled and well-read scholar like Boardman cannot have been unaware of the problem yet the awareness did not shield him from error. It would be simple to extend the list of people who have made the same errors – Coomaraswamy inverted them, Marshall’s careful archaeology did not stop his training in Greece shaping his views. Today a comparative project such as Empires of Faith runs the same risk of creating, in its choice and presentation, a notion of Gandharan art that will tell future scholars more about our own cultural perspectives than the object of study. The historiography of Gandharan studies suggests that the Gandharan problem, the distortions caused by the world-view that appropriates it (Roman, Greek, or Indian) cannot be avoided simply by being aware of past errors. The evidence and scholarship for ancient Gandhara is far greater than for Afghanistan, Sind, Kashmir, Gujarat, or even Northern India in the same period. It makes sense to want to include it in wider

41

42

S. K. Abe, ‘Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art in the West’, in D. S. Lopez (ed.), Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago, 1995) 63–106. The volume Abe’s paper appears in has been reviewed in depth by Nattier (J. Nattier, ‘Buddhist Studies in the Post-Colonial Age’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 (1997) 469–85 at 472–4) who is critical of the disconnect between theoretical account and sources. The review is also useful for the way it problematizes the diversity of Buddhist scholarship (479–85).

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comparisons but we should be careful that what we are comparing is rooted in an analysis of evidence rather than in the projection of our deeply held cultural assumptions. And we should be particularly aware that there is no sharp boundary between our heuristic categories of ‘evidence’ and ‘prejudice’. 43

43

This essay was prepared while working for the Leverhulme funded project Empires of Faith. It benefited from comments by Elizabeth Errington, members of the Empires of Faith team, and at a seminar in Chicago in October 2015.

3

|

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean     

The study of the ancient Mediterranean world has traditionally been a hotbed of ancestralist rivalries and competitive modern genealogies (nationalist and cosmopolitan, Christiano-centric and anti-Christian). This is especially true for what have been – from a European viewpoint – the privileged cultures of Greece and Rome. No account of Roman religion can be free of centuries of layered debate on these issues: consciously or unconsciously, the field is a tangle of constantly outdated ‘presentisms’ deriving their authority from accounts of a special, shared and collective past.1 But Roman religion has a very special place within these narratives: it is not Christianity – it represents the past before the continuing Christian present, which Western scholarship has either upheld or detested since the Enlightenment – and it is not Greece, wherein the highest cultural and philosophical ideals of Europe were always vested. In no other field with which this book is concerned are the self-contradictions of a long history of varieties of investments more directly manifest, than in the subject of visual and material culture in relation to Roman religion. Let us begin, as histories of Roman religions never begin, with an object. Of all the types of object we have from the Classical past, perhaps none so typifies our sense of ancient religion as the altar (Figure 3.1).2 Altars are everywhere, with an impressive spectrum of possible artistic embellishments, inscribed ancient languages and contextual settings. They impel us

1

2

For the classic philosophical account of ‘presentism’ in the writing of history (‘all history is contemporary history’), see B. Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (London, 1941) 19. For discussion of Croce’s approach, see M. Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered (Hanover, 1987) 93–5; D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley, 1987) 151–2, 283–5; N. Conati, ‘History as Contemporary History in the Thinking of Benedetto Croce’, Open Journal of Philosophy 5 (2015) (http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2015.51007). For the place of the history of ancient art in this model, see B. Croce, ‘History, Chronicle and Pseudo-History’ (published in 1937) in B. Croce, Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays (London, 1966) 497–508. Raphael’s Sacrifice at Lystra, the cartoon now in the V&A made at the behest of Pope Leo X for the weaving of a tapestry unveiled in the Sistine Chapel in 1519, typifies this, placing the altar at the heart of the scene, the nexus between the falling axe, the bull, the statue of Asclepius behind, and the expectant victim to the left of the scene.

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Figure 3.1 Raphael (1483–1520), The Sacrifice at Lystra (Acts 14:8–18, where the Lystrians offer sacrifices to Saints Paul and Barnabas after they have cured a lame man). Bodycolour on paper mounted onto canvas. Cartoon for a tapestry in the Sistine Chapel, commissioned by Pope Leo X and unveiled in 1519. Height: 350 cm, width: 560 cm, made c. 1515–16. Victoria and Albert Museum, on loan from the collection of Her Majesty the Queen. Photograph: Courtesy of the V&A. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

to think of what many see as the defining ritual that differentiates religions in the ancient and the modern periods, ‘paganism’ from Rabbinic Judaism or Christianity, polytheism from monotheism: the act of blood sacrifice.3 3

See in particular G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (Chicago, 2009). On sacrifice more generally, see J. Carter, Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader (London, 2003), for essays spanning more than a century written by a variety of renowned scholars. See also M. W. Knust and Z. Varhelyi, Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice (Oxford, 2011) for a survey of the types, meanings and functions of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Jewish and early Christian sacrifice, and recent approaches to it. M.-Z. Petropoulou, Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism and Christianity, 100 BC – AD 200 (Oxford, 2008) examines the mechanism of animal sacrifice, and the different conceptual realities involved in it in the ancient world. The recent edited volume of C. A. Faraone and F. S. Naiden, Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers (Cambridge, 2012), offers some new perspectives on an old problem in ancient religion. I. Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France (Chicago, 2002), discusses the importance of discussions of sacrifice in scholarly conceptions of religion, particularly in France from the Reformation onwards. For Roman sacrifice, see e.g. J. Scheid, Quand faire, c’est croire: les rites sacrificiels des Romains (Paris, 2005), part 1, entitled ‘Le sacrifice: rite central de la

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

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Figure 3.2 Altars in the Senhouse Museum found at Maryport, UK. Dedicated in the 2nd century  by the ‘I cohors hispanorum’ and their various commanders. Sandstone. All of a square type, but no two altars are the same either in dimension or decoration. Senhouse Museum. Photograph: By kind permission of the Manager and Trustees of Senhouse Roman Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

In 1870, a spectacular concentration of altars was discovered at the Roman fort of Alauna – modern Maryport – in Cumbria, Britain: seventeen sandstone altars were found buried in pits in a field.4 Many carry inscriptions, most with dedications to Iuppiter Optimus Maximus (Jupiter Best and Greatest), and many have friezes with geometric decoration (Figure 3.2). Further finds followed in later years, in addition to discoveries from the eighteenth century and earlier, and it is for this collection of altars that Maryport is best-known. Individually, the altars are not particularly remarkable; there are many examples of sandstone altars dedicated by Roman soldiers from Britain, they are not especially well-carved; the choice of deity is not unusual. What makes them stand out is their number, and the circumstances of their burial. Nevertheless, they afford some information about the religious life of those who lived there in the past. They point to the names of gods – important foci

4

religion romaine’. Strikingly, the best archaeologically-focused account of Roman sacrifice – S. Lepetz and W. van Andringa (eds.), Archéologie du sacrifice animal en Gaule romaine: Rituels et pratiques alimentaires (Montagnac, 2008) – despite much on bones, finds and sacrificial reliefs (that is, both material and visual culture), has no room in its 300 pages for any discussion of altars. J. C. Bruce, ‘On the Altars Recently Found in the Roman Camp at Maryport’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society 2 ser. 1 (1874) 175–88. On the site see M. Jarrett, Maryport, Cumbria: A Roman Fort and its Garrison (Kendal, 1976); R. J. A. Wilson (ed.), Roman Maryport and its Setting (Kendal, 1997).

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    

of worship; they provide names of individuals and groups too, offering a social dimension; the form of the altars speaks not only to religious practice, but to traditions in religious dedications, and the quantity of them might point to degrees of popularity. But to what extent, in interrogating such issues, is it appropriate to divide the totality of any one of these material objects into separate empirical chunks? Is it legitimate to focus only on the name of the god without considering the dedicant, the object’s form, the decoration and the find context? These points, quite simple when levelled at just one object or a small assemblage, become more complex when expanded to the entire group. How do we relate one of these altars to the others found or to the site as a whole? How do we compare this site to others? And how do we relate them all to evidence for ancient religion more generally, including to varied forms of text written in different languages, and to an enormously varied visual and material world? These questions circle around issues of evidence and the disciplinary specialists who contend with them, in particular historians, art historians and archaeologists, all of whom work on religion in the ancient world. The desire to cross disciplinary divides in order more effectively to study ancient religion – and in this chapter, in particular, Roman religion – has long existed. But a fundamental challenge remains. This is an issue that will become familiar over the course of this volume: the problem of commensurability. Is there a way of interpreting any one of these altars from Maryport so as to grant equal weight to its inscribed text, artistic features, and archaeological context? One of the aims of this chapter is to interrogate the ways ancient historians, art historians and archaeologists approach objects like these altars, and to examine how the questions asked of them are burdened by the preconceptions of each discipline. Can such objects of material and visual culture function in the writing of Roman religion, and in the writing of history more broadly? Part of the challenge in the field of Roman religion, and its material culture more broadly, lies in the history of the disciplines. We start from the premise that Roman religion, as a set of practices and rituals with a series of objects and buildings as its accoutrements and setting, was fundamentally rooted in visual and material culture. Scholarship on Roman religion and Roman art has painted the two in parallel lines. Richard Gordon neatly encapsulated the disciplinary difficulties: ‘The “experts” on ancient religious art are art historians, not historians of religion.’5 To these one might add a third: archaeology. 5

R. L. Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary: Production and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World’, Art History 2 (1979) 5–34, at 11.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

Despite Gordon’s acute observation – articulated in the late 1970s – the absence of a sustained dialogue between ancient history, art history and archaeology remains a problem for discussing the materiality of Roman religion. To bring together different methods and media that would allow us to work with them in an even-handed fashion is one of the biggest challenges currently confronting the study of ancient religion. Roman religious art, inasmuch as it can be distinguished as a category at all, has traditionally been seen mainly as art and not as a set of empirical data with a broader relevance for the history of religion. Roman religion as a topic of interest comes under the purview of Ancient History, and the study of it is to a great extent influenced by the preferences of this field for a dependence on textual sources (including epigraphy). The historic gap between the three disciplines concerned in different ways with the Maryport altars – ancient history, art history and archaeology – has affected the ways ancient religion has been written. This requires an examination of the different priorities of these three disciplines in approaching ancient religion, and religious material culture. This chapter looks at each discipline in turn, starting with ancient history, and moving to Roman art and archaeology. These sections address some of the historical reasons for the lack of a meaningful language for the discussion of Roman religious material culture. We use the example of the Maryport altars to illustrate the divergent approaches each field can take to the same objects. The conclusion emphasizes the modern scholarship that is challenging the old narrative of parallel lines, and is starting to draw them together.

1.

Historians’ Constructions of Roman Religion

An altar should be a good introduction to the materiality of Roman religion. It is a physical witness of sacrifice, arguably an actor – with agency (culturally contingent on its ritual context, to be sure) – within performative religion. Any example should be useful to historians interested in sacrifice as a transactional process between the human and divine worlds, as an instantly identifiable part of ritual, indeed a key setting for its action. But rather than focusing on the objects on which sacrifices were performed, historians have approached sacrifice – and indeed the study of ritual more generally – through the traditional medium of texts.6 6

Such as Pausanias Hellados Periegesis 5.15.10; Ovid Fasti 1.335–456; Horace Odes 3.18; Lucian de sacrificiis.

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    

How might historians approach the Maryport altars? Can they be more than illustrations of a ritual setting or used as support for claims founded on the priority of textual sources? One starting point is with their inscriptions, which tell the viewer something about the dedicant, the god or gods to whom the altar was dedicated and the provincial epigraphic habit.7 Let us examine one altar in particular, known (after its inscription, just to emphasize the priority of the written) as RIB 823, made from red sandstone probably in the reign of Hadrian (about 130 ) and excavated before 1725 (Figure 3.3).8 Its inscription reads: IOM COH Ī HIS CUI PRAE M MAENI VS AGRIP TRIBV POS

This may be translated as: ‘To Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The First Cohort of Spaniards, which is commanded by Marcus Maenius Agrippa, tribune, set this up’. The First Cohort of Spaniards is first attested in Britain in the first century ; members of this cohort are responsible for most of the inscribed altars found at Maryport.10 In addition to this offering by the cohort as a whole, Maenius Agrippa dedicated at least three other altars, all as tribune; this, along with the testimony of the other finds, suggests that there was a strong tradition of dedicating altars to Jupiter Optimus Maximus among these soldiers.11 The choice is not unusual; this

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On the epigraphic habit see R. MacMullen, ‘The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire’, American Journal of Philology 103 (1982) 233–46; G. Woolf, ‘Monumental Writing and the Expansion of the Roman Society in the Early Empire’, JRS 86 (1996) 22–39; F. Lloris, ‘The “Epigraphic Habit” in the Roman World’, in C. Bruun and J. Edmondson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy (Oxford, 2014) 131–47. Senhouse Roman Museum, MAYSM.1992.21; RIB [for Roman Inscriptions of Britain] 823; CIL vii.379 (https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/823). The Latin has therefore been restored as: I(ovi) O(ptimo) M(aximo) / Coh(ors) Ī His(panorum) / Cui Prae(est) / M(arcus) Maeni- / us Agrip(pa) / Tribu(nus) / Pos(uit). See RIB 2213; S. Frere, ‘M. Maenius Agrippa, the Expeditio Britannica and Maryport’, Britannia 31 (2000) 23–8. Another tribune, C. Caballius Priscus, appears to have been responsible for four other altars (Frere, ‘M. Maenius Agrippa’, 23). Agrippa, from Camerinum in Italy, is known from a career inscription found there: CIL XI.5632 = ILS 2735 with Frere, ‘M. Maenius Agrippa’, 24. RIB 8115–831; 833–5.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

57

Figure 3.3 Sandstone altar from Maryport. Dedicated by the tribune Marcus Maenius Agrippa in the 2nd century . Senhouse Museum. Photograph: By kind permission of the Manager and Trustees of Senhouse Roman Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

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    

epithet belonged to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline in Rome, and signified his worship as supreme god.12 What can the rest of the altar tell us about Roman religion? It stands as a signifier of religious practice; does its function as an altar make it a sacred object? Was it intended as a specific indication of the cohort’s religious identity as a collective, of Agrippa’s own personal religious and social identity, or was it the kind of ubiquitous dedication that people in his position normally made, in this case attributed to the cohort as a whole?13 As an object, it perhaps throws up more questions than it provides answers. But this should not be seen as a hindrance to studying religious material culture. Its very elusiveness as an object – particularly when compared to the more concrete nature of its textual inscription – gives an insight into why altars, such as those found at Maryport, have been largely disregarded in the writing of the history of Roman religion, unless they were major surviving monuments of the past, such as Augustus’ Ara Pacis.14

What Is ‘Roman Religion’? Ancient history as a discipline has largely left material culture – with the exception of epigraphy – to archaeologists or scholars of ancient art. This section therefore focuses on Roman religion itself: in what ways it exists as a category, and whether it is workable as an adjectival label to hang onto material culture. It addresses two major problems for the study of Roman religion: the lack of a coherent definition and the traditional preference of historians for textual sources. These are by no means the only two

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Twenty altars were dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus (RIB 815–31, 833–5); one to Jupiter Augustus (RIB 814). Note that of the four altars dedicated by Agrippa only this one (RIB 823) bears the name of both the unit and the commanding officer; the other three (RIB 824, 825 and 826) carry only the name of the commander: see D. Breeze, ‘The Regiments Stationed in Maryport and their Commanders’, in Wilson, Roman Maryport and its Setting, 67–89, at 67. Most scholarship on the Ara Pacis has overtly focused on its political agenda, for example P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1988) 120–3, 179–83, 203–5, 252–3, and J. Pollini, From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome (Norman, 2012) 204–70, or on its artistic motifs, for example D. Castriota, The Ara Pacis Augustae and the Imagery of Abundance in Later Greek and Early Roman Imperial Art (Princeton, 1995) and D. Conlin, The Artists of the Ara Pacis and the Process of Hellenization in Roman Relief Sculpture (Chapel Hill, 1997). For a reading of it as a religious monument, see J. Elsner, ‘Cult and Sculpture: Sacrifice in the Ara Pacis Augustae’, Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991) 50–61.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

problems for the field, but the specific interest of this chapter in finding a viable unified language of discourse brings them particularly to the fore. The hope of finding a clear definition of ‘Roman religion’ is both unrealistic and anachronistic. The subject is vast, and encompasses great temporal, geographic, linguistic and categorical variation. Its start and end dates are imprecise, and subject to debate. If we begin with the foundation of Rome, should we incorporate mythology into the religious history of the city? To what extent do these origins frame the religious landscape of the Republican and Imperial periods? Moreover, the search for an end date could take us up to the reign of Constantine and the advent of legalized Christianity (AD 306–337), to the fall of Rome (AD 476), or even to the fall of Constantinople (AD 1453) depending on whether our emphasis is on traditional polytheistic worship, on the city of Rome, or on the survival of aspects of a pre-Christian imperial model in Byzantium.15 The geography of the subject covers the sprawl of the Roman Empire, including local, civic, provincial and state-sponsored practice, as well as the spread of new forms of religious worship through diaspora and mission.16 And how far can Romano- or Italo-centrism be allowed to define religion in the context of an empire spanning the entire Mediterranean? The categorical variation in what constituted religion is especially difficult to convey. The term ‘religion’ covers the traditional collection of gods at Rome, the advent of new and local gods from across the empire, the role of the state in propagating cultivation of imperial cults (however we may understand them), the longevity of ancient traditional civic and rural polytheisms, the place of magic, the beliefs of a household and the role of individuals in choosing a personal form of worship that suited them best, the range of so-called mystery and initiation cults, the differences 15

16

On identity conflict in Byzantium, see A. Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 2007) Part I; on its Roman identity, A. Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA, 2015). On the transformation and tenacity of festivals in the Greek East, see F. Graf, Roman Festivals in the Greek East (Cambridge, 2015). On the geographical spread of various cult activities, see for example, D. Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1987–2005); the work of William van Andringa on sanctuaries and religious practices in Roman Gaul: W. van Andringa, Archéologie des santuaires en Gaule romaine (Saint-Etienne, 2000); W. van Andringa, La religion en Gaule romaine (Paris, 2002); the works of Ted Kaizer and Lucinda Dirven on local cults in the Roman Near East: T. Kaizer, The Variety of Local Religious Life in the Near East in Hellenistic and Roman Periods (Leiden, 2008); L. Dirven, Hatra: Politics, Religion and Culture between Parthia and Rome (Stuttgart, 2013). On geographic conceptions, see Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000).

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between local religions and more universal ones. It raises questions about the role of sacrifice versus other ritual acts, such as the sprinkling of incense or libation,17 the distinction between public and domestic worship, and understandings of belief.18 It even includes early forms of the modern world religions of Judaism and Christianity, which we might no longer consider to be particularly ‘Roman’, but played significant, even transformative, roles in the Roman religious landscape. There is no precise ancient definition of religion, no straightforward Greek or Latin term that the modern scholarship can adopt, and this makes the task of approaching the subject more complex. As such, the study of Roman religion may seem frequently to depend upon the preferences and interests of individual historians or to be subsumed into wider historical fashions and trends. Nonetheless, definition continues to be the key to exegesis for many scholars of ancient religion. One of the main problems lies in our restricted linguistic choices for discussing religion: the terms that we use, and the conceptions of religion that underpin them, are inevitably informed by our experience of modern world religions. The approach of many ancient historians educated in Europe or America has therefore been shaped by a Christian legacy of writing about religion and has frequently been a reaction to it. Despite these complications, the characterisations of some of the field’s most important figures continue to colour scholarship. For Theodor Mommsen, the great nineteenth-century Prussian historian, Roman religion was cold, formalistic, and state-controlled: it was of a very earthly character, and scarcely different in any material respect from the trembling with which the Roman debtor approached his just, but very strict and very powerful creditor. It is plain that such a religion was fitted rather to stifle than to foster artistic and speculative views.19

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Now the subject of an excellent book on art and religion in the Greek context: M. Gaifman, The Art of Libation in Classical Athens (New Haven, 2018). On belief see T. Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford, 2015). T. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 3 vols. (Leipzig 1854–6) Vol. I, Ch. XII [= The History of Rome (London, 1894) 206–35, with quotation from p. 224] with discussion by J. Scheid, ‘Polytheism Impossible, or the Empty Gods: Reasons Behind a Void in the History of Roman Religion’, History and Anthropology 3/1 (1987) 303–25, esp. 307–8 and 316–17, with 308–13 on Mommsen’s followers. It was an attitude that would continue to dominate perceptions of Roman religion for decades to come. See for example the influential lectures of William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London, 1902)) particularly 38–44, with 86–7.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

The message is clear: compared to the more spiritual character of monotheism, Roman religion was transactional, legalistic, and based on social models of reciprocity and justice.20 Rather than seeing religion, Mommsen saw the Roman legal system, replicated in different social structures; in essence, Mommsen denied the very religiosity of Roman religion. This is to say that he denied that Roman religious structures had more than a social purpose: they were the opposite of personal, spiritual – and Protestant – approaches to Christianity. Defining Roman religion from a social – or even a state – perspective is widespread. One approach has been to emphasize certain aspects of Roman religion that speak more to social, economic or political structures than to religious elements per se.21 The project of integrating Roman religion into wider Roman society, and into particular social structures, has enjoyed widespread popularity; the methodologies involved have varied, almost from historian to historian, though certain themes and terms have gained especial purchase. The mid-twentieth-century German historian Franz Altheim clearly saw Roman religion as an intrinsic part of all other areas of life in the Roman world, which should not be separated from them without losing something of its nature: A history of Roman religion, as a special subject of study, can only be orientated by a history of Rome in general. It can only be understood as a part of a coherent whole, which, regarded from another standpoint, presents itself to us as the history of Roman literature, of Roman art, of Roman law, and which, like every history, has its focus in the history of the state.22

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On the legalistic and prosaic, the precedent of Hegel is clear, for example, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1998), on the Philosophy of History, III, i, 1, where he laments, ‘How little have these prosaic conceptions in common with the beauty of the spiritual powers and deities of the Greeks!’ Influential works on Roman religion from the 1980s explored the social dimensions such as the spread of Christianity, e.g. R. MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (New Haven, 1984) and R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine (Harmondsworth, 1986); or of the imperial cult, e.g. S. R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 1984); M. Beard and J. North, Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient World (London, 1990); Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West; I. Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford, 2002). For a recent (if somewhat self-regarding) review of the writing of and the problems in the history of Roman religion, see J. Bremmer, C. Bonnet, J. Lieu, Z. Vahelyi and J. Rüpke, ‘Discussing Religious Change: A Panel on Jörg Rüpke’s Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion’, Religion in the Roman Empire 4 (2008) 107–54, esp. 134–49. F. Altheim, A History of Roman Religion, tr. H. Mattingly (London, 1938) 3.

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The conception of Roman religion as inherent in all other areas of Roman society, that collectively focused on the state – which in Altheim’s work of the 1930s and 1940s had distinct debts to National Socialist ideology – would later give rise to the idea of an ‘embedded’ religion, that could not be separated from Roman literary, artistic, legal and political life along the lines by which we comprehend religion today.23 This template for seeing religion as an intrinsic part of society is closely related to the polis-religion model of work on Greek religion.24 Recently, there has been a surge of interest in finding the voice of the individual in history, including in the history of religion.25 The recognition of the power of individuals can also be seen explicitly in what one might call the ‘late-Capitalist’ model of a competitive religious marketplace in the Roman world.26 The focus on the individual allows scholars to bypass some of the difficulties inherent in changing conceptions of religions and social structures; the centre of research revolves around the individual at a 23

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On ‘embeddedness’ see J. North, ‘Conservatism and Change in Roman Religion’, Papers of the British School at Rome 44 (1976) 1–12; J. North, ‘Religious Toleration in Republican Rome’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 25 (1979) 85–103; M. Beard, J. North and S. R. F. Price, Religions of Rome, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1998). Among those against ‘embeddedness’, see A. Bendlin, ‘Social Complexity and Religion at Rome in the Second and First Centuries BCE’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1998); B. Nongbri, ‘Dislodging “Embedded” Religion: A Brief Note on a Scholarly Trope’, Numen 55 (2008) 440–60. C. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Further Aspects of Polis Religion’, AION 10 (1988) 259–74 and ‘What Is Polis Religion?’ in O. Murray and S. Price (eds.), The Greek City from Homer to Alexander (Oxford, 1990) 295–322, published together in R. Buxton (ed.), Oxford Readings in Greek Religion (Oxford, 2000) 13–55. This model focuses on the ways in which the political and social structure of Greek city-states was able to mould religious practices, although the idea of polisreligion among the Greeks has come under increasing criticism: see in particular G. Woolf, ‘Polis-Religion and Its Alternatives in the Roman Provinces’, in H. Cancik and J. Rüpke (eds.), Römische Reichsreligion und Provinzialreligion (Tübingen, 1997) 71–84 and J. Kindt, Rethinking Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2012). For adaptations of aspects of this model to Roman religion, see R. L. Gordon, ‘Religion in the Roman Empire: The Civic Compromise and Its Limits’, in Beard and North (eds.), Pagan Priests , 233–56 and J. Scheid, The Gods, the State and the Individual: Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome (Philadelphia, 2016). See J. Rüpke (ed.), The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford, 2013); G. Woolf, ‘Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion’, in Rüpke (ed.), The Individual in the Religions, 136–60; J. Rüpke, On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome (Ithaca, 2016); J. Rüpke, Religious Deviance in the Roman World: Superstition or Individuality? (Cambridge, 2016); Scheid, The Gods, the State and the Individual, 32–43. For an attempt to tie the individual to the archaeology of religion, see J. Rüpke, ‘Individual Choices and Individuality in the Archaeology of Ancient Religion’, in R. Raja and J. Rüpke (eds.), A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World (Chichester, 2015) 437–50. An idea first formulated by J. North, ‘The Development of Religious Pluralism’, in J. Lieu, J. North and T. Rajak (eds.), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (London, 1992) 174–93, and later popularized by Beard et al., Religions of Rome, vol. 1, 245–312.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

certain time and in a certain place, and the ways in which her or his identity was shaped.27 These approaches – which are by no means exhaustive – are wideranging and potentially incompatible; it is perhaps understandable that there has traditionally been a reluctance to address the issue of how to integrate into this already-heady mix the study of religious material culture. The French school of ancient religion took visuality and archaeology seriously, notably in the work of Jean-Pierre Vernant on ancient Greece,28 and of Romanists in the wake of Robert Turcan and John Scheid.29 The landmark publication in 1998 of Religions of Rome by Beard, North and Price included an entire volume dedicated to sources with literary and epigraphic texts presented alongside images.30 But none of this can be described as a fully equal integration where material culture is

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For a formulation of this argument, see J. Rüpke, Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion (Princeton, 2018) 7–10. For a range of Jean-Pierre Vernant’s work on these issues see ‘Naissance d’images’, in J.-P. Vernant, Religions, histoires, raisons (Paris, 1979) 105–37 (translated into English in J.-P. Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. F. Zeitlin (Princeton 1991)); several essays published in the collected volume of essays Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs: études de psychologie historique (Paris, 1985); also Vernant, Mortals and Immortals. Perhaps as a result of Vernant’s work, work on the role of Greek images in religious contexts has received considerably more attention than in Roman contexts, for example A. A. Donohue, ‘The Greek Images of the Gods: Considerations on Terminology and Methodology’, Hephaistos 15 (1997) 31–45, and T. S. Scheer, Die Gottheit und ihr Bild: Untersuchungen zur Funktion griechischer Kultbilder in Religion und Politik (Munich, 2000); M. Gaifman, ‘Visual Evidence’, in E. Eidinow and J. Kindt (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Religion (Oxford, 2015) 51–66; C. Barrett ‘Material Evidence’, in Eidinow and Kindt (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Religion, 113–30; T. S. Scheer, ‘Art and Imagery’, in Eidinow and Kindt (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Religion, 165–78; M. Gaifman, ‘Theologies of Statues’, in E. Eidinow, J. Kindt and R. Osborne (eds.), Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2016) 249–80. For just a small indication of Vernant’s lasting influence see R. Neer, ‘Jean-Pierre Vernant and the History of the Image’, Arethusa 43 (2010) 181–95; P. Borgeaud and D. Fabiano (eds.) Perception et construction du divin dans l’Antiquité (Geneva. 2013). E.g. R. Turcan, Les Sarcophages romains à représentations dionysiaques: essai de chronologie et d’histoire religieuse (Rome, 1966); R. Turcan, Religion romaine, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1988); R. Turcan, Rome et ses dieux (Paris, 1998); J. Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion (Edinburgh, 2003); van Andringa, La religion en Gaule romaine; Lepetz and van Andringa (eds.), Archéologie du sacrifice animal en Gaule romaine; V. Huet, ‘La mise à mort sacrificielle sure les reliefs romains: une image banalisée et ritualisée de la violence?’ in J.-M. Bertrand (ed.), La violence dans le monde grec et romain (Paris, 2005) 91–119; V. Huet, ‘Les images de sacrifice en Gaule romaine’, in Lepetz and van Andringa (eds.), Archéologie du sacrifice animal en Gaule romaine, 43–74; V. Huet, ‘Reliefs mithriaques et reliefs romains “traditionnels”: essai de confrontation’, in C. Bonnet, V. Pirenne-Delforge and D. Praet (eds.), Les religions orientales dans le monde grec et romain (Rome, 2009) 233–56. Beard et al., Religions of Rome, vol. 2: A Sourcebook.

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the driving empirical data for the study of Roman religion, rather than the illustrator of texts. In using the term ‘Roman religion’, one must acknowledge its many imperfections: it can imply the predominance of the city of Rome, ascribe unity to a widely disparate number of religious beliefs and practices based on geography and empire, and it forces us to subscribe to the cult of catchall expressions. But it can nevertheless prove useful. Roman religion might better be understood as an amalgamation of religious forms, ideas or practices in the Roman period.31 It is a necessarily imprecise term that can allow us to think in terms of connections, without implying uniformity. It is this very imprecision that has the potential to allow scholars to work more with material culture, not forcing readings on the material, but allowing it to speak. As the search for absolute definitions of Roman religion have given way to more open approaches, material culture has more opportunity to play a part in scholarly conceptions.32

The Privileging of Texts Nonetheless, there remains a discernible preference for textual, and particularly literary, sources. This emphasizes the instinctive bias and training of many ancient historians and is an inclination that has led ancient historians to look for texts in order to understand Roman religion. In Christianizing the Roman Empire, Ramsay MacMullen questions the biases of historians: We ourselves naturally suppose, immersed as we are in the JudeoChristian heritage, that religion means doctrine. Why should we think so?33

One response to his question could be that our modern understanding of doctrine, and hence of religion (if ‘religion means doctrine’), frequently 31

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For recent discussions of how we frame our understanding of religion in the ancient world see B. Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013) 15–24; Rüpke, Pantheon. Recent years have seen a rising tendency in handbooks and collections of work on Roman religion to connect it to other fields. See C. Ando, Roman Religion (Edinburgh, 2003); Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion; J. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2007); J. North and S. Price (eds.), The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Oxford, 2011). This is perhaps linked to a greater ease with understanding fluid definitions of Roman religion, without labouring over focused readings on the place of belief, ritual, theology and even, tentatively, materiality. MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, 8.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

depends upon texts. Nonetheless, while ancient historians are unlikely to express an explicit interest in Roman religious doctrine, this can appear to be the aim of those who focus on texts at the expense of archaeological material.34 A recent movement towards the intellectualization of Roman religion has reinterpreted certain Roman texts as attempts to articulate and describe religious activities and behaviours.35 One of the most famous of such texts, Varro’s Antiquitates rerum divinarum was dedicated to Julius Caesar in 46 . Although the full work has been lost, sufficient quotations survive in Augustine’s De civitate dei for a partial reconstruction. The treatment of religious material culture – in particular, the use of images of the gods – is especially interesting. Varro claims that the ancient and original form of Roman religion did not use images of the gods, and that this led to a purer relationship with the divine; the introduction of images, by contrast, had brought about a lessening of fear and an increase of error.36 A similar argument is put into the mouth of Lucilius Balbus in Cicero’s De natura deorum (43 ). Balbus posits that images of the gods, which teach worshippers how deities look and dress, have brought about a perversion of religion.37 Such texts are not value-neutral guides to visual culture in Roman religion. Varro espoused an erudite, complex and hybrid position with debts to Academic, Stoic and Cynic philosophy, and this is evident throughout the Antiquitates;38 in De natura deorum, Cicero creates a philosophical dialogue to examine religion. Both of these writings reveal the preoccupations of their authors: tradition and status (as exemplified through rituals and priesthoods), and a fast-changing political landscape in the late Republic in which ‘old’ values were becoming obsolete. While they – and others like them – provide information on certain factual points, and an excellent presentation of a particular apologetic position 34 35

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See Chapter 4 of this volume. For a summary of this as a trend, see D. MacRae, Legible Religion: Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Religion (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 3–5. August. De civ. D. 4.31; Varro, Antiquitates rerum divinarum fr. 18 and 22. See for instance P. van Nuffelen, ‘Varro’s Divine Antiquities: Roman Religion as an Image of Truth’, Classical Philology 105 (2010) 162–88, esp. 182–5; J. Rüpke, ‘Historicizing Religion: Varro’s Antiquitates and the History of Religion in the Late Roman Republic’, History of Religions 53 (2014) 246–68, esp. 256–7. Cic. Nat. D. II.28. See Y. Lehmann, ‘Varro the Roman Philosopher’, in D. Butterfield, Varro Varius: The Polymath of the Roman World (Cambridge, 2015) 123–39; L. Kronenberg, ‘Varro the Roman Cynic: The Destruction of Religious Authority in the Antiquitates rerum divinarum’, in J. König and G. Woolf (eds.), Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture (Cambridge, 2017) 306–28.

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within a complex debate, they give neither a full picture, nor an unbiased one. If some of the key internal Roman accounts argue against the importance of visual culture to religion, it is hardly surprising that this stance has been echoed by subsequent historians. The preference given to textual over material or visual evidence is in part due to a tradition of writing history, from a German Protestant heritage in particular, in which words, and the understanding gained through reading texts, has long been valued over the use and interpretation of images and material culture.39 This model has habitually written religion out of texts, at the expense of the wealth of religious visual material from the ancient world. Yet relying upon textual evidence raises several problems: it tends to privilege elite and literate voices, it reduces visual evidence to the role of an aesthetic supplement, and it may over-simplify history. The focus on texts can overlook not only the value of material and visual evidence in reconstructing a more comprehensive picture of religious behaviours, but also the important contribution that can be made by more cognitive approaches to religion.40 The bottom line is that – today as in antiquity – religious practice and imagination cannot be separated from the spaces, decorations, objects and implements with which and within which devotion is practised. The question is to what extent scholarship can grasp this experiential world.

2.

Art Historical and Archaeological Formulations of Religion

Can images, objects and physical contexts be employed to cast different kinds of light on Roman religion? What questions would we like them to answer, and what are the limitations that their forms impose? If the questions that we ask of material culture were initially designed for an entirely different form of evidence (i.e. for texts), they are bound to lead to unsatisfactory conclusions. This is a simple point, though one that is often overlooked: we either must change the type of answers we want, or change the questions. 39

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See M. Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, 2009), Ch. 1. For a definition of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ approaches to writing religion, as used in this volume, see Chapter 1. For a concise appeal for cognitive studies, see C. R. Phillips, ‘Approaching Roman Religion: The Case for Wissenschaftsgeschichte’, in J. Rüpke (ed.), A Companion to Roman Religion (Oxford, 2007) 10–28.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

Material culture is by its nature particular. We can group and categorize images, objects, types of building and so on, but when we assess them, they are rooted in the physical world.41 Traditionally, that physicality is itself approached through two – not always compatible – disciplines: archaeology (addressing material culture) and art history (addressing visual culture). Most scholars today would agree that the modern notion of ‘art’ cannot be applied to the ancient past without careful consideration. The resulting discussions have taken a number of routes, including the search for the beginnings of art history and a form of artistic appreciation in the ancient past itself.42 Others have questioned whether ‘art’, or perhaps ‘Art’, is a suitable term at all.43 These discussions demonstrate the subjectivity of the word, but equally indicate the continuing desire to grant to material objects the power to move us in the way that ‘art’ as a descriptive category suggests.44 While much of the evidence that art historians and archaeologists may call upon is the same, and any division is ambiguous, the fact remains that Classical art historians and archaeologists are frequently different beasts with different methodological choices. This is well illustrated in studies of ancient religion. Michael Squire wrote recently that, ‘any division between

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This is why one must be hesitant about too enthusiastic a use of certain classic papers in the history of art and religion which discuss images from an ideal-typical perspective but never cash out their reflection on any specific (potentially recalcitrant), actual and particular objects. Examples include E. Kitzinger, ‘The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954) 84–150; Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary’; J. Rüpke, ‘Representation or Presence? Picturing the Divine in Ancient Rome’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 12 (2010) 181–96; C. Ando, ‘Praesentia Numinis. Part 1: The Visibility of Roman Gods’, Asdiwal 5 (2010) 45–73, ‘Praesentia Numinis. Part 2: Objects in Roman Cult’, Asdiwal 6 (2011) 57–69, and ‘Praesentia Numinis. Part 3: Idols in Context (of Use)’. Asdiwal 10 (2015) 61–76. See for example Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary’, 5–10; J. Tanner, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society and Artistic Rationalisation (Cambridge, 2006) 246–76, and V. J. Platt and M. Squire (eds.), The Art of Art History in Greco-Roman Antiquity, Special Issue of Arethusa 43/2 (Baltimore, 2010). A brief summary with references is provided by P. Stewart, The Social History of Roman Art (Cambridge, 2008) 2–3. See also N. Kampen, ‘On Not Writing the History of Roman Art’, The Art Bulletin 77 (1995) 375–8, and ‘On Writing Histories of Roman Art’, The Art Bulletin 85 (2003) 371–86; S. Scott, ‘Art and the Archaeologist’, World Archaeology 38 (2006) 628–43. Summarizing the argument made by Porter in the same volume, M. Squire, ‘Introduction: The Art of Art History in Greco-Roman Antiquity’, Arethusa 43/2 (2010) 133–63, esp. 153–4: ‘If, as cultural historians, we posit too large a chasm between the ancient and modern worlds, there can be no getting across; worse still, Porter warns, we will end up denying the fundamental continuities in human sentience that bridge the historical divide between past and present.’ R. R. R. Smith, ‘The Use of Images: Visual History and Ancient History’, in T. P. Wiseman (ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2002) 59–102, 64 phrased it well when he described ancient art as ‘a convenient collective misnomer’.

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(“subjective”) art history and (“objective”) archaeology is a chimera of our own modernist making’.45 This creature has long existed. The histories of the two complementary fields are necessarily intertwined, but they are different disciplines with distinct modes of analysing their chosen material.46

Roman Art and Religion: Category and Style Our Roman altar from Maryport (Figure 3.3) has never excited the interest of art historians. It is debatable whether it possesses ‘artistic’ elements at all – it lacks figural representation that for many would raise it above the ‘decorative’;47 and its features are so common as to express little individuality. They are coarsely executed in a simple way, and not of great quality when compared to other ancient material. On the other hand, the ornamental roundels with rosettes at the top are sufficiently distinctive to have aided the restoration of a missing corner only excavated in 2011.48 This form of ornamentation is characteristic of a number of other altars at the site (notably RIB 826, which was also dedicated by Agrippa although this has an additional circle and dot motif ), but less elaborate than the demilunes, zig-zags, vegetal scrolls and ribbing found on other altars in the Maryport group. This altar, to be blunt, is not evidence that art historians are likely to engage with. This raises two interconnected questions for this section: first, what has historically constituted ‘art’, in particular ‘Roman art’?; and second, what is ‘religious art’? The usefulness or even the validity of Roman art as a category has historically been in doubt. Traditionally, Roman art has been a disciplinary placeholder between (the glories of ) the Greek tradition and the advent of the (decadent) Middle Ages.49 Even when granted autonomy, Roman art 45

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M. Squire, ‘Classical Archaeology and the Contexts of Art History’, in S. E. Alcock and R. Osborne (eds.), Classical Archaeology, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2012) 468–500, 493. This perspective is admittedly a simplification of many dynamic education systems and cannot be seen as more than a generalization. As Squire, ‘Introduction’, 145, observes, the German tradition judges classical archaeology and classical art history as being inseparable. Smith, ‘The Use of Images’, 64–5, characterized this division as being between Greek art and Roman archaeology. See also Kampen, ‘On Writing Histories of Roman Art’, 373. For ornament see now N. Dietrich and M. Squire (eds.), Ornament and Figure in GraecoRoman Art (Berlin, 2018). See E. Chapman, F. Hunter, P. Booth, P. Wilson, J. Pearce, S. Worrell and R. Tomlin, ‘Roman Britain in 2011’, Britannia 43 (2012) 271–421, esp. 294. Kampen, ‘On Not Writing the History of Roman Art’, 375, citing in particular the positions taken by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Alois Riegl. See also O. Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven, 1979); Smith, ‘The Use of Images’; and R. Brilliant,

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

existed either as an offshoot of Greek art or as a passive body under the influence of other artistic cultures; at its best it was an emulation of Greek or a precursor to late antique artistic developments; at its worst a symptom of decadence and decline.50 The independent study of Roman art as a positive phenomenon in its own right was born very late – at the end of the nineteenth century – in the Viennese work of Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl. But it was always regarded as a mixed bag – not a pure result of a single spurt of ethnic genius (as in Greece) but a dualism or pluralism of eclectic styles, classes, racial and cultural impulses that ultimately depended on a large, pluralist and culturally mixed imperial system comprising many languages, visual styles and cultural traditions.51 That pluralism is specifically parallel to the well-known religious pluralism of the Roman Empire.52 This sense of Roman visual culture as derivative of Greek, with little value accorded to models of replication or the eclectic

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Roman Art from the Republic to Constantine (New York, 1974), who attempts to pick up from Brendel. Brendel, Prolegomena, 15–24, traces the history of the separation of the study of Roman art from Greek. On emulation see H. Koch, Römische Kunst (Breslau, 1924), laden with overbearing comparisons with Greek art, and later E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London, 1960) 110–25, on Greek painting. On Roman art as a forerunner, over which there was a fierce debate in Vienna, see Chapter 5 of this volume. The conflation of artistic decline with moral decline is an enduring theme, with roots in Roman antiquity. See for example the critiques of Vitruvius (VII, 5, 3f ) and Pliny (HN XXXV, 2–5) on the decline of painting. For dualism see e.g. G. Rodenwaldt, ‘The Transition to Late Classical Art’, Cambridge Ancient History 12 (1939) 544–70, 546–7 and G. Rodenwaldt, ‘Zur Begrenzung und Gliederung der Spätantike’, Jahrbuch des deutsches Archäologisches Instituts 59/60 (1944/45) 81–7, esp. 84, 87; G. Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Das Schöpferische in der römischen Kunst (Hamburg, 1961) 42–51, esp. 48–51; R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Centre of Power: Roman Art to AD 200, tr. P. Green (London, 1970) 51–105 and R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Dall’ Ellenismo al Medioevo (Rome, 1978) 19–48; M. Torelli, ‘Roman Art, 43BC–AD69’ in Cambridge Ancient History 10 (2nd edn ., 1996) 930–58, esp. 930–1, 956–8. For pluralism, see e.g. P. von Blanckenhagen, ‘Elemente der römischen Kunst am Beispiel des Flavischen Stils’, in H. Berve (ed.), Das Neue Bild der Antike (Leipzig, 1942) 310–41; Brendel, Prolegomena, 101–37; T. Hölscher, Römische Bildsprache als semantisches System (Heidelberg, 1987) 10, 17–19 translated into English as The Language of Images in Roman Art (Cambridge, 2004) xix–xxii, 5–7; S. Settis, ‘Un’ arte plurale. L’impero romano, i Greci e i posteri’, in E. Gabba and A. Schiavone (eds.), Storia di Roma IV: Caracteri e morfologie (Turin, 1989) 827–78; J. Elsner, ‘Classicism in Roman Art’, in J. Porter (ed.), Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (Princeton, 2006) 270–97. A point made by Elsner, ‘Classicism in Roman Art’, 273–4. On religious pluralism see e.g. North, ‘Religious Toleration in Republican Rome’; North, ‘The Development of Religious Pluralism’; Beard et al., Religions of Rome, vol. 1, 245–363; A. Bendlin, ‘Looking Beyond the Civic Compromise: Religious Pluralism in Late Republican Rome’, in E. Bispham and C. Smith (eds.), Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome (Edinburgh, 2000) 115–35; J. Rüpke, From Jupiter to Christ: On the History of Religion in the Roman Imperial Period, tr. D. M. B. Richardson (Oxford, 2014) 169–209.

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and creative use of existing visual categories to generate new models of meaning and representation until the last generation,53 was thus accentuated by the plurality of variants found throughout the empire. It is this lack of founders, originators and most importantly ‘artists’ that led to a prevailing view that Roman art, particularly portraiture with veristic tendencies, lacked the ‘spiritual animation’ of the Greek classical ideal.54 The legacy that it has imparted to Classical art history is the repression of possible religious meanings in artistic material, from the Classical Greek period through to the advent of Christianity as the state-endorsed religion of the Roman Empire. The wedge between art and religion is not easily removed: to discuss religious art is not necessarily to discuss religion. In several texts from the late nineteenth century onwards, a great many artworks were brought together and assessed precisely because of their ‘religious’ character.55 But such corpora failed to turn discussion of the art under examination back onto religion, or to do so without being constrained by textual accounts of what religion should be. These were art historical accounts of religious material, not religious histories. Though not greatly concerned with religion, two seminal works published in 1987 encapsulate the move for Roman art to speak back to and about society. These were Paul Zanker’s Augustus und die Macht der Bilder, and Tonio Hölscher’s

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See the review article by C. H. Hallett, ‘Emulation versus Replication: Redefining Roman Copying’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005) 419–35, of E. K. Gazda, The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity (Ann Arbor, 2002), and E. Perry, The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Visual Arts of Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2005); J. Elsner and J. Trimble (eds.) ‘Art and Replication: Greece, Rome, and Beyond’, Art History 29 (2006) 201–342; K. Junker and A. Stähli (eds.), Original und Kopie: Formen und Konzepte der Nachahmung in der antiken Kunst (Wiesbaden, 2008); M. Marvin, The Language of the Muses: The Dialogue between Roman and Greek Sculpture (Los Angeles, 2008); J. Trimble, Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture (Cambridge, 2011); A. Anguissola, “Difficillima imitatio”: Immagine e lessico delle copie tra Grecia e Roma (Rome, 2012); S. Settis, A. Anguissola and D. Gasparrotto (eds.), Serial/Portable Classic (Milan, 2015). For a discussion of copies in relation to religion in particular, see A. Anguissola, ‘Retaining the Function: Sacred Copies in Greek and Roman Art’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 51 (2007) 98–107. This was a view subscribed to by Hegel, for instance; see P. Kottman and M. Squire (eds.), The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Paderborn, 2018). For example, A. Della Seta, Religione e arte figurata (Rome, 1912); C. Clerc, Les theories relatives au culte des images chez les auteurs grecs du IIme siècle après J.-C. (Paris, 1915); E. Strong, Apotheosis and After Life: 3 Lectures on Certain Phases of Art and Religion in the Roman Empire (London, 1915); I. S. Ryberg, Rites of the State Religion in Roman Art (Rome, 1955); E. Will, Le relief cultuel gréco-romain: contribution à l’histoire de l’art de l’empire romain (Paris, 1955); K. Schefold, Römische Kunst als religiöses Phänomen (Reinbek, 1964).

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

Römische Bildsprache als semantisches System.56 Establishing an approach that still invigorates the discipline, these texts enabled a view of the ingenuity of Roman art as lying in the creative use of earlier, even preconceived, styles, forms and media to convey different meanings from those intended when those models were created (whether in Classical or Hellenistic Greece, or earlier in Rome, or in Egypt or in the near East).57 Defining Roman visual culture in these terms meant that it had more wide-ranging implications for use as evidence in historical questions – including the study of ancient religion – than had been possible before.58 Since the 1980s there has also been an increasing number of art historians interested in religion. In 1981 the first volume of the great iconographic encyclopaedia of ancient mythology, the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), was published, its run finally finishing in 2009.59 This was followed by the specifically religion-centred iconographic Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum (ThesCRA) published between 2004 and 2006.60 The Institute of Religious Iconography at the University of Groningen published its annual ‘Visible Religion’ between 1982 and 1990 with several contributions from Classical scholars, and at the end of the decade, David Freedberg’s The Power of Images was published, dealing with all manner of magical and religious manifestations of art across cultures.61

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Zanker, Augustus und die Macht der Bilder, translated as The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, and Hölscher, Römische Bildsprache als semantisches System, translated as The Language of Images in Roman Art. Cf. Elsner, ‘Classicism in Roman Art’, 270–6 for extension of the argument beyond Greek models. For other examples, see the wide-ranging political take of R. Turcan, L’art romain dans l’histoire: six siècles d’expressions de la romanité (Paris, 1996). For the study of society through art see J. Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 BC–AD 315 (Berkeley, 2003) and Stewart, The Social History of Roman Art. H. Ackermann, J.-R. Gisler and L. Kahil (eds.), Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, 8 vols., plus 2 supplements plus index (Zurich, 1981–2009). V. Lambrinoudakis and J. Balty (eds.), Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum, 5 vols. plus index (Los Angeles, 2004–6). D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989). See V. J. Platt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge, 2011) 78 n.4; B. Gladigow, ‘Präsenz der Bilder – Präsenz der Götter. Kultbilder und Bilder der Götter in der greischischen Religion’, Visible Religion 4–5 (1985–6) 114–33, and ‘Epiphanie, Statuette, Kultbild: Griechische Gottesvorstellungen im Wechsel von Kontext und Medium’, Visible Religion 7 (1990) 98–121; H. Versnel, ‘What Did Ancient Man See When He Saw God?’, in D. van der Plas (ed.), Effigies Dei: Essays on the History of Religions (Leiden, 1987) 42–55, esp. 46–7; J.-P. Vernant, ‘Mortals and Immortals: The Body of the Divine’, in Mortals and Immortals, 27–49; A. Schnapp, ‘Are Images Animated? The

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But with what might be described as ‘degree-zero’ art-historical objects without much distinctive iconography, like the Maryport altar, there has been little attempt to find a language or means for including them into a historical account of religion, despite the fact that they offer such rich and extensive primary evidence for religious practice and its accoutrements.62 Not only has scholarship failed to make such things speak back to social formations, it has failed to find a way of letting them speak at all.

Archaeology and Religion: ‘Ritual’ versus ‘Religious’ Classification The role of archaeology for the study of religion, and Roman religion in particular, might seem to be self-evident.63 The enormous number of images of gods in one form or another, of temple complexes, and other paraphernalia (prominent amongst them, altars), contextualizes and helps us visualize the ancient world. It is evidence that religion left its mark. But the extent to which it is possible to analyse archaeological remains in order to assess religion is debatable: what exactly can one hope to ascertain? When the largest collection of altars from Maryport was found in 1870, questions immediately arose as to why they had been placed there.64 Laid in a series of pits, the altars had clearly been removed from their original stations, but had evidently achieved a new and deliberate position that could reveal a particular form of behaviour. Initially it was supposed that the altars were buried for safe-keeping by those who had used them for religious purposes,65 possibly as a result of military

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Psychology of Statues in Ancient Greece’, in C. Renfrew and E. B. W. Zubrow (eds.), The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology (Cambridge 1994) 40–4. For the altar in Greek religion as a form of material aniconism, see M. Gaifman, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford, 2012) 32, 44, 225–32 and H. Blume, ‘The Furniture of the Gods: The Problem with the Importation of “Empty Space and Material Aniconism” into Greek Religion’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 17 (2015) 55–68. Ours cannot be an exhaustive overview of archaeology, Classical archaeology or even of Roman religious archaeology. On the development of archaeological thought more generally, see the classic by G. Daniel, 150 Years of Archaeology (London, 1975), and the monumental work by B. G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 2007), esp. chs. 2 and 3 on Classical archaeology and antiquarianism. On the historical development of Classical archaeology see S. Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New Haven, 2006). For a specific and approachable work see J. Droogan, Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology (London, 2013). For an early interpretation see Bruce, ‘On the Altars Recently Found in the Roman Camp at Maryport’. Bruce, ‘On the Altars Recently Found in the Roman Camp at Maryport’, 179–81.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

invasion.66 Half a century later, it was suggested that they had in fact been buried year on year, in a kind of ritualized pattern, following the dedication of a new altar at the start of the year.67 At the end of the 1990s this hypothesis was discounted because the supposed ritual of burying was shown to be without basis.68 In 2012, following excavations the previous year, the burial of the altars was shown to coincide with the building of a large timber-frame structure, meaning that the stones were used as packing material.69 In other words, interpretive assumptions shifted from a fantasy of residual and resistant paganism preserving its sacred objects via a model of ritual ideology to straightforward pragmatism. What the studies of the Maryport altars have in common is a focus on classifying the act of burial.70 The need for systems of classification is particularly pronounced in archaeology, and because of this we may propose two questions about the discipline’s development from the late nineteenth century onwards. First, what influenced the formation of the classification system that determined what was and what was not ‘religious’? Second, what has been the impact of ‘ritual’ as a means of classification, and what is its relationship with understandings of religion? The tendency to want to refer to an object as being either one thing or another has persisted.71 Such categorization became, to a greater or lesser extent, a dichotomy separating the religious from the unreligious, spurring the kinds of distinctions that still govern how many archaeologists ‘do’ religion: looking for the abnormal and irrational to characterize something as ‘religious’- or ‘ritual’-based, against their descriptive opposites.72 66

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Such as that of the Maeatae in 196, as suggested by R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Roman Fort and Settlement at Maryport’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society 36 (1936) 85–99, esp. 97. L. P. Wenham, ‘Notes on the Garrisoning of Maryport’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, Series 2, 39 (1939) 19–30, esp. 22. P. R. Hill, ‘The Maryport Altars: Some First Thoughts’, in Wilson (ed.), Roman Maryport and its Setting, 92–104. I. Haynes and T. Wilmott, ‘The Maryport Altars: An Archaeological Myth Dispelled’, Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai – Historia (2012) 25–37. This focus on what one might call the death moment in the biographies of these objects, when they were finally interred, is in stark contrast to the traditional focus of art history on an object’s moment of creation. In this respect, archaeology has been heavily influenced by classification systems within the natural sciences. See J. M. Fritz and F. T. Plog, ‘The Nature of Archaeological Explanation’, American Antiquity 35/4 (1970) 405–12, for a review of mid-twentieth-century thought on the matter. The old joke in archaeology, whereby everything that was unintelligible was referred to as a ‘ritual object’ is discussed in R. D. Whitehouse, ‘Ritual Objects: Archaeological Joke or Neglected Evidence?’, in J. B. Wilkins (ed.), Approaches to the Study of Ritual: Italy and the

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That reflex for identifying ritual objects reveals much about how religion has become relegated to the eccentric category of the socially nonnormative, an unfortunate and anachronistic result of the prevalence of secularism in the academy. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim and the Durkheimian school had a profound impact on the development of archaeological approaches to religion from the late nineteenth century onwards.73 The notion of the sacred and the profane as a means of distinguishing religious material, central to Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912),74 has been immensely influential; Durkheim’s definition of religion and his means of categorizing what is religious had lasting appeal.75 He posited that religion was inherently a social process; what was not social, was not religious, but rather ‘folklore’.76 Religion, when viewed in this way, was inseparable from other social phenomena.77 Julian Droogan recently examined the intermingling of such ideas with Marxist conceptions of religion and society, which were dominant in scholarship in the later twentieth century. The combination of viewing religion as society, and the denial of religion as being more than a product of economic and material conditions (in Marxist terms), ultimately made the study of religion a secondary aim for archaeologists.78 Little of what

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Ancient Mediterranean (London, 1996) 9–30, esp. 9–10. On the deeper distinction between ‘admired’ and ‘emulated’ classical antiquity, and the ‘primitive’ prehistoric in archaeology, see D. Wilkinson, ‘The Apartheid of Antiquity’, World Archaeology 43/1 (2011) 26–39. Of central importance in this school were Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss. See further Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice, 156–79. E. Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie (Paris, 1912), translated as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London, 1915). Durkheim’s appeal certainly continues, and examples abound of the use of this phrase, for example, R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (Oxford, 1957); M. Eliade, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York, 1961). In 2005 the ethnographer and anthropologist W. Y. Adams could still say, ‘I can hardly do better’ than to refer to Durkheim for a definition of religion: Religion and Adaptation (Stanford, 2005) p. x. This is argued throughout his work, but for an explicit statement of this idea see his definition of what a religion is: Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 46. That other great sociologist, Max Weber, stated eight years after Durkheim that ‘gods and demons, like vocabularies of languages, have been directly influenced primarily by economic situations and the historic doctrines of different peoples’. M. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, tr. E. Fischoff (Boston, 1963) 13. Droogan, Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology, 71–107. The archaeologist and religious scholar Jules Toutain (1865–1961) is almost the exception that proves the rule: his publications include, Études de mythologie et d’histoire des religions antiques (Paris, 1909), Les cultes païens dans l’empire romain, 3 vols. (Paris, 1907–20); Nouvelles études de mythologie et

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

developed in the archaeological interpretation of religion in the early twentieth century was theorized until the 1980s.79 The importance of the definition, however, is evident from the lack of classical archaeological works that attempt to deal with deeper problems of religion beyond cataloguing material. There has been a reluctance on the part of archaeologists to see religion as part of their remit. The attitude is typified by Christopher Hawkes’ ‘Ladder of Inference’.80 Hawkes claimed that the four steps ranging from the easiest to the hardest to infer from archaeological phenomena are: the techniques used to create them; the subsistence-economics that was built on them; the social and political institutions that built them; and, finally, to infer religious institutions and spiritual life from them. Hawkes was not wrong to argue that understanding religion from archaeology alone is hard, but was he right to close the door on such an aim?81 Over the last thirty years there has been a surge of interest in developing archaeological techniques for challenging just the sort of argument that the likes of Hawkes had put forward, in the hope of finding a place for archaeological investigations in the study of religion. Hawkes’ point, as he made clear, is that religion and spiritual life cannot be approached ‘unaided’ or in other words, without a textual history. The great challenge to this proposition, in terms of archaeological studies, has been focused on landscape and on ritual, in particular within the burgeoning field of cognitive archaeology. In the last thirty years there have been dozens of conferences, edited volumes and monographs produced on this topic within Classical archaeological circles, all responding to this new intellectual movement.82

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d’histoire des religions antiques (Paris, 1935), and his translation with Stiébel of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough between 1903 and 1911 (Le Rameau d’Or, 3 vols. (Paris, 1903–11)). Droogan, Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology, 73. C. F. C. Hawkes, ‘Archaeological Theory and Method: Some Suggestions from the Old World’, American Anthropologist 56 (1954) 155–68, esp. 161–2. See the useful piece by C. Evans, ‘Historicism, Chronology and Straw Men: Situating Hawkes’ “Ladder of Inference”’, Antiquity 72 (1998) 398–404. Hawkes makes it explicitly clear (‘Archaeological Theory and Method’, 162–4) that this is what he believes. For example Renfrew and Zubrow (eds.), The Ancient Mind; T. Insoll Archaeology, Ritual, Religion (Cambridge, 2004); T. Insoll (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion (Oxford, 2011); E. Kyriakidis, The Archaeology of Ritual (Los Angeles, 2007). Ian Hodder’s work, particularly on Çatalhöyük, has been particularly influential, for example most recently: Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study (Cambridge, 2010) and Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society: Vital Matters (Cambridge, 2014). A number of scholars have developed the work of the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse (see in particular

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In the alignment of material culture with the study of ancient religion, Simon Price’s influential book of 1984, Rituals and Power, and Colin Renfrew’s 1985, The Archaeology of Cult were both landmark publications, heavily reliant on archaeological findings and their interpretation. Both also drew extensively on the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz.83 Relativism, so important for anthropologists keen to allay fears of cultural bias, allowed particular evidence to be viewed as culturally specific. Sociological approaches that had once suppressed religious meanings in material culture could now be utilized to think about religion. Material evidence could provide indications about the religious habits of ancient communities, and such approaches were also a means of avoiding the baggage of contemporary, Eurocentric schemes of what constituted religion. In the decades since, numerous Classical archaeologists have taken the study of ritual to heart.84 Yet little attention has been paid to defining the relationship of ritual to religion and vice versa. The contribution to understanding of religion made by studies of ritual thus remains founded upon uncertain principles. Without clarity on this, ritual-centred approaches cannot hope to play more than a marginal role in responding to the larger question of what we mean by the term ‘religion’.85 For example, the LIMC’s successor, the Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum (ThesCRA), as a multi-volume condensation of contemporary academic opinion on images and religion, has been damningly summarized: ‘Notwithstanding the great usefulness of such a compendium, it is frankly a monumental testimony to a series of presumptions and presuppositions grounded in no argument or analytic justification

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H. Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Oxford, 2004)), including in the combined volume edited by Luther H. Martin and Harvey Whitehouse, Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition (Oxford, 2004). C. Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in M. Banton (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London, 1966) 1–46; C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London, 1973). For a summary of perspectives not limited to Classical archaeology, see L. Fogelin, ‘The Archaeology of Religious Ritual’, Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007) 55–71. J. Elsner, ‘Material Culture and Ritual: State of the Question’, in B. Wescoat and R. Ousterhout (eds.), Architecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium (Cambridge, 2012) 1–26, offers a summary critique of the problem, written in 2008, that succinctly articulates the specific problem of inference for archaeologists and art historians studying religion. Though the field is dominated by optimists, it is worth noting that more cautious members of the discipline have recently been more vocal. G. Lucas, ‘Evidence of What? On the Possibilities of Archaeological Interpretation’, in R. Chapman and A. Wylie (eds.) Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice (London, 2015) 311–24, has expressed doubts about the ‘quite profound ontological leaps . . . routinely assumed in archaeology’, in something of a revival of Hawkes’ scepticism.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

whatsoever.’86 It lacks any discussion of either the category of ‘ritual’ or that of ‘religion’, nor of the equation of these two terms throughout. This is a signal instance of the optimistic inclusion of evidence and subjects of inquiry without a fundamental appraisal of the problems they bring. Ritual is something that might be observed, as for example in scenes of processions in Roman art, or inferred from the nature, context or comparability of a particular object to others, as in the case of the Maryport altars (both their dedications and potentially their burials). But in what sense is the ritual that they suggest religion? Clearly, there was some religious substance in the regular dedication of altars by members of the same military company; but the mid-twentieth-century theory (entirely unsupported by evidence) that the Maryport altars were buried in an annual ritual represents a good example of ungrounded optimism in inferring ritual and religion from archaeology. This assumption has recently been rejected in favour of pragmatic interpretations of the burials as enabling building foundations. In Durkheimian terms, ‘secular’ rituals, like going to work every morning at the same time, do not necessarily occupy ‘sacred’ as opposed to ‘profane’ space.87 Might works of art or objects of material culture operate differently if viewed as either ritual items or religious items? And how might we relate studies of ritual to comparable studies of religion? These are more troubling questions than perhaps they should be, throwing into light the gap between ambition and practice in archaeology.

3.

Conclusions

At present, the study of Roman religion through material culture is caught between the currents of the three broad disciplinary approaches we have 86

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Elsner, ‘Material Culture and Ritual’, 9. It may be added that there is no discussion of the relationship of religion and ritual in any of the 500 pages of Raja and Rüpke (Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World), despite the phrase ‘archaeology of religion’ being in the book’s title and the phrase ‘archaeology of ritual’ being the title of part 1 (pp. 27–80). Catherine Bell’s influential distinction of ritual from everyday actions demonstrates Durkheim’s enduring influence and describes ‘ritualization’ as ‘a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities’: see C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992) 74. Later Bell states that, ‘. . . what is ritual is always contingent, provisional, and defined by difference’ (91). Bell does not explicitly define religion, but her use of Durkheim’s terminology of the sacred and profane (passim) with ritualization implies that ritual and religion are synonymous and on the sacred, privileged and non-quotidian side of Durkheim’s great divide. This in turn conceives of religious acts in abnormal, distinctive terms. Though this might be a good way of conceiving of some types of ritual, it is debatable whether it is universally relevant for the study of religion.

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been discussing: historical, art historical and archaeological. We have demonstrated in each sub-section how the interpretation and use of the Maryport altars could be affected by these often-competing lines: historians have valued the inscriptions over the objects; art historians have not engaged with them at all; archaeologists have seen them mainly in terms of their collectivity and what their burials may entail. The challenge is partly located in the difficulties of communicating across disciplinary boundaries. The trouble is that, whether striving against or working within subject boundaries, one encounters the deeply ingrained problems that prevent effective cross-disciplinary communication and comparison. While there is no desire to keep these approaches distinct from one another, there remain no sustained precedents for a comparative dialogue. Ideological biases of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have denied the significance of material evidence in relation to religion, denied the religiosity of aesthetically judged objects, and denied the significance of an object or image’s religious aspects in relation to other social structures. In part, at least in relation to questions in the study of religion, this is connected to the fact that the ancient ‘polytheistic’ religions of antiquity are an outlier in the bigger narrative of the world religions, including the main thrust of this volume. Unlike the world religions – and indeed unlike some universalizing religions that ultimately never ‘made it’, such as Manichaeism – the religions of Graeco-Roman antiquity, with the exception of Judaism and Christianity, were not founded on written scriptures. Since academic method in studying religion is profoundly dependent on starting from scripture (itself a process embedded in centuries of theology in Europe and Asia), the lack of scripture has always complicated the study of ancient religion. This is why the study of ancient religion has largely lain in the purview of the ancient historian and to an extent, the archaeologist, rather than in the hands of theologians. With recognition of material culture’s central place in ancient religion, the focus has rightly shifted and specialists working on this material have increasingly participated in discussions of religion.88 The result has been a certain discomfort about how to marshal an evidential base for ancient religion and indeed the problem of what constitutes appropriate empirical evidence at all. Religion only became an interesting aspect of the study of material culture when it was

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For some thoughts on visual theology in ancient Greece, see R. Osborne, The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge, 2011) 185–215 (on ‘godsbodies’); Platt, Facing the Gods, 77–123; M. Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy (London, 2011) 154–201; Gaifman, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity, 243–70.

Writing the Art, Archaeology and Religion of the Roman Mediterranean

acknowledged that images and objects could play more than one significant role even for the same person, and that different viewers saw the same thing differently. But as soon as response to objects, rather than the meaning of objects became the object of study, the evidence that material culture could provide in relation to religion ran into direct conflict with constructions of religion that have traditionally sought the kinds of firm categories constructed through scripture and its commentarial exegeses. This chapter has shown that we need a discourse that allows us to talk across our various forms of evidence, without unduly stressing one evidentiary base or methodological framework. It is worth asking whether it is possible to write a religious history entirely from material and artistic evidence. For many, it will be very difficult to grasp how such a thing could be done. How will we know what was meant, who was who, what things were for? These are reasonable doubts; but only insofar as we cling to the traditional types of history, and history of religions, that are written from texts. To reverse the question, can we write an adequate religious history without material and artistic evidence? For the ancient world, the answer must be no. In part, this is because the Greeks and Romans never conceived of their religious life in the kind of textual terms defined by scriptures: how can we know how they visualized their gods, how they framed them in space, what their procedures for worship were, without the evidence of material culture? Our ability to incorporate material evidence into our pictures of the past is dependent upon a continued interrogation of the methods we use. The particularity of material evidence remains problematic. The idiosyncrasy of many objects and images, not to mention contexts, makes it extremely difficult to talk across time and space in the way we do when discussing economics or political power. But, in transforming object-specific studies to broader histories, we should expect to challenge our preconceptions not only of what religion was, but of how we write about religion and construct history more generally. The very introduction of material evidence into our picture of religion, long excluded by a dominant textual tradition, is part of the way we may break this cycle. But in doing so, we have to be aware that many of the ways that we do history or think about religion must necessarily be questioned as a result. Objects like the Maryport altars offer a valuable example of methodologies and questions rooted in material culture. What they might tell us is not necessarily confined to one aspect of religion: as well as religious practice, we might think of religious identity, of belief, of the sacrality of the altars themselves and the extent to which they are religion. Their materiality and

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the dimension of time, the fact of their continued existence in a changing world, makes it almost impossible for them to have maintained the same nature and degree of significance amongst the people who used them from the day of their creation to the time when they were buried. The altars may not be able to reveal all that we wish to know about them, but to have such expectations is to miss the point: no single piece of evidence can ever provide the full and final answer. Few things ever come with a maker’s mark and complete biography attached. The key is to ask questions of them and to use them to help answer questions.89 It is these doubts and possibilities, this type of reflection, which needs to be built into materially engaged histories of religion in the future. We have recently seen a greater willingness from scholars to talk about religion beyond what have traditionally been conceived of as the boundaries of the disciplines of art history and archaeology, and similarly a desire to use material evidence by historians. Concerted efforts have been made to respond not just to the call for increased use of visual material as an intrinsic part of the evidence for Roman religion, but to face the challenges that this presents. These have come from all sides of the disciplinary divides and are frequently configured as inter-disciplinary approaches.90 It is to this kind of model that we must look, in order to challenge the common perceptions of how to study Roman religion, be that through a historical, art historical or an archaeological perspective.

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For a philosophical account of this issue from the one great Roman archaeologist who was also a great philosopher, see R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939) 122–4. See in particular J. Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton, 2007) 1–26; C. Ando, The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire (Berkeley, 2008) 21–42; S. Estienne, D. Jaillard, N. Lubtschansky and C. Pouzadoux (eds.), Image et religion dans l’antiquité gréco-romaine (Naples, 2008); T. Habinek, ‘Ancient Art versus Modern Aesthetics: A Naturalist Perspective’, Arethusa 43 (2010) 215–30; J. Mylonopoulos (ed.), Divine Images and Human Imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome (Leiden, 2010); Platt and Squire (eds.), The Art of Art History in Greco-Roman Antiquity; V. J. Platt, ‘Art History in the Temple’, Arethusa 43/2 (2010) 197–213; Platt, Facing the Gods; Squire, ‘Introduction’; Raja and Rüpke (eds.), Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World, 6–7. Sylvia Estienne’s edited volume was the product of a joint French–Italian conference and four-year seminar series running at the French school of Rome. The desire to get something done is extremely evident in this volume, even if the quality of its contributions differs markedly. The 2010 volume of Arethusa edited by Platt and Squire demonstrated the potential of future studies, drawing on the various expertise of its contributors to paint a picture of both historiographical and modern views on understanding Graeco-Roman art more broadly.

Figure 2.2 Seated Buddha in the teaching posture. On the cushion below him, a seated Bodhisattva with turban and ornaments flanked by a kneeling male and female worshipper. Second or third century AD, grey schist. From Jamalgarhi, Pakistan. 95 by 53 cm. British Museum, BM 1895,1026.1. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

Figure 3.1 Raphael (1483–1520), The Sacrifice at Lystra (Acts 14:8–18, where the Lystrians offer sacrifices to Saints Paul and Barnabas after they have cured a lame man). Bodycolour on paper mounted onto canvas. Cartoon for a tapestry in the Sistine Chapel, commissioned by Pope Leo X and unveiled in 1519. Height: 350 cm, width: 560 cm, made c. 1515–16. Victoria and Albert Museum, on loan from the collection of Her Majesty the Queen. Photograph: Courtesy of the V&A

Figure 3.2 Altars in the Senhouse Museum found at Maryport, UK. Dedicated in the 2nd century  by the ‘I cohors hispanorum’ and their various commanders. Sandstone. All of a square type, but no two altars are the same either in dimension or decoration. Senhouse Museum. Photograph: By kind permission of the Manager and Trustees of Senhouse Roman Museum

Figure 3.3 Sandstone altar from Maryport. Dedicated by the tribune Marcus Maenius Agrippa in the 2nd century . Senhouse Museum. Photograph: By kind permission of the Manager and Trustees of Senhouse Roman Museum

Figure 4.1 Fresco from the Mithraeum at Capua Vetere, Italy. From a series painted on the fronts of the benches which may show initiation rituals. Second century . Photograph: P. Adrych, per gentile concessione del Polo Museale della Campania

Figure 4.2 Detail of the Mainz Cup, terracotta crater with Mithraic imagery. First half of the second century . This side shows a scene which has been interpreted as representing initiation. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt. Photograph: P. Adrych by permission of the Archäologisches Museum, Frankfurt

Figure 4.3 Bronze statuette of Jupiter Dolichenus. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , found at Mauer-an-der-Url, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The statuette displays a common Roman conception of Jupiter Dolichenus in military dress, brandishing a double-axe and lightning bolt. The dedication beneath reads, ‘To Jupiter Dolichenus, greatest and best, Marrius Ursinus, a veteran, following a command, freely, gladly, and deservedly set this up’. Photograph: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Figure 4.4 Bronze triangle from Austria featuring representations of Jupiter Dolichenus and other gods. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , found at Mauer-an-der-Url, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Found in the same hoard as Figure 4.3, this triangle still has its stand attached. From bottom to top the figures have been identified as the Dioscuri; Jupiter Dolichenus and consort; Sol and Luna; an eagle; and finally a winged Victory statuette on top. Photograph: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Figure 4.5 Bronze triangle featuring representations of Jupiter Dolichenus and other gods. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , unknown findspot, now in the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection, Munich. The triangle, divided into four planes, features Jupiter Dolichenus with his female consort in the centre, three gods identified as Hercules, Minerva and Dionysus above, and an eagle at the very top. The so-called Dioscuri flank a male figure making an offering at an altar in the lower plane. Photograph: © Archäologische Staatssammlung München (photographer: Manfred Eberlein)

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Mystery Cult and Material Culture in the Graeco-Roman World     

If Roman religion has been constructed as something of a void, defined in opposition to the Christianity that succeeded it, and the religions of the Greeks that preceded it, an important part of how it has been shaped is through comparison to forms of religious practice that have been called the ‘mystery’ or ‘Oriental’ cults.1 For some, in harking back to the kinds of ecstatic religious experience of the Greek world framed, for example, by Euripides’ Bacchae, these cults evoke the Dionysian dynamism of a Nietzschean archaic;2 for others, in their creative invention during the imperial period, their momentum owing to adherents rather than the state hierarchy, their possible soteriology and their vibrant material culture, they have seemed the ancestors of Christianity.3 Mystery cults are only a subsection of religion in the Roman period, but they have been seen as forming a distinct and peculiar category of their own.4 As a group, they have not fitted easily into broad-brushstroke accounts of Roman religious activity. They tend instead to sit, somewhat uncomfortably, on the outskirts: placed there in part by contemporary insiders and outsiders, and in part by the weight of later scholarship that saw them as 1

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The founding collective text on the Oriental cults in modern scholarship is F. Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (Paris, 1906), followed by many accounts such as R. Turcan, Les cultes orientaux dans le paganisme romain (Paris, 1989); see the excellent introduction by C. Bonnet and F. van Haeperen to the new republication: F. Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (Turnhout, 2009) pp. xi–lxxiv. Key founding texts on mystery religions are R. Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen (Leipzig, 1910) followed by A. Loisy, Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien (Paris, 1914). For a brilliant historiographic account of the model of the ‘irrational’ in Greek religion, founded on the pioneering work of R. Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, 3rd edn. (Breslau, 1917), see R. Gagné, ‘Greek Relgion 1920–1950’, in C. A. Stray, C. B. R. Pelling and S. J. Harrison (eds.), Rediscovering E. R. Dodds: Scholarship, Poetry, and the Paranormal (Oxford, 2019) forthcoming. Note that in 1951, E. R. Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951) 1) defined his topic, the opposite of ‘rational’, as ‘the awareness of mystery and the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience’. Indeed, the Christianities of the pre-Constantinian empire are among them. On the usefulness of ‘mysteries’ as a category, and whether they should be separated from other ancient forms of religion in this way, see J. Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, 1990).

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other and different. To speak of these forms of religion as both separable from other aspects of ancient religion and as a collective is to make two large and not necessarily sustainable generalizations.5 We will not justify the term ‘mystery cults’ here, or what it implies; we use it instead as a matter of historiographical fact. If anything, our account will warn of the perils this kind of grouping can bring. But for these reasons, ‘mystery cults’ more than deserve their own chapter in this volume; they certainly fulfil the requirement of having a rich and complex historiographic tradition of their own. One of the aims of this volume is to seek the means of effectively allowing for comparison between different religious traditions; mystery cults provide a perfect illustration of this: they are constructed to allow for the comparison of forms of mysticism. In addition, they furnish excellent examples of religious practices that have been affected by both Christianizing expectations in scholarly retrospect and the privileging of textual over material evidence. They stand alone, and yet illustrate several of the thornier problems of discussing Roman religion more widely. This chapter will look first at the role of textual accounts in the writing of the religious histories of the ‘Oriental mysteries’. Second, it will examine the effect on scholarship of looking at mysteries through the Christian lens, itself the result of the compelling interest in them as a form of pagan ancestry to the salvific form of religion defined by Christianity. We will explore some of the assumptions that have been made of mysteries as a category, before then discussing two case studies – of initiation in the worship of Mithras, and of objects and images in the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus – to assess how disciplinary preferences can inform, change or distort our perceptions of ancient religions. One major difficulty in approaching the mysteries is that the justification for their collective study lies in an ancestralist framework: comparison has been made on the basis of what is religiously significant as constructed from a Christian point of view. This is the legacy of the Christian genealogical interest in the Classical past. Even rising secularism has continued to use a predominantly Christian framework when discussing religion. A Christian emphasis – and, in particular, a Protestant emphasis – places weight on text and scripture, with images and objects taking a reduced

5

This has been acknowledged by many in the field, for example G. Sfameni-Gasparro, ‘Mysteries and Oriental Cults: A Problem in the History of Religions’, in J. A. North and S. R. F. Price (eds.), The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Oxford, 2011), 280–1.

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

role.6 The Christian paradigm also created models about how religions ought to look, and from which specific components they ought to be made; it engendered expectations of belief, of a personal connection to the divine, and even of salvation. First, a brief word on terminology. In discussing ‘mystery cults’ in this chapter, we refer to a traditional method of grouping, that emphasizes mystery or secretive elements of religious practice. This group is often considered to include practices at Eleusis, on Samothrace, or associated with Dionysus (some going back to archaic times in Greece), and also to cover the worship of Mithras, Isis, Serapis, Cybele and Attis, not to speak of Jesus, a mix of new religions and old ones newly reconfigured in the Roman Empire. A different combination though, putting particular forms of the veneration of these same gods together, has been described as ‘Oriental’ or ‘Eastern’ cults. The division between these as categories is rarely made absolute, and the debate over these terms already enjoys a rich scholarship.7 Volumes that treat these various cults as a collective often devote a substantial part of their introductions to explaining the difficulties of terminology.8 These terms – Mystery, Oriental, Eastern – are not only descriptive, but rhetorical. They embody very old arguments about what these forms of religion were, why they were successful, where the ultimate origins of Western spirituality should be located (Greece, for ‘mystery cults’, or the East for the ‘Oriental cults’) and where they fit into the wider study of the history of religions.

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On the idea of Protestant versus Catholic formulations of the requirements of religion, see Smith, Drudgery Divine, and Chapter 1 in the present volume. R. L. Gordon, ‘Prefazione’, in E. Sanzi and G. Sfameni, Magia e culti orientali: per la storia religiosa della tarda antichita (Cosenza, 2009) 9–30, at 9–15, provides a succinct account of what these labels might entail whilst also discussing how each may help and hinder study. For an analysis of the term ‘Oriental’ in connection with Franz Cumont see G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (Chicago, 2009), and for a concise historiography of its use see M. J. Versluys, ‘Orientalising Roman Gods’, in L. Bricault and C. Bonnet (eds.), Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco-Roman Empire (Leiden, 2013) 235–60. See also J. Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (Berlin, 2014) pp. vii–xiv for a brief overview of the development of the term ‘Mysteries’. Some recent examples include: A. Bendlin and C. Bonnet (eds.), ‘Les “religions orientales”: approches historiographiques / die “orientalischen Religionen” im Lichte der Forschungsgeschichte’, edited sub-section of Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 8 (2006) 151–273; J. Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras, trans and ed. R. L. Gordon (Leiden, 2008) 1–24; H. Bowden, Mystery Cults in the Ancient World (London, 2010) 8–25; E. Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus: un ‘culto orientale’ fra tradizione e innovazione: riflessioni storico-religiose (Rome, 2013), 17–62; Bremmer (Initiation into the Mysteries) discusses the problem throughout his book, with a concentrated section on the study of the mysteries in relation to Christianity coming later, 142ff.

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1.

Religion, Mystery and Text

The study of Graeco-Roman mystery cults began with examinations of the texts in which they appeared.9 The history of these texts extended from deepest prehistory right up to the final flourishes of polytheistic worship in the fourth and fifth centuries .10 What historians were looking for was a textual, even a scriptural, framework of religious belief, on the one hand, and accounts of mystic experience to flesh out their understanding, on the other. From a material-cultural point of view, this is partly due to a doubt – which continues to be debated today – as to whether we may hope to grasp from our own assessment of an object, image or place its potential or experiential meaning for ancient viewers or users.11 A dependence upon textual sources is a marker of the influence of Christianity upon scholarly approaches to mystery cults. Religions that have scriptural exegesis, and which have been characterized by the impulse of adherents to record their beliefs and histories in writing, have seemed somehow more accessible to modern scholars, more recognizable as real religions. There are countless examples of the complicated relationship between textual and material sources in the evidential bases for the various cults of the Roman world; this relationship can range from a complete absence of surviving texts (and, concomitantly, a complete reliance on 9

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Arguments that the worship of certain groups did not constitute ‘mysteries’ start from the base position of an absence in texts of words that either firmly suggest or allude to ‘mystery’ practices. See the recent contribution of Sfameni-Gasparro, ‘Mysteries and Oriental Cults’. In the study of mystery cults through archaeology, see e.g. M. Jost, ‘Mystery Cults in Arcadia’, in M. B. Cosmopoulos (ed.), Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology of Ancient Greek Secret Cults (London, 2003) 143–68, esp. 143, table 6.1 – a list of mystery cults in Arcadia as mentioned in Pausanias that forms the (textual) basis of investigation. There is little consensus in antiquity as to the history of such rites, other than that they were extremely old. For example, Diod. Sic. 5.48–9, links them to the heroic past of Jason and Heracles. The Eleusinian Mysteries are by far the most well-known. For some they were thought to be as ancient as the events that made them significant. The most famous mythological account has Demeter demand a temple and teach her rites at Eleusis: Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 2.270–4; henceforward her place is at Eleusis: 2.318f; 353f. Others link their adoption to the most ancient customs despite being adopted as a result of movement, for example Herod. II.171, which should be read as an attempt to lend authority through investment from Egypt. Cicero would later claim that they had raised humanity from a barbarous to a civilized status: Cic. De leg. II, xiv, 36. Recent scholarship has argued that many apparently ancient rituals in the great compendium offered by Pausanias’ Description of Greece were in fact rather recent in his time but imagined by him as immensely ancient: see esp. V. Pirenne-Delforge, Retour à la source: Pausanias et la religion grecque (Liège, 2008). Issues of ‘experience’ are central to this debate. For a brief discussion, particularly on ‘mystical’ experience (96ff.), see R. H. Sharf, ‘Experience’, in M. C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, 1998) 94–116.

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archaeological and artistic evidence), through religious practices that have both archaeological remains and textual references, to those where we are almost entirely reliant on textual sources. Even though the problem of a disciplinary divide, which frequently placed religious material culture outside the purview of religious historians, was outlined as early as the 1970s, it has been an underlying aspect of much contemporary scholarship on Roman religion.12 The study of mystery cults is deeply entwined with this problem. Though the majority of scholarship does incorporate material evidence, this has not solved the problem of combining textual and material sources, and of giving them equal weight according to the surviving evidence in each case, and in particular of driving interpretation of archaeological data through often very sparse and obscure literary or epigraphic fragments. One of the side effects of grouping and naming a series of disparate practices under an umbrella term like ‘mystery cults’ is that it implies some sort of commonality between the different religious activities involved.13 When one form of worship – that of the Graeco-Egyptian goddess Isis, for example – has rich texts (like the great novel of conversion by Apuleius known as the Golden Ass) that are contemporary to the life of a cult with a notable lack of texts but known through a very rich archaeology (like, for instance, that of Mithras), are there sufficient shared empirical grounds to compare our conclusions about one cult from those texts with our conclusions about another form of worship, largely derived from material culture? In such cases, the temptation to carry across the analytic results of examining texts from one religious practice to another, or to extend the applicability of our texts across broad stretches of time, space and culture, has proved understandably great. The risk of circularity, however, and indeed of being plain wrong, is rather high. Using texts from one cult to look at the worship of another, for example, is an excellent way of strengthening connections and commonalities, and of underplaying, even overlooking, differences.

2.

A Christian Model and Its Assumptions It is often said that the historical importance of the oriental cults lies less in their intrinsic value or appeal than in their relation to Christianity.14

12

13

14

See R. L. Gordon, ‘The Real and the Imaginary: Production and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World’, Art History 2 (1979) 5–34, and Chapter 2 of this volume for a more detailed discussion. In support of the “typological unity” of these cults, see Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods, Introduction. Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods, 383.

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    

Mystery cults have often been interpreted as a link between what our relationship with religion was in the Graeco-Roman world, and what it is today; equally they have been viewed as an aspect of religious practice that transcends cultural and temporal boundaries.15 Texts written by cult practitioners, outsiders and Christian polemicists have suggested to scholars that mystery cults were base, primal and orgiastic.16 At the same time, they have been seen as complex, concerned with the inner-self, offering worshippers something they could not acquire elsewhere. In the late nineteenth century the study of mystery cults gained scholarly attention through comparison with the development of Christianity.17 Whether references were oblique or explicit, and whether scholars were concerned with establishing or refuting potential links, this comparison lay behind many approaches of the time, and – given the Christian cultural context that has shaped the lenses of so many scholars up to our own time – it remains unavoidable even if often no longer explicit.18 Comparisons with early Christianity, combined with traditional approaches to studying the Graeco-Roman world, led to the privileging of literary

15

16

17

18

See in particular M. Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (New York, 1958), and especially his ch. 6, ‘Patterns of Initiation in Higher Religions’, where he discusses Yoga practices, ancient Greek Mystery practices and Christian initiation in the same context. What is central here is not belief, but common means of obtaining a new status. For example, Liv. 39.8–14 on the Bacchanalian mysteries; Tert. De praescr. haeret. 40–4 on the perversion of heresies; Gregory Nazianzen Oratio 39, 4–5 on the ‘obscenity’ of the cults of Eleusis, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Hecate, Orpheus and Mithras. For a discussion of this period and the issues involved in the variety of approaches that were taken see Smith, Drudgery Divine. For a recent review, see Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 142–65. Far from being mainstream, this comparative approach was pioneering, albeit limited by the preconceptions brought to the study of mystery cults from an overbearing Christian perspective. This was by no means a new discovery of the nineteenth century, however; comparisons between mystery cults and Christianity were part of the Reformation argument of Isaac Casaubon in the seventeenth century (for a discussion, see Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods, 389–91). Ernest Renan’s (1823–92) famous claim that if Christianity had stumbled, we would today be worshippers of Mithras was fairly typical of this (E. Renan, Marc-Aurele et la fin du monde antique (Paris, 1882), 579). James Frazer’s (1854–1941) The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols. (London, 1890) was neither explicitly devoted to the topic of ‘mysteries’ nor to the comparison of Christianity (or the figure of Christ) to pagan worship but included a discussion of the resurrection within the frame of ‘dying and rising’ gods. The comparison was not without controversy. Other works were far more explicit, for example Alfred Loisy’s (1857–1940) Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien, and Samuel Angus’ The Mystery-Religions and Christianity: A Study in the Religious Background of Early Christianity (London, 1925). This was a position taken up by a variety of others, not least the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. For a brief review of this movement’s contributions, but also the objections mounted against its conclusions, see M. Simon, ‘The Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Fifty Years Later’, Religious Studies 11 (1975) 135–44.

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

accounts of mystery cults. There is a greater self-awareness among scholars now of the dangers of using Christian terminology to describe Roman cult practices and beliefs – with such words as liturgy and scripture considered particularly dangerous – and of applying a Christian framework to our understanding of the structures and rituals of ancient religion.19 In contrast to the staid model of state-supporting Roman religion, mystery cults were portrayed as exciting, dynamic, spiritually enlivening – a progression towards Christianity. In the mid-nineteenth century, Roman religion was frequently constructed as cold, limiting and prosaic, a tool used by the Roman elite to control not only the Roman people but also the subjects of the empire. It was seen as lacking the creative and vital impulses essential to Christianity.20 By contrast, mystery cults were traditionally portrayed by historians as bridging the gap between a legalistic Roman religion, and a more spiritual Christianity.21 Whilst personal connections to the divine are taken as essential, a strong sense of community, often requiring initiation, is also held to delimit members of mystery-cult communities and thus, to an extent at least, mystic experience. Initiation will form the main theme of the case study on the worship of Mithras that follows. The idea of salvation is a particular element of Christian thought that has often been applied retrospectively to our conception of mystery cults.22 Over the course of the twentieth century, ancient historians have become less comfortable with using the term ‘salvation’ unproblematically;

19

20

21

22

For a theoretical examination of the Christian impact on the writing of ‘mystery cults’, see Smith, Drudgery Divine, passim. On the relationship of ‘mystery cults’ with emergent Christianity and modern academic caution on the matter, see Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods, 383–421; Bowden, Mystery Cults in the Ancient World, 198–211. On Theodore Mommsen’s nineteenth-century Prussian version of ‘a religion . . . fitted rather to stifle than to foster artistic and speculative views’ (T. Mommsen, The History of Rome (London, 1894), vol. 1, p. 224), see Chapter 3 of this volume, pp. 60–61. The words mysterium in Latin, and μυστήριον in Greek (the latter used to translate the Hebrew ‫( רז‬rāz) in the Septuagint translation of the Book of Daniel), are not, of course, exact equivalents, nor are they used uniformly. If any generalization is possible, they refer to ‘a mystery’ or ‘secret’. The plurals mysteria and μυστήρια are more suggestive, perhaps denoting a collection of hidden ideas or practices. See further W. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA, 1987) Introduction 7–11; Bowden, Mystery Cults in the Ancient World, 207–11, 122–37; K. Waldner, ‘Dimensions of Individuality in Ancient Mystery Cults: Religious Practice and Philosophical Discourse’, in J. Rüpke (ed.), The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford, 2013) 215–20; Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, Preface. For a brief discussion of ‘salvation’, with its various possible meanings, in the scholarship of mystery cults, see Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods, 26–30. It is worth highlighting that Alvar himself inclines towards salvific interpretations, but he notes the major works that challenged original assumptions about the inherently salvific nature of mystery cults.

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    

does salvation belong to this world, or the next? Should every god addressed as soter or salvator (saviour) be understood as a salvific god? Ideas of personal relationships and sacred healing are by no means unique to mystery cults – nor is initiation, at least not in the sense of belonging to a religion – but they often carry with them an idea of secrecy and privilege.23 The idea of hiddenness, secrecy and mystery carries with it a distinct allure: one of knowledge, the differentiation of the initiated elite from the ignorant, and ultimately the forms of power that may derive from this. In terms of a social explanation for the rise of Christianity, this is one reason why mystery cults were seen as a stepping stone in the cultural transformation from civic Roman religious activity towards Christian worship. Nonetheless, ideas of mystery have perhaps been over-conflated with secrecy: just how secretive were the mystery cults? One of the most famous in Greece was the Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated at Eleusis in Attica, and associated with the worship of Demeter and Persephone.24 The secondcentury travel-writer Pausanias emphasized that he could not share the secrets revealed in these Mysteries (and a number of others in the Greece of his time), which heightens the sense of secrecy for the modern reader.25 There are certain complications to the popular picture of a mystery cult, however: the Eleusinian Mysteries were only one part of a larger network of religious events and festivals that took place in and around Eleusis; the festivals of the Lesser and Greater Mysteries were widely-known around the Greek-speaking world, even if the precise nature of them was unspeakable, and were highly popular; initiation into the mysteries was open to any Greek-speaking adult, upon completion of a sacrifice.26 The openness of membership and initiation, and the publicity of the Mysteries, rather differs from modern expectations of mystery cults – expectations that have

23

24 25

26

The second-century  orator Aelius Aristides narrated his experiences in the sanctuary of Asclepius at Pergamum – including direct contact with the healing god through dreams – in Sacred Tales. The cult of Asclepius is not considered to be a mystery cult, although this kind of personal connection to a god, and the revelation of privileged information, might blur some boundaries between them. It is perhaps a good example of how the division between mysteries and other forms of worship was not clear-cut in the ancient world. On mystic initiation as a recurrent metaphor in The Sacred Tales, see J. Downie, At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides Hieroi Logoi (Oxford, 2013) 116–23. R. Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford, 2005) 327. Paus. 1.38.7. On this kind of secrecy in Pausanias, where he reveals to his reader that he cannot say more on religious grounds, see J. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge, 1995) 144–52. Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens, 327–68.

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

often been reinforced by the practices of organizations such as freemasons over recent centuries.27 In fact, however, most cults described in relation to ‘Mysteries’ had both public and private aspects; this was the case with the Eleusinian Mysteries, and with those of Isis and Cybele.28 In many cases, the public aspects of these cults, which have been preserved in reliefs, frescos and inscriptions of processional and festive scenes, align with traditional civic Graeco-Roman religious practice; the ‘mystery’ elements constitute only a part of a religious whole.29

3.

Cumont, Mithras and Avestan Texts

An emphasis on a textual blueprint to explain a religious cult is fundamental to the scholarship of Franz Cumont (1868–1947), the Belgian archaeologist and historian who developed the concept of Oriental cults and is widely credited as the originator of the field of Mithraic studies.30 This is not to say that he avoided the material record. On the contrary, Cumont took the study of visual and material evidence extremely seriously.31 He was willing to grant it the power to convey religious meanings 27

28

29

30

31

Freemasonry has particularly been compared to the worship of Mithras, presumably because both are traditionally characterized as male-only practices. For an interesting literary analogy, see Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, and its Song to Mithras. Several articles comparing freemasonry with Mithras-worship and other ancient mystery cults appeared in the Masonic journal The Builder, which circulated from 1915–930. The case of the worship of Mithras seems to be an exception; see W. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 41. On processional scenes of Cybele, see B. Madigan, The Ceremonial Sculptures of the Roman Gods (Leiden, 2013) 60–1, 83–4; for a possible Isiac scene, see 98–9 in the same volume. There is also a vivid account in Apul. Met. XI of Isiac festivals at Corinth. For example, in R. L. Gordon, ‘Franz Cumont and the Doctrines of Mithraism’, in J. Hinnells (ed.), Mithraic Studies (Manchester, 1975) 215; R. Beck ‘Mithraism since Franz Cumont’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.17.4 (1984) 2003. A recent review is the introduction by N. Belayche and A. Mastrocinque to the most recent republication of F. Cumont, Les mystères de Mithra (Turnhout, 2013) pp. xiii–xc. This is best evidenced by his two-volume work Textes et Monuments Figurés relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra (Bruxelles, 1894–6; 1913), of which one volume comprised a catalogue of texts, monuments and inscriptions relating to Mithras. Cumont’s later work (e.g. Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain), features less material, though decidedly more than many of his contemporaries’ works. Other works, however, were deeply involved with the discussion of material remains, for example his 1942 book, Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des Romains (Paris, 1942). On Cumont’s importance and his place in the history of the study of religions, see in particular C. Bonnet, Le ‘Grand Atelier de la Science’: Franz Cumont et l’Altertumswissenschaft. Héritages et émancipations (Brussels, 2005) and ‘Les “Religions Orientales” au Laboratoire de L’Hellénisme. 2: Franz Cumont’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 8 (2006) 181–205.

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    

in a way that was simply absent in most accounts of his time. His recounting, though, not only of the history of these forms of religion but also of their nature, remained firmly dependent upon assumptions of a textual undercurrent. Cumont looked at the material evidence, but the backbone of his analyses was derived from readings of textual accounts.32 In the model he developed, it was only through the assessment of texts that one could make use of the images and material culture that constituted the vast majority of evidence available for ‘Oriental Religions’, as he characterized them. Whilst Cumont used material culture, he required textual evidence to make sense of it, in the same way that Christian archaeology needed scripture to identify the biblical meanings of Christian imagery. Cumont argued that the worship of Mithras, for example, was especially dependent on doctrines transmitted through texts, binding the god’s worshippers into a discrete and united group, or a religion as he explicitly framed it.33 He was ready to concede that these texts – effectively the scriptures of Mithraism – might now be lost forever, but one of his primary objectives was to reconstruct a semblance of them from possible hints and allusions in a vast and learned range of ancient traditions, from the Zoroastrian scriptural Avesta to the fragmentary Roman literary record, from the inscriptions supplied to some of the artefacts associated with Mithras to the very rich surviving archive of Mithras-related objects and images.34 Cumont’s weaving together of Zoroastrian and Roman texts – in part to justify his belief in Mithraic worship as an Oriental cult, and in part to provide it with a solid historical and originary basis – was to prove untenable; and once the idea of a lost Mithraic scripture founded on Eastern roots was abandoned, then a monolithic edifice of Mithras worship as a substantive, theologically-underpinned and consistent religion across the empire held little water.35

32

33 34

35

See for example Cumont’s reading of the Mithraic tauroctony: F. Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, tr. T. J. McCormack (Chicago, 1903) 104–49; discussed further in D. B. Dalglish, ‘Reconstructions: Mithra in Rome’, in P. Adrych, R. Bracey, D. Dalglish, S. Lenk and R. Wood, Images of Mithra (Oxford, 2017) 15–38. For example, Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, 29. For his vain hope for a Mithraist’s library, see F. Cumont, ‘The Dura Mithraeum’, in Hinnells (ed.), Mithraic Studies, 186. In particular, Gordon, ‘Franz Cumont and the Doctrines of Mithraism’, offered a systematic deconstruction of Cumont’s Mithraic model, highlighting the problems of the proposed Zoroastrian heritage of Roman Mithras-worship, and successfully changing the face of Mithraic scholarship.

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

Cumont’s approach had, however, remained dominant for decades.36 What he had helped to confirm was the status of these ‘Oriental religions’, or ‘mysteries’ as the ‘real’ and ‘vital’ religion of the ancient world as against the cold formalism of ‘ordinary’ polytheistic state or civic cults. This only served to encourage the primacy of texts over material culture, given the intrinsic connection held to exist between scripture and monotheistic worship (for which ‘mysteries’ were a harbinger). Whilst material evidence had been taken up, it was kept at arm’s length. It was used and assessed, but, however detailed and central to arguments objects might sometimes appear to have been, this assessment was conducted within a model of religion that was largely predetermined for it on the basis of readings from a textual tradition.

4.

Material Evidence without Texts: Two Case Studies

The following examples offer both illustrations of the problems under discussion and tentative suggestions of how we might shift our conceptual models to allow the material evidence to speak alongside, and not merely in reference to, texts. They are limited and imperfect; they therefore cannot speak to all the problems experienced by scholars working at the coalface of ancient religion. The first study examines initiation within the Roman worship of Mithras, comparing the ‘outsider’ accounts of fragmentary textual sources – traditionally interpreted as referring to Mithraic practice – with the archaeological evidence from Mithraic sites. The second explores the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus: the fact that it has not been categorized as a mystery cult, how to make sense of its material culture, and the expectations that are associated with it. Both ask similar questions: without reliable exegetic texts, how have historians characterized and understood religious material culture, and is there a way forward in working with the visual record?

36

Many works on the ‘Oriental Religions’ were produced in almost exactly the same manner as Cumont’s, for example P. Merlat’s catalogue (Répertoire des inscriptions et monuments figurés du culte de Jupiter Dolichenus (Paris, 1951)) and 1960 interpretation of the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus (Jupiter Dolichenus. Essai d’interprétation et de synthèse (Paris, 1960)). In fact, this format of catalogue publications and synthesizing essays was established as the norm, especially through the Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’Empire romain (EPRO) series published by Brill under the direction of Maarten Vermaseren, retitled Religions of the GraecoRoman World in 1992.

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    

Initiation and the Roman Worship of Mithras The origins of Roman Mithraic worship remain murky; what is clear is that by  100, worshippers of Mithras were dedicating temples, altars and art across the empire from Germany to Syria.37 The popularity of this god, who was depicted in stereotypically ‘Eastern’ dress, is attested until the fourth century , when worship began to die out. No writings survive from confirmed Mithraists, but this form of worship was subject to some intense Christian polemic, and several of these assaults have survived, which provide possible – but problematic – glimpses into Mithraic practice. The archaeological remains associated with Mithras are very rich, however, ranging from Mithraic temples (mithraea), to statues, frescos, reliefs and small finds. Several apparent elements of Mithraic practice have led to its firm categorization as a mystery cult: an emphasis on membership and possibly on hierarchy; the nature of its sacred spaces – mithraea are often small, sometimes underground, and usually dark and windowless; and initiation.38 The aspect of initiation is one where the absence of ‘insider’ texts can perhaps be felt most keenly. It could be assumed that, while some aspects of worship and practice might have been visible to non-Mithraists, the actual process of initiation would have been necessarily more secluded and secretive. Nonetheless, there are passages from Porphyry, the pagan Neoplatonic philosopher, as well as several Christian apologists, that claim to 37

38

A basic handbook is Manfred Clauss’ The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries (Edinburgh, 2000); an excellent general survey is R. Gordon, ‘Mithras’, Reallexicon für Antike und Christentum 24 (2012) 964–1009. For a survey of opinions on Mithraic origins, see A. Chalupa ‘The Origins of the Roman Cult of Mithras in the Light of New Evidence and Interpretations: The Current State of Affairs’, Religio 24 (2016) 65–96. The subject of hierarchy relates to the understanding of ‘grades’ within Mithraic membership. A list of seven grades is set out by Saint Jerome in his letter to the Christian Laeta (Ad Laeta ch. 2). This letter (by a Christian opponent of everything a Mithraist might stand for) forms a large part of the evidence for the traditional conception of seven grades of Mithraic initiation, following a particular order. In fact, this is an example where material evidence has been interpreted through the lens of outsider textual accounts; the traditional idea of seven Mithraic grades has been challenged in recent years. For debate on how the idea of hierarchy might have worked within Mithraic worship, see M. Clauss, ‘Die Sieben Grade des Mithras-Kultes’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 82 (1990) 183–94, who sees it as a system of priesthood. For arguments in favour of an initiatory hierarchy, closely tied to ideas of cosmology and even soteriology, see R. Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun (Oxford, 2006), 114. For a survey of these grades, see A. Chalupa, ‘Seven Mithraic Grades: An Initiatory or Priestly Hierarchy?’, Religio 16/2 (2008) 177–201; for a challenge, see P. Adrych, ‘The Seven Grades of Mithraism, or How to Build a Religion’, in N. Belayche and Fr. Massa (eds.), Figuring ‘Mysteries’ in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, RGRW (Leiden forthcoming).

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

have an insight into Mithraic initiatory rituals. Let us begin, as many studies of Mithraic initiation frequently do, with an examination of these textual sources.39 A key passage of Porphyry (c.  234–305) comes from De antro nympharum and concerns the uses of honey. It has traditionally been interpreted as referring to Mithraic practices, though it is worth bearing in mind that the lions mentioned are not necessarily the leones of the Mithraic grade: When therefore into the hands of those initiated into the leontic rites honey is poured for washing instead of water, they are charged to keep their hands clean from all wrong and injury and defilement; the offering of actual water to the initiate is avoided as being hostile to the fire with its purifying qualities.40

The Christian apologist Justin Martyr ( 100–165) also mentions the use of food as part of an initiation ritual, though his interest lies in the possibility that there is a deliberate Mithraic subversion of the importance of bread and wine to Christian rites: For at the initiatory rites bread and a cup of water are set out accompanied by certain formulae, as you know or may ascertain.41

This passage suggests that there was at least some awareness of Mithraic initiatory practices among Justin Martyr’s audience, even though this is relatively early in the spread of Mithras worship around the Roman Empire. The tone struck by other Christian writers is equally condemnatory of Mithraic rituals. Tertullian (c.  155–240) discusses an initiation test, though it is uncertain whether the Mithraic ‘soldier’ is a generic term for Mithraists (or, indeed, any followers of a god), or a more specific reference to the miles grade: Be ashamed as Christ’s fellow-soldiers to be open to reproach not only from Christ himself but from any soldier of Mithra. For to him when he is initiated in a cavern, a veritable home of darkness, a crown is offered 39

40

41

E.g. Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 132–4. Beck (The Religion of the Mithras Cult) is not strictly about initiation into Mithraic worship, but he is explicit in his belief that Porphyry’s De antro nympharum should be seen as, ‘an obvious entry point to an interpretation of the mysteries’, and to initiation in particular (p. 17; ch. 4). The notable exception to the trend is Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods, 371: ‘We have no right to generalise from the few literary accounts, which are located neither in time nor in space.’ Porph. De antr. nymph. 15, trans. A. S. Geden, Select Passages Illustrating Mithraism (London, 1925); amendments in bold, Adrych. Justin, Apol. 66, trans. Geden, Select Passages.

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    

on a naked sword, as if in parody of martyrdom; this then is placed on his head, and he is enjoined with his own hand to lift it from his head and voluntarily to transfer it to his shoulder, declaring that Mithra is his crown.42

A Christian writer known as Pseudo-Nonnus (c.  550 or 650), in his commentary on Gregory of Nazianzus’ attacks on Julian the Apostate, talks about initiation tests: No one can be initiated into the rites of Mithra without passing through all the disciplines and giving proof of self-control and chastity. Eighty grades are enumerated through which the postulant must pass in succession; for example, plunging first into deep water for many days, then throwing himself into fire, then solitary fasting in a desert place, and others also until as stated above he has passed through the eighty. Then finally if he survives he receives the highest initiation, or if he has succumbed an (honourable) sepulture.43

The Latin author known as Ambrosiaster (c. fourth century) also details these tests in several passages: They are tricked in the cave when they have their eyes blindfolded. Some, their hands tied with chicken guts, are thrown down over troughs filled with water; then someone approaches with a sword, who calls himself their liberator, and cuts through the bonds mentioned above.44

These passages, in addition to several other (less detailed) accounts, present a picture of an initiation process, involving ordeals and tests. Thus far, the textual evidence suggests a form of initiatory cult very much in keeping with popular conceptions of secrecy, trial and hierarchy. Nonetheless, we should note that, for the most part, it represents the hearsay of outsiders, all of whom – with the exception of Porphyry – were Christian apologists with a virulent polemical prejudice against the followers of Mithras. Not only is this evidence strikingly sparse as the basis for constructing an initiatory and liturgical structure, but it is also intrinsically unreliable. Even Porphyry may have had little first-hand experience of Mithraic cult and

42

43

44

Tert. De corona 15, trans. Geden, Select Passages. For a brief discussion of Tertullian, and his possible information about the worship of Mithras, see P. Beskow, ‘Tertullian on Mithras’, in J. Hinnells (ed.) Studies in Mithraism (Rome, 1994) 51–60. Ps.-Nonnus Commentary on Gregory Nazianzen, in Julianum imperatorem invectivae duae, trans. Geden, Select Passages. Ambrosiaster quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti 113.11.

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explicitly bases his discussions on the account of an otherwise unknown historian of Mithras called Eubulus.45 How far does this textual presentation coincide with the material evidence for initiation? Much of this evidence comes from the mithraeum at Capua Vetere in Italy, where a series of frescos has traditionally been interpreted as depicting scenes of initiation.46 Running along the front of the right-hand bench, these paintings show groupings of either two or three men, one of whom is naked, and is thought to represent an initiand. Two frescos show him wearing a blindfold, though in other scenes he is depicted without it, perhaps indicating a successful progression through various tests. In one of the paintings, the initiand is kneeling, and appears to have his hands tied behind him (Figure 4.1); the passage of Ambrosiaster would certainly support such an interpretation.47 In another scene, the initiand is again kneeling, while a sword lies beside him and a figure (often described as a mystagogue – someone leading the initiand through the tests) stands behind him, holding a crown over his head; the passage from Tertullian corresponds with the kind of imagery that we can see here.48 Aside from the frescos in the Capua Vetere mithraeum, there are very few other material sources that suggest Mithraic initiation. While there is an abundance of iconographic depictions of different grades, only an earthenware cup found in Mainz seems to show imagery of a kind similar to the Capua Vetere frescos (Figure 4.2).49 On one side of this cup, a naked figure, presumably an initiand, is shown with his arms crossed in front of his face. He is flanked by two figures, probably mystagogues, one of whom is aiming an arrow at him. The arrangement of this scene, with an initiand flanked by two other figures, who appear to be subjecting him to some sort

45

46

47 48 49

Eubulus as author of many books on Mithras: Porphyry, De abstinentia 11.16; on Eubulus’ account of Zoroaster’s cave in honour of Mithras: Porphyry, De antro nympharum 6. CIMRM 187–94; the Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae (The Hague, 1956–60) is a collection of Mithraic inscriptions and monuments in two volumes edited by Maarten Vermaseren, in which he was heavily supported by Franz Cumont. See also M. Vermaseren, Mithriaca I. The Mithraeum at Santa Maria Capua Vetere (Leiden, 1971) for an account of the excavation and discoveries within the Capua Vetere mithraeum. CIMRM 188. CIMRM 191. For a reading of this cup, and brief outlines of its previous historiography, see I. Huld-Zetsche, ‘Der Mainzer Krater mit den sieben Figuren’, in M. Martens and G. De Boe (eds.), Roman Mithraism: The Evidence of the Small Finds (Brussels, 2004) 213–27. For more detailed arguments, see H. G. Horn, ‘Das Mainzer Mithrasgefäß’, Mainzer Archäologische Zeitschrift 1 (1994) 21–66; R. Merkelbach, ‘Das Mainzer Mithrasgefåß’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 108 (1995) 1–6; R. Beck, ‘Ritual, Myth, Doctrine and Initiation in the Mysteries of Mithras: New Evidence from a Cult Vessel’, Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000) 145–80.

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    

Figure 4.1 Fresco from the Mithraeum at Capua Vetere, Italy. From a series painted on the fronts of the benches which may show initiation rituals. Second century . Photograph: P. Adrych, per gentile concessione del Polo Museale della Campania. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Figure 4.2 Detail of the Mainz Cup, terracotta crater with Mithraic imagery. First half of the second century . This side shows a scene which has been interpreted as representing initiation. Archaeological Museum Frankfurt. Photograph: P. Adrych by permission of the Archäologisches Museum, Frankfurt. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

of trial, is very reminiscent of one of the Capua Vetere paintings. On the other side of the cup is a procession of four figures, which has also been linked to an initiation ritual, though there is little other evidence, either material or textual, to support this. So much for the artistic evidence. In addition to the Capua Vetere frescos and the Mainz Cup, there are several inscriptions which seem to provide evidence of Mithraic initiation. In particular, six statue bases or altars found in Rome, unfortunately now lost, apparently had inscriptions recording the dates of initiation into certain grades.50 The formula of the inscriptions is fairly uniform, with a Mithraic father committing members into their respective grades.51 These inscriptions indicate that there was some level of ceremony attached to the conferral of a (new) grade status upon a Mithraist, though it is unclear whether (further) rituals of initiation were required. One inscription that seems to suggest the idea of initiation as rebirth is a graffito found in the Santa Prisca mithraeum in Rome.52 This commemorates the date on which an unnamed Mithraist was ‘born at dawn’ (natus prima luce); again, assuming that this graffito does refer to initiation, it is unclear whether this was a first entrance into Mithraic worship, or whether it represented a progression through a hierarchy. Thus far, the textual and material sources largely appear to support each other, particularly when we think of the group of scenes from the Capua Vetere frescos. There is, however, a significant interpretive gap; we choose to read the frescos as depicting scenes of initiation trials because we are already familiar with the accounts of Ambrosiaster and Tertullian. Without these texts, would we have quite so securely identified these paintings as initiatory? This is one of the major problems with privileging textual over material accounts, or giving texts a primary exegetical place – especially when these are polemical assaults by Christian opponents of Mithras; the inherent subjectivism of assessing material culture can often be subsumed into an assumption of knowledge based on literary sources. We also want to find scenes of initiation precisely because this is how ‘mystery cults’ are configured in our minds; our belief that initiation was important to these ‘mysteries’ therefore goes hand in hand with our expectation of finding it. It is also worth bearing in mind that – despite the spread of the worship of Mithras to almost every part of the Roman Empire – this is almost the only evidence we have for how Mithraists may themselves have pictured 50 51 52

CIMRM 400–5. The Latin reads tradidit leontica or Persica etc. as relevant. CIMRM 498.

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    

their initiation rituals. If initiation rituals were so central to Mithraic activity, why are there so few depictions of them? Is it possible that other material evidence does show scenes of initiation, but that they have not been recognized as such because they bear little resemblance to the pictures painted by the literature? A relief found in Besigheim, Germany, is perhaps a good example of this.53 Several scenes on this relief, showing figures kneeling in front of a man in Eastern dress and wearing a Phrygian cap (i.e. the standard costume in which Mithras is depicted), have traditionally been interpreted as mythological. The standing figure is usually identified as Mithras, yet there is also the possibility that he represents a Mithraic pater taking on the role of Mithras for an initiation ritual. The dangers of relying on texts to reconstruct aspects of religious ritual, particularly at the expense of allowing the material evidence to speak for itself, are apparent. In order to see all these fragments of evidence – the snippets of text, the inscriptions, the Capua Vetere frescos, and the Mainz Cup – as linked, requires a certain kind of mindset, an expectation of what ‘mystery cults’ involve. This is the kind of approach that has built up the case for Mithraic initiation rituals from disparate sources. Without these expectations though, what sort of evidential base does this selection of material constitute when it comes to mounting a powerfully interpretive argument about the workings of a supposed religion which spread from Asia Minor and Syria to Britain across the entirety of the Roman Empire and flourished for at least three centuries?

Classifying the Worship of Jupiter Dolichenus What do we do if we have no literary sources whatsoever? Generally, though it has received less attention than some other cults, that of Jupiter Dolichenus (frequently referred to as Jupiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus in inscriptions) has been approached with a certain amount of gusto inflected with a note of caution.54 The god was associated with the town of Doliche in Commagene, modern day southern Turkey, where on a nearby hilltop a male god had long since been worshipped (Figure 4.3). The name of the god, and representations of a bearded male figure 53 54

CIMRM 1301. For example, A. Collar, Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas (Cambridge, 2013) 80: ‘We know about the cult from the epigraphic and archaeological material . . . however, unlike other so-called “Oriental” cults, such as Mithraism, we know nothing about the cultic ideology or theology’, the only difference between their evidentiary bases being texts.

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

Figure 4.3 Bronze statuette of Jupiter Dolichenus. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , found at Mauer-an-der-Url, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The statuette displays a common Roman conception of Jupiter Dolichenus in military dress, brandishing a doubleaxe and lightning bolt. The dedication beneath reads, ‘To Jupiter Dolichenus, greatest and best, Marrius Ursinus, a veteran, following a command, freely, gladly, and deservedly set this up’. Photograph: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

standing on top of a bull brandishing an axe and lightning, can be found at various sites across the Roman world in the second and third centuries , particularly along the empire’s frontiers.55 Today the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus is usually referred to as an Eastern cult (or some such 55

Though appearances of the god may differ, common traits are the double-axe grasped in his left hand, lightning in his right, and his stance on top of a bull. All of these features do, however, vary, as well as the god’s beard, hair, costume, and whether he appears alone or in company.

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    

variation), not a mystery.56 This is the product of both an increasingly rigorous academic separation of what are potentially different things, but equally the degree to which the classification of a ‘mystery’ cult is reliant upon texts.57 Material evidence, no matter how suggestive it might be, cannot define a mystery; it can only supplement a descriptive that must be drawn from texts. On the one hand, dropping this term has been a positive step: the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus can now be framed not in terms of essentially comparative literary sources that do not relate directly to it, but rather in terms of what evidence we have for this god’s worship, all of which is material-cultural or epigraphic.58 But at the same time, the subject has been removed from the study of mystery cults precisely because of the absence of texts. Ironically, far from arguing outside of the confines of a textual tradition, in denying that the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus might constitute a mystery cult, scholars are working within what this tradition allows for and have duly framed their approaches as a result of a lack of textual references to the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus. As a consequence,

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The term is assiduously avoided in several important recent approaches to Jupiter Dolichenus, for example M. Blömer, ‘Iuppiter Dolichenus zwischen lokalem Kult und reichsweiter Verehrung’, in M. Blömer and E. Winter (eds.), Iuppiter Dolichenus: vom Lokalkult zur Reichsreligion (Tübingen, 2012) 39–98; Collar, Religious Networks. Sanzi (Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus, 233) states that the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus does not represent a mystery cult, a line adhered to by Roger Beck in his review of E. Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus: un ‘culto orientale’ fra tradizione e innovazione: riflessioni storicoreligiose, Bryn Mawr Classical Review (24 May 2014). For the image see M. Hörig and E. Schwertheim, Corpus Cultus Iovis Dolichenus (Leiden, 1987) (henceforward CCID) no. 291. In the past, scholars had no such qualms in referring to the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus as a mystery. The characterization was implicit in Cumont’s The Mysteries of Mithra, 36, 48, 178 and in his The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, tr. G. Showerman (Chicago, 1911) 130–4, but stated explicitly elsewhere: Études syriennes (Paris, 1917) 180, 194. In using Cumont’s interpretation of ‘Oriental cults’, C. Sanders, ‘Jupiter Dolichenus’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 23 (1902) 84–92, appears to have accepted their relation to ‘mysteries’ as did A. H. Kan, Jupiter Dolichenus: Sammlung der Inschriften und Bilderwerke (Leiden, 1943), who did not depart from the characteristic framing of ‘Oriental religions’ derived from Cumont. Similarly, Merlat (Jupiter Dolichenus: essai d’interprétation et de synthèse, esp. 5, 100, 190–7, 209–10), at no point contravenes Cumont’s representation of these collective cults as mystic. Recent studies of the god’s cult barely make mention of the lack of texts, focusing on the positives of the material evidence instead, for example E. von Winter (ed.), Von Kummuh nach Telouch: historische und archäologische Untersuchungen in Kommagene (Bonn, 2011); Blömer and Winter (eds.), Iuppiter Dolichenus: vom Lokalkult zur Reichsreligion; Collar, Religious Networks; Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus. It should come as no surprise that almost all of those who currently study Jupiter Dolichenus are archaeologists and thus, to a degree, it is the subject of a disciplinary divide.

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subsequent readings of the epigraphic and iconographic evidence have confirmed this conclusion. Ultimately this relates to the fact that the categorization of a ‘mystery cult’ has never been constituted through, and rarely been questioned in terms of, material evidence; rather, it is confirmed by it. Ennio Sanzi recently argued that, ‘the cult reserved for Jupiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus is not a cult of mystery: in the entire epigraphic and iconographic heritage there is nothing that lets one lean towards this solution.’59 His detailed investigation of several aspects of the evidence for Jupiter Dolichenus might seem to confirm his assessment, but it should be added that there is nothing in the material record that actively denies or contradicts the assumption of the cult being a mystery (if that is an assumption one wants to make). Sanzi argues that the god’s worship should be considered as an ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ cult. He claims it is not a mystery on comparative grounds, because aspects of the god’s cult do not relate to contemporary mysteries. In particular, he finds no evidence of revelation within the cult, or barriers to knowledge equivalent to other forms of esoteric religion, in particular the ‘grades’ in Mithras worship.60 The images, he concludes, generally relate to two primary concerns of Jupiter Dolichenus: health and stability. These did not require a revelatory aspect to be communicated and had no eschatological basis, but were limited to the mortal lives of the god’s worshippers.61 The argument is developed through images that include Jupiter Dolichenus with other deities, especially on a series of bronze triangles that are presumed to have been mounted on poles (Figures 4.4

59 60

61

Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus, 233 (author’s trans.). See Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus, 221–33, particularly the conclusion on 233. On the difficulty of Mithraic grades as an aspect of this problem see our discussion above, footnote 38. The eschatological side of Sanzi’s argument is highly nuanced, but nevertheless forms a part of his reasoning as to why the cult should not be considered a mystery: Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus, 19–46. The scholarly consensus is that eschatological concerns need not have been a central element in mystic religious belief: C. Aloe-Spada, ‘Aspetti soteriologici del culto di Jupiter Dolichenus’, in U. Bianchi and M. Vermaseren (eds.), La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’Impero romano: atti del Colloquio internazionale su la soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’Impero romano, Roma, 24–28 settembre 1979: pubblicati (Leiden, 1982) 541–51, on Jupiter Dolichenus. G. Sfameni Gasparro’s work has been particularly important, especially Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis (Leiden, 1985), and recently ‘Après Lux perpetua de Franz Cumont: quelle eschatologie dans les “cultes orientaux’’ à mystères?’ in Bricault and Bonnet (eds.), Panthée, 145–67.

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    

Figure 4.4 Bronze triangle from Austria featuring representations of Jupiter Dolichenus and other gods. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , found at Mauer-an-derUrl, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Found in the same hoard as Figure 4.3, this triangle still has its stand attached. From bottom to top the figures have been identified as the Dioscuri; Jupiter Dolichenus and consort; Sol and Luna; an eagle; and finally a winged Victory statuette on top. Photograph: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

and 4.5).62 Appearances with Asclepius and Apollo are easily related to the notion of health. We also have inscriptions asking for the guarantee of salus for individuals, communities and the emperor.63 Inscriptions also make use of terms such as conservator to refer to Jupiter Dolichenus, providing a sense of stability.64 This idea is further discussed through an assessment of the configuration of figures on the bronze triangles. Sanzi’s reading of several of these pieces establishes a series of planes, moving from the terrestrial at the bottom, through to the celestial at the top. On the bottom are positioned figures such as the Castores or Dioscuri, represented in a number of guises, but a fairly consistent feature nevertheless. Occasionally we also find other gods such as Hercules and Mars or Minerva, again associated here with the terrestrial. At the top we often find representations of Sol and Luna underneath an eagle, the latter thought to represent the broad sky across which the celestial bodies travel. Between these planes stand Jupiter Dolichenus and his companion Juno (Regina), standing on top of a bull and either a bull, a goat or a deer, respectively. These figures he interprets as the interlocutors between the celestial and the terrestrial spheres, acting as ‘intra-cosmic’ deities.65 Sanzi argues that all of these elements and their understanding were open to all of the worshippers of the god(s) in the contexts that we find them, and thus none of this understanding appears to have been restricted. Whilst he acknowledges the potential for variations of the god’s cult, he has also sought to establish what was intrinsic or uniform to the god’s worship.

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Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus, 205–33. For the triangles in particular, see also see CCID no. 5–6; S. De Bellis, ‘Sur la typologie des triangles votifs du culte de Jupiter Dolichénien’, in G. Bellelli and U. Bianchi (eds.), Orientalia sacra urbis Romae: Dolichena et Heliopolitana: recueil d’études archéologiques et historico-religieuses sur les cultes cosmopolites d’origine commagénienne et syrienne (Rome, 1996) 455–68. See in particularly Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus, 243–67. Note that these are almost all from Rome: CCID 373, 376, 377, 385, Rome; 529, Stockstadt, Germania Superior. The assessment of U. Bianchi and G. Sfameni Gasparro at the 1978 International Seminar on the Religio-Historical Character of Roman Mithraism (published 1979), suggested that a ‘mysteriosophy’ ran through the Mystery traditions and philosophies of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, which essentially revolved around the ascension of an adherent through various levels of esoteric understanding and spheres of heaven; see U. Bianchi (ed.), Mysteria Mithrae: Atti del Seminario Internazionale su ‘La specificatà storico-religiosa dei Misteri di Mithra, con particolare riferimento alle fonti documentarie di Roma e Ostia’, Roma e Ostia 28–31 Marzo 1978 (Leiden, 1979), in particular G. Sfameni Gasparro, “Riflessioni ulteriori su Mitra dio ‘mistico’,” 399–408. Today, the association of such ideas with uniform doctrine is unlikely to win much support, but it is interesting to observe in the context of approaches taken to Jupiter Dolichenus at the time and since.

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    

Figure 4.5 Bronze triangle featuring representations of Jupiter Dolichenus and other gods. Late 2nd to early 3rd century , unknown findspot, now in the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection, Munich. The triangle, divided into four planes, features Jupiter Dolichenus with his female consort in the centre, three gods identified as Hercules, Minerva and Dionysus above, and an eagle at the very top. The so-called Dioscuri flank a male figure making an offering at an altar in the lower plane. Photograph: © Archäologische Staatssammlung München (photographer: Manfred Eberlein). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

What undermines this approach and ultimately the conclusions regarding the ‘non-mystic’ aspects of the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus, is the underlying expectation of a normative religion. Despite nuanced allowances for variation, this is clear from the assumption of an absolute, underlying principle to the worship of the god which controls assessments

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

of the objects.66 But is it right to establish a ‘normative’ form of worship that we allow to vary, or should we imagine that no such norm existed, and conceive of these groups of evidence (in the places we find them) not as variations so much as separate phenomena that happen to have shared elements? If we imagine similitude, then it is easy to infer religion from our evidence, when in fact the empirical data may provide little reason to do so. If we begin without expecting an inherent connection, then the data highlights some striking similarities, given the distance in time and space between many of our articles of evidence, but need not entail the assumption that these similarities equate to uniformity – let alone some transregional doctrine or ritual repeated across communities and sanctuaries – throughout the archaeologically attested instances. It is not surprising that the bronze triangles present a number of intriguing differences as well as similarities. Their triangular shape is uniform, but they do vary: the long and thin triangle, pointed with something of an arrowhead from Nida in Germany, is quite different from an almost equilateral triangle for which we have no provenance.67 This latter piece has been incised rather than moulded or embossed as the majority were; its figures are difficult to see and it might therefore have been viewed and perhaps used quite differently.68 The ‘normative’ pattern of figures can be found on several triangles, but no two triangles arrange the space in the same way, depict the same figures, depict them in the same manner, or feature the same accoutrements.69

66 67 68 69

Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus, 226ff. CCID 512 and 80 respectively. See also CCID 475, a fragmentary triangle from Aquileia, Raetia that has also been incised. Arrangement of space: sometimes Jupiter Dolichenus dominates the triangle in the central plain, standing alone (CCID 6, 201, 327(a), 512), but in others he is depicted with Juno (e.g. CCID 80, 103, 202, 295 475, 587; K. Gschwantler, Guss + Form: Sonderausstellung: Bronzen aus der Antikensammlung (Vienna, 1986), 142–3, pl. 284). The terrestrial gods – by Sanzi’s reckoning, Hercules and Minerva – appear above Jupiter Dolichenus on one triangle now in Munich, as well as the figure of Dionysus accompanied by a leopard or panther (L. Wamser, C. Flügel and B. Ziegaus, Die Römer zwischen Alpen und Nordmeer: Zivilisatorisches Erbe einer europäischen Militärmacht: Katalog-Handbuch zur Landesausstellung des Freistaates Bayern, Rosenheim, Ausstellungszentrum Lokschuppen vom 12. Mai – 5. November 2000 (Darmstadt, 2000), 236 Ill. 197 Cat. no. 177a (henceforward Wamser et al. 2000); C. Hattler, Imperium der Götter: Isis, Mithras, Christus: Kulte und Religionen im Römischen Reich (Stuttgart, 2013) 299, n. 191) (see image). Figures depicted: these include Serapis (CCID 511) and Juno in the guise of Isis (CCID 512) at Nida; Dionysus, Hercules and Minerva in the aforementioned triangle in Munich (image); a figure interpreted as Jupiter Optimus Maximus appears in some pieces (CCID 103, 202; Wamser et al. 2000). Altars appear regularly, but on some they are entirely absent (CCID 6, 294, 512); standards, whether military or cultic, appear on some (CCID 103, 202, 294, 295; Wamser et al. 2000), and on others, trees appear (CCID 80, 475, 587).

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    

What the evidence suggests is a dynamic pattern of religious iconography with variations. Given the period in which it emerged and spread this should not surprise us in the least.70 It is quite possible that worshippers in different contexts constructed their cult quite differently, given that it appears to have manifested largely through material representations of the deities at its centre. Against this evidence, scholars have frequently been inclined to construct a normative, even monolithic, cult. Most recently, this approach has denied the possibility of mystic elements. But if this normative cult never existed, it is quite possible that some mystic practices formed part of the way the god was worshipped in particular places at certain moments in time. On the Aventine at Rome, a site of Dolichenus worship is next to a large Isiac complex, and in fact contains two representations of Isis and Serapis.71 It also contained two tauroctonies (Mithras killing the bull) and a further Mithraic relief.72 Gods whom we have no problem linking to mystery cults thus appear in exactly the same space as Jupiter Dolichenus. This building also provides us with inscriptions mentioning priests, patrons and candidates, amongst other positions.73 Like the representations of Jupiter Dolichenus, the buildings associated with the figure are far from uniform, so it is hard to generalize. The enclosed form of many, however, suggests some degree of privacy.74 In Balaklava, the building has a form that is easily compared to a mithraeum with a main room equipped 70

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For two classic accounts of religion in this period see A. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford, 1933) and E. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, 1965). The period continues to excite interest and elicit a variety of approaches from K. Hopkins’ A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (London, 1999) to works on pilgrimage (e.g. J. Elsner and I. Rutherford (eds.), Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 2005)), and on the individual in religion (Rüpke, Individual in the Religions). CCID 365, 386; R. Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire, tr. A. Nevill (Oxford, 1996) 161. On Jupiter Dolichenus in Rome see Bellelli and Bianchi, Orientalia sacra urbis Romae; B. FowlkesChilds, ‘The Cult of Jupiter Dolichenus in the City of Rome: Syrian Connections and Local Contexts’, in Blömer and Winter (eds.), Iuppiter Dolichenus: vom Lokalkult zur Reichsreligion, 211–24. CCID 367–8, 369. For example: CCID 373, 376, 382, 383. J. Rüpke, ‘Structural Change in the Cult of Jupiter Dolichenus: Observations on the Inscriptions of the Aventine Dolichenum’, in J. Rüpke (ed.), Fasti sacerdotum: A Prosopography of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian Religious Officials in the City of Rome, 300 BC to AD 499 (Oxford, 2008) 51–6, provides an extensive discussion of these inscriptions. See the review of H. Schwarzer, ‘Die Heiligtümer des Iuppiter Dolichenus’, in Blömer and Winter (eds.), Iuppiter Dolichenus: vom Lokalkult zur Reichsreligion, 143–210. The buildings themselves come in a variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from an extended temple site at Doliche itself, and a 37  16 m site at Saalburg to a 3.5 m circular room in Egeta. We know of

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with raised, flanking platforms either side of a central corridor, presided over by a cult image at the end.75 We have very little notion of the ritual dramas that took place in such buildings, so should we exclude the possibility of a mystic organization? The arguments against a mystic element to the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus have been mounted not on the basis of what the evidence does, but on what it does not do. It does not present us an unknown; a hidden mystery. How could it? A text can tell us that there is something we do not know or that is not represented in the imagery, and can artfully not tell us what it is. Visual and material-cultural evidence, however, simply does not work that way: it will never of itself announce that there is a mystery behind it. This reckoning of the god’s cult presumes that there was nothing to reveal that was not already known; nothing that was not already on display and intelligible to all. The diversity of the images, however, and the different ways that they may be interpreted as a result of how they are configured speaks against this. To see was not necessarily to know, and furthermore we can only guess at the variety of rituals that might have taken place in the diverse buildings that appear to have housed the god’s worship.

5.

Beyond Expectations in the Evidence

If a text were to emerge tomorrow referring to the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus as a mystery cult, it is all but certain that scholarship would at once call it a mystery cult. But this too would be misguided. Given the diversity that we have only briefly touched on, the discovery of a new text would simply confirm a possibility that already existed. This is not to argue that the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus constituted a mystery cult or that it did not. The presence or absence of mystery in any particular instance of a religion need not imply that the cult as a whole was always a mystery cult for all its adherents, or that it was never so. Arguably monolithic normativity (as Christianity strove with such effort to establish for itself ) was probably of very little importance to the religious world of pagan polytheism, in contradiction to the reflexes and assumptions of those who approach such religions from a mindset framed by the expectations

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about 30, of which 15 have left remains; the rest are known through epigraphy or conjectured on the basis of finds. T. Sarnowski and O. J. Savelia, Balaklava: Römische Militärstation und Heiligtum des Jupiter Dolichenus (Warsaw, 2000).

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    

of the ‘world religions’. As a result, we might observe the potential for what could be described as ‘mystic’ practices in various places where the god was worshipped, but not in others. It may even be argued that the need for scripture in religion, which was manifested in the Roman state’s eventual choice of Christianity as its sole faith, and which is repeatedly evidenced in the survival of what we now call the world religions (all of which are based in scripture), was ultimately dependent on the need to control and define the radically disparate practices and beliefs of communities that professed to be devoted to a particular god or pantheon. Scripture, and the commentary that went with it, created the possibility for orthodoxy. But orthodoxy is not something imaginable in the visual, oral and ritual world of ancient religious practice. Similarly, the surviving textual evidence for Mithraic worship comes from external sources: Porphyry and Christian writers. It is also from nonMithraic sources that we have the ancient attestation for the worship of Mithras being called ‘mysteries’.76 To what extent, then, are we justified in so ubiquitously referring to the ‘mysteries of Mithras’?77 There is little explicit evidence that the worship of Mithras had any clear salvific connotations of an afterlife, unlike other contemporaneous ‘mystery cults’ such as that of Isis.78 Without this element of afterlife, one of the main similarities between Mithraic worship and other mysteries therefore seems to be the idea of initiation and degrees of access to some sort of secret knowledge. Nonetheless, the idea of Mithraic initiation is more problematic than it might appear at first glance, and is largely shaped by modern expectations and interests. Why have we been so insistent – over the course of two chapters – about the need to liberate material culture from the hegemony of texts? It is clearly an enduring methodological challenge to scholars of the ancient world, be they archaeologists, art historians or historians. We have demonstrated that texts – and sometimes remarkably few of them – have been given a degree of primacy, and that the surviving archaeological record has

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E.g. Plutarch, Life of Pompey 22.5 (τελετάς τοῦ Μίθρου – mysteries of Mithras); Justin Martyr First Apology 66 (τοῖς τοῦ Μίθρα μυστηρίοις – in the mysteries of Mithras); Origen Contra Celsum VI.22 (Περσικὰ μυστήρια – Persian mysteries); Porphyry De abstinentia 2.56. Roger Beck in fact refers to this as the ‘proper and ancient name’ of Mithras-worship (‘Mithraism since Franz Cumont’, 2004). The sacrifice of the bull clearly has some sort of regenerative function in certain contexts, as we can see on those reliefs and statues where the tail or blood of the animal turns into ears of grain (for example, CIMRM 435, 593), but apart from that there is no real suggestion of a Mithraic afterlife, or salvation in any world except this one.

Mystery Cult and Material Culture

often been required to conform to the expectations derived from textual exegesis. But what should be equally clear is that this methodological claim – founded in the demand to treat archaeological data as an equal partner with literary evidence – is in fact, and simultaneously, a historiographic claim about the systematic presence of Christianizing perspectives in the priority of scripture as still the controlling frame and interest in the study of ancient charismatic religions.

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5

The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity: Between Politics and Religion in the Forms of Late Roman Art ś 

There is a very good case for supposing that not only the idea of late antique art, but indeed of late antiquity itself as a meaningful historical period, was invented in Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The ideological dynamics are significant, and help to explain the usual understanding of a temporal formulation (‘late antiquity’) to determine what is in fact a culturally and geographically specific designation – that is, a Europeancentred history and archaeology, as opposed to one that looks more globally towards Asia. Indeed, east of Iran, no one uses the term ‘late antique’ for the artistic innovations of the first few centuries  which led to the rise of distinctive artistic production in the religious cultures that have come to be called Buddhist, Jain and Hindu.

1.

Vienna c. 1900: The Light of Catholic Europe and Darkness from the East

In what would in retrospect come to be seen as a late moment of European imperial grandeur before the First World War, a culture of well-financed and state-supported scholarship was allowed to focus considerable resources on, and invest a substantial interest in, the late Roman imperial period. The drive for this, within the German-speaking world of the humanities, may in part be seen as a Roman Catholic Austro-Hungarian reaction against the ancient Greek obsessions (both aesthetic and historical) of Protestant Prussia.1 Where it had been normal to dismiss both Roman and later medieval art as a decline from Greek ideals of naturalistic representation in German art history and archaeology, in Austria the arts and culture of the later Roman Empire, in particular in its Christian phase, were open to being presented as offering a ready and positive homology 1

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On the German love affair with Greece, see e.g. E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge, 1935); S. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996); C. Güthenke, Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism 1770–1840 (Oxford, 2008).

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with the (contemporary) arts and culture of the Holy Roman Empire in its late Habsburg phase.2 Far from decadence, the contemporary Habsburg moment could be seen as a cultural and creative apogee built on the long history of the German-speaking Catholic imperial project, just as Constantine’s Christian empire could be regarded as the fulfilment and zenith of the Roman imperial process, which had begun with Augustus over three centuries earlier. While one might argue that the advent of Christianity is the most significant and decisive factor for historical and cultural change between the ancient and medieval worlds in the West, the Austrian ideological need to provide ancestral rooting for the Catholic Holy Roman Empire in both the Roman imperial system (after Augustus) and its reinvention as a Christian empire (under Constantine) gave the story a distinctive twist of continuity. One issue that profoundly problematizes our own response to the intellectual construction of late antiquity in the late imperial European context (and this is precisely paralleled by the serious account of Byzantium created in late Romanoff Russia, on which see Maria Lidova’s Chapter 6 in this volume) is the fundamental fissure in modern Europe marked by the First World War. The aftermath of the war, with the end of the imperial monoliths as well as the economic and political crises of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, represented a transformation in all the historical and ideological circumstances that gave rise to the drive for thinking about the late Roman Christian empire at the close of the nineteenth century. The Austro-Hungarian regime, its dual Habsburg monarchy, its careful stitching together of states and peoples across a large and linguistically disparate swathe of central Europe collapsed, as did the Russian empire. If there was an attraction in 1920s and 1930s Europe for late antiquity, it lay in the mythical memory of a stable world free of economic and military crisis. What had been forged as a contemporary imperial fantasy of likeness between the late Roman or Byzantine state and the current Austrian or Russian empires, turned very shortly after the First World War into a nostalgic daydream of the longevity of stable statehood. This radical difference between the historical conditions that gave rise to the idea of late antiquity and the reality within which this idea came to intellectual fruition in part provided the impetus for what would be, in the 1920s, a highly creative interrogation of the late nineteenth-century

2

See M. Olin, ‘Alois Riegl: The Late Roman Empire in the Late Hapsburg Empire’, Austrian Studies 5 (1994) 107–20.

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work on late antique art, which arguably established the foundations of modern art history.3 We may isolate two conflicting drives in the late Habsburg era, both of which played themselves out in competing visions of late antiquity and its art. In the first place, there was an optimistic emphasis on the internal resources of a large and multicultural empire (both late Roman and Austro-Hungarian) to weather, manage and embrace change in a positive spirit and as a progressive development. This view – associated in particular with the art historians of the Vienna School, notably Franz Wickhoff (1853–1909) and Alois Riegl (1858–1905), and dependent on positivistic, evolutionary thinking in the natural sciences4 – fostered a vision of the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire into what ultimately became the Holy Roman Empire, as a force for good, a civilizing process for all the multiplicity of nations and races that made up the late Roman state (in parallel to the overtly multicultural and multilingual Habsburg empire). This mapped out as an account of material culture and art whose styles and forms may have changed from earlier antiquity but which were of fundamentally equal value with the art and material culture of Greek and Roman times. In contrast, but at the same time, a more pan-Germanicist tendency – dismissive of peoples and races that were not Germanic, paranoid about external forces potentially corrupting what good had been preserved from the degeneracies of historical change in modernity – offered a much more pessimistic model. In late antique art, this model presented the cults and nonnaturalistic art forms of the East as invading and corrupting the last vestiges of the Greek spirit, which had survived in the Roman world, with aesthetic forms that would drive the last nails into the coffin of Greek naturalism. The fears for a Habsburg world threatened from all sides, within and without, mapped itself onto an art history where the Hellenic glories fell in late antiquity into Semitic decadence. This thesis, promulgated at the same moment at Riegl’s account of late antique art, came to a head in the work of Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941), a professor at Graz who in 1909 would be called to Vienna to succeed Wickhoff. Both models – fundamental to all the writing and thinking about the art history of late antiquity that has taken place since – are effectively versions of aspirations and anxieties about the

3

4

The outdatedness of Alois Riegl’s nineteenth-century assumptions is in part the starting point for the hugely important discussion of Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg, ‘Alois Riegl: Die Spatromische Kunstindustrie’ (1929), Art History 39/1 (2016) 84–97. Again a point well made by Kaschnitz von Weinberg, ‘Alois Riegl: Die Spatromische Kunstindustrie’.

The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity

late Austro-Hungarian Empire. It has to be said that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, this seems like a distinctly weird starting point for modern reflections on late antique art, particularly if one includes the visual cultures of the non-Christian world looking east to India and China. In 1894–5, discussing an illuminated early Christian manuscript in the Vienna Library, the so-called Vienna Genesis, Franz Wickhoff presented a reinterpretation of Roman art as a valid and valuable cultural phenomenon, with aesthetic effects parallel to the most up-to-date and contemporary aesthetics of the avant-garde – such as Impressionism.5 It may be noted that Wickhoff’s book is – surprisingly but significantly – the first positive account of Roman art in its own right, rather than the usual narrative of a steady decline from the glory that was Greece.6 In 1901, in a landmark volume, Alois Riegl published his magisterial Late Roman Art Industry, a book which made a vibrant claim for late antique art within the Roman Empire as being far from decadent and the expression of the collective cultural will of its time.7 It is this book, huge in its influence well beyond the fields of art history and archaeology,8 that established the concept of late antiquity as a historical period.9 5

6 7

8

9

W. Ritter von Hartel and F. Wickhoff, Die Wiener Genesis, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1894–5), esp. pp. 1–98 and 143–66 of the text volume (all written by Wickhoff ), with the key section on Roman art translated by E. Strong as F. Wickhoff, Roman Art: Some of Its Principles and Their Application to Early Christian Painting (London, 1900). See O. Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven, 1979) 28–9. A. Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna, 1901) volume 1. Translated (horribly) by R. Winkes as Late Roman Art Industry (Rome, 1985). For some historiographic discussion see Brendel, Prolegomena, 25–47. For sociologists inspired by Riegl see Max Weber, ‘The Meaning of “Value Freedom” in the Sociological and Economic Sciences’ (1917) in Collected Methodological Writings (London, 2012) 304–34, esp. 322–3 and K. Mannheim, ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung’ (1923) in From Karl Mannheim (New York, 1971) 8–58. For his influence among Marxists, see G. Lukács in ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (1922) in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, tr. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA, 1971) 153; W. Benjamin: ‘Berlin Chronicle’ (1932) in Selected Writings vol. 2, part 2, 1931–34 (Cambridge, MA, 1999) 615; ‘The Rigorous Study of Art’ (1932) in Selected Writings vol. 2, 668; ‘Johann Jakob Bachofen’ (1934–5) in Selected Writings vol. 3, 1935–38 (Cambridge, MA, 2002) 10; ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility’ (second version, 1935–6) in Selected Writings vol. 3, 104 and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility’ (third version, 1936–9) in Selected Writings vol. 4, 1938–40 (Cambridge, MA, 2003) 255; and especially his ‘Curriculum Vitae (VI): Dr Walter Benjamin’ (1940) in Selected Writings vol. 4, 381 where Late Roman Art Industry is the first book mentioned in the list of ‘decisively influential’ writings ‘some of them far from my main field of study’. Also Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997) 60, 156, 169 and Umberto Eco Postscript to ‘The Name of the Rose’, tr. W. Weaver (San Diego, 1984) 66. See A. Giardina, ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi Storici 40 (1999) 157–80, esp. 157–9; J. Elsner, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901’, Art History 25 (2002)

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Riegl’s book combines a significant modernist aesthetics (notably its title’s gesture to industrial production and the focus of its last chapter on arts and crafts as of equal historical and artistic value alongside the high arts of sculpture, painting and architecture) with an extraordinarily rigorous formalist account of a vast range of objects of all kinds. The argument was designed to demonstrate that the changes in visual style and form, which earlier scholarship had (pretty universally) interpreted in terms of decline and corruption were in fact the result of changes in the artistic and cultural will of the later Roman era. In a gesture redolent of the psychological interests that permeated the Vienna of Freud, Riegl offered a historical account of art with a significant place for the subjective volition of artists, viewers and cultural collectives. Yet, even in what was designed to be a normative and essentially Eurocentric Western model for late antique art as a kind of homology to the contemporary Holy Roman Empire, in fact Riegl’s project was governed by a deeply apologetic defence of an aesthetics and an era in the face of art-historical scholarship’s Hellenocentric adherents of medieval decline. This was simultaneously a historical defence of late antiquity against a largely antipathetic scholarly tradition and a contemporary nationalistic justification of (Catholic) Austro-Hungarian culture against that of (mainly Protestant) imperial Germany. In different ways, these stories – both the work of Riegl and Wickhoff at the end of the nineteenth century and the various responses in the discipline in the first decades of the twentieth – are an argument about the internal progress and regeneration of the European artistic tradition from and within its own resources. One of the crucial aspects of the Rieglian legacy is the notion of a Eurocentric self-sufficiency about artistic development, which was itself a development of the kinds of thinking about the Greek tradition which defined both the Renaissance and the neoclassical Enlightenment thought of J. J. Winckelmann. This European story about the post-antique heritage of European traditions of art (whether in the western Middle Ages or Byzantium) chooses to emphasize continuous internal development within the visual tradition and to elide the 358–79; W. Liebeschuetz, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity’, Antiquité Tardive 12 (2004) 253–61, esp. 254–5; H. Inglebert, ‘Introduction: Late Antique Conceptions of Late Antiquity’, in S. Johnson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012) 1–17, esp. 1. The most nuanced historical approach to the great contribution of the Viennese (not only Riegl but Strzygowski, on whom see below, and indeed a larger intellectual community) to the concept and study of late antiquity, beyond but including its art, is G. Fowden, Before and After Muhammad (Princeton, 2014) 23–37 and 42–4.

The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity

fundamental differences implicit in the move from pagan polytheism to Christian hegemony within the territories of the Roman Empire. It is not only tendentious but also an apologetic claim against another set of views, which surfaced at the same time as Riegl published Late Roman Art Industry and were polemically targeted against it. The long tradition of Christian theology had always recognized that Christianity was something radically new in its advent into the Roman world. It came from the East with models of canonical scripture and Hebraic, rather than Graeco-Roman, categories of thought that were not remotely normative in pagan antiquity. Protestant scholarship – which was the dominant theological tradition in the years after the Reformation (and against which the Catholic Viennese were in part reacting) – tended to see the emergence of Christian art as a form of degeneracy from the pure, aniconic and scriptural world that was imagined as the earliest Church.10 Hellenic traditions – such as the veneration of images and other kinds of ‘idolatry’ – corrupted the pristine integrity of the new religion, leading to the kinds of medieval Catholicism,11 from which it took Martin Luther’s Reformation to rescue the Church. But for those who upheld an aesthetic ideal of the glories of Greek art, this narrative was reversible. While Christianity was always capable of corruption by Hellenism, the wonders of Greek and Roman naturalism were equally corruptible by the degenerate and non-naturalistic arts of the Semitic East, brought into the Roman world by the adherents of oriental cults like Christianity. That is, if the ancient history of the West were understood not as a triumphant tale of imperial progression through time (in the manner of Wickhoff and Riegl) but as a sad narrative of artistic decline from the Greeks to the Middle Ages, then the racial intervention of degenerates from the East was a powerful model of explanation, picking up on a host of contemporary prejudices against all kinds of primitive colonials and, not least, Semites. In 1901, the same year as the publication of Late Roman Art Industry, another Austrian professor – one of the world’s greatest experts on ancient Coptic, Jewish, Islamic and eastern Christian art – Josef Strzygowski published The Orient or Rome?, a brutal attack on the continuity model of Roman and early Christian art envisaged by Wickhoff in his book on the 10

11

The inspiration for this position lies in the major project of Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), the major Lutheran historian of the early Church. For its principal expression in relation to art see H. Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nachden literarischen Quellen (Göttingen, 1917) esp. 1–3 and 81–105 with the discussion of P. C. Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (Oxford, 1994) 7–10. See Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nachden literarischen Quellen, 81–100.

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Vienna Genesis,12 and he swiftly followed this with a number of assaults on Riegl.13 Although it is easy to personalize the polemic which ensued, and to see it in terms of the very local power-politics of Austro-Hungarian academia,14 the positions taken effectively define profoundly different views of modernity as envisaged through artistic genealogy. Riegl and Wickhoff had embraced and celebrated cultural transformation, cast as stylistic change, emphasizing an internalist but multicultural model of European development. Theirs was an account which stressed the self-sufficiency of the European tradition.15 Strzygowski deplored the decline from Greek naturalistic ideals to the kinds of schematism and abstraction found in early medieval art, and he explored a vast array of visual materials from the East and from Egypt to show how this development in the West was dependent on the malign influence of external forces, although he was also later to argue for positive ‘Aryan’ influences that would bring new life from the

12

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14

15

J. Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom: Beiträge zur Geschichte der spätantiken und früchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig, 1901). For some discussion of Strzygowski, see S. Marchand, ‘The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory 33/4 (1994) 106–30; M. Olin, ‘Art History and Ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski’, in P. S. Gold and B. C. Bax (eds.), Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture (Amsterdam, 2000) 151–70; S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009) 387–426 on Orientalism and art in general and 403–10 on Strzygowski; S. Marchand, ‘Appreciating the Art of Others: Josef Strzygowski and the Austrian Origins of Non-Western Art History’, in P. Scholz and M. Długosz (eds.), Von Biala nach Wien. Josef Strzygowski und die Kunstwissenschaften (Vienna, 2015) 256–85; I. Foletti and F. Lovino (eds.), Orient oder Rom? History and Reception of a Historiographical Myth (1901–1970) (Rome, 2018). See J. Strzygowski, ‘Hellas und des Orients Umarmung’, Beilage zur Münchener Allgemeinen Zeitung, nos. 40 and 41, 18 and 19 February 1902, 313–17 and 325–27 and in his review in Byzantinischer Zeitschrift 11 (1902) 263–6. The former of these is an extraordinary racist rant, very hard to find outside Germany, which ought to be republished and read, perhaps even translated, despite and because of its content. See Alois Riegl, ‘Spätrömisch oder orientalisch’, Beilage zur Münchener Allgemeinen Zeitung, nos. 93 and 94, 22 and 23 April 1902, 133–56 and 162–5, reprinted in Maske und Kothurn 58 (2012) 10–26, translated as ‘Late Roman or Oriental?’ (1902) in G. Schiff (ed.), German Essays on Art History (New York, 1988) 173–90; J. Strzygowski, ‘Die Schicksale des Hellenismus in der Bildenden Kunst’, Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur 8 (1905) 19–33. For discussion see G. Vasold, ‘Riegl, Strzygowski and the Development of Art’, Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011) 103–16 available at http:// arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/vassold.pdf See also G. Rivoira, Lombardic Architecture: Its Origin, Development and Derivatives (1901), tr. G. Rushfoth, 2 vols. (London, 1910), which sees the rise of Gothic as a result of internal developments within the Roman tradition as opposed to external influences. See the discussion of Annabel Wharton, Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge, 1995) 3–12.

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East.16 His story is thus one that depends willy-nilly on global communication, and cultural interaction for good and for ill. It is not internalist or self-sufficient in its view of European art and it gives a strong (although often negative) agency to the late antique arts of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Palestine. In particular, and anticipating a substantive line of thought that would remain on the ascendant in German and Austrian thinking until 1945, Strzygowski blamed ‘the Semitic pack’ for introducing the degeneracy that demolished the aesthetic and cultural standards of Hellenism.17 The politics of this set of narratives are tightly wrapped up in the internal complexities of a long-deceased empire. But the conceptual drives that governed them – multiculturalist and racist, internalist and globalizing, confident and paranoid – would have long histories in the ideologies of the later twentieth century. Within the study of late antique art, as late as the 1970s, the deep polarity of the Rieglian and Strzygowskian approaches continued to frame the field with scholars attempting to find options of compromise.18 Interestingly, neither the stories espoused by Riegl and Wickhoff nor by Strzygowski were primarily concerned with the religious aspects of Christian art. The two narratives were ultimately interpretations of the heritage and continuity of the Graeco-Roman artistic tradition in relation to changes in form and style, not about the advent of a new religious mentality and mythology with origins outside Europe or at any rate on its borders. The deep forces of Eurocentrism – which provide a founding impetus for the interest in late Roman culture – would remain a dominant issue in the study of late antique art, and do so up to the present.

2.

Christian Origins, Infallibility and the Fall of Rome

Since Antonio Bosio (c. 1575–1629) during the Counter-Reformation, one of the principal uses of Christian archaeology had been to affirm the 16

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18

See e.g. C. Maranci, Medieval Armenian Architecture: Constructions of Race and Nation (Louvain, 2001) 85–158. See Olin, ‘Alois Riegl: The Late Roman Empire in the Late Habsburg Empire’, 114–15 and Vasold, ‘Riegl, Strzygowski and the Development of Art’, 106–7. Notably, in the West, one might think of the work of E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making: Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean Art, 3rd–7th Century (London, 1977) 7–21, with critique by Elsner, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity’, 374–6; on Czech art history see P. Hečková, ‘Disquiet in the Camp: The Question of Roman Art and the Orient oder Rom Issue in Czech Art History’, in Foletti and Lovino (eds.), Orient oder Rom?, 131–46 and K. Benešovská, ‘The Epilogue of Orient oder Rom in the 1970s? The Forgotten Work of Václav Mencl’, in Foletti and Lovino (eds.), Orient oder Rom?, 147–62.

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apostolic continuity of Papal Roman Catholicism through the assertion of the continuity of Christian material culture since the very inception of the religion within the city of Rome.19 In the second half of the nineteenth century, and especially during the pontificate of Pius IX (1846–78) – which would proclaim Papal Infallibility at the first Vatican Council in 1870 as the city fell to the armies of a united Italy and the papacy succumbed to the loss of any pretensions to temporal power – a vibrant scholarly and archaeological enterprise of academic institutions and journals was established to affirm ever stronger archaeological links with apostolic origins.20 The key scholarly figures in this nineteenth-century revival were Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822–94)21 and his ordained German followers, resident in Rome, Anton de Waal (1837–1917),22 Franz Xaver Kraus (1840–1901),23 Johannes Peter Kirsch (1861–1941)24 and Josef Wilpert

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See e.g. S. Ditchfield, ‘Text before Trowel: Antonio Bosio’s Roma Soterranea Revisited’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), The Church Retrospective (Stourbridge, 1997) 343–60; S. Ditchfield, ‘Reading Rome as Sacred Landscape, c. 1586–1635’, in W. Coster and A. Spicer (eds.), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005) 167–92, esp. 178–89; I. Oryshkevich, ‘Cultural History in the Catacombs: Early Christian Art and Macarius’s Hagioglypta’, in K. Van Liere, S. Ditchfield and H. Louthan (eds), Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012) 250–66. E.g.: The Commission for Sacred Archaeology founded 1852; the Bollettino di archeologia cristiana established in 1863; Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte founded in 1887; the quinquennial congresso internazionale di archeologia Cristiana, which met first in the Austro-Hungarian city of Spalato in 1894. On the rise of Christian archaeology as an academic discipline: W. H. C. Frend, The Archaeology of Early Christianity: A History (London, 1996) 76–84; F. W. Deichmann, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie (Darmstadt, 1983) 20–25. On its practice in Rome in this period, see C. Salvetti, ‘Storia degli studi di archeologia cristiana II’, in F. Bisconti and O. Brandt (eds.), Lezione di archeologia cristiana (Vatican City, 2014) 31–50. For de Rossi, see P. M. Baumgarten, Giovanni Battista de Rossi, fondatore della scienza di archeologia sacra (Rome, 1892); J. B. Erenstoft, ‘Controlling the Sacred Past: Rome, Pius IX and Christian Archaeology’ (PhD thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2008) 173–96; S. Heid and M. Dennert (eds.), Personenlexikon zur christlichen Archäologie: Forscher und Pernsönlichkeiten vom 16. bis zum 21. Jahrhudert, 2 vols. (Regensburg, 2012) 400–5 (S. Heid); N. Lewis, ‘The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome: How Historiography Helped Create the Crypt of the Popes’, Archive für Religionsgeschichte 20 (2018) 91–109; G. Parpulov, ‘De Rossi’s School and Early Christian Iconography’, Journal of Art Historiography 19 (2018) 1–10. On De Waal, see E. Gatz, Anton de Waal (1837–1917) und der Campo Santo Teutonico (Rome, 1980); Heid and Dennert (eds.), Personenlexikon zur christlichen Archäologie, 410–12 (S. Heid). For Kraus, see e.g. E. Hauviller, Franz Xaver Kraus: ein Lebensbild aus der Zeit des Reformkatholizismus (Colmar, 1904); Heid and Dennert (eds.), Personenlexikon zur christlichen Archäologie, 758–61 (M. Dennert). For Kirsch, see Heid and Dennert (eds.), Personenlexikon zur christlichen Archäologie, 732-5 (S. Heid).

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(1857–1944).25 The tendentiousness of the programme was explicit: attention to each catacomb in its own archaeological integrity (a laudable method in fact) was justified because early Christian monuments . . . do not belong to a dead civilization of the past . . . but by their nature serve the lofty aim of illuminating the origins of [our] most holy religion.26

That is, Roman Catholic apologetics against Protestant aniconism was cashed out as a continuity narrative of Christian visual culture back to the very origins and located in the soil of the holy city of Rome. This is not only a Romanocentric story but a Eurocentric one too. Moreover, the alliance of new technologies of photography and the subsequent colouring of photographs allowed a focus on the content of Christian images on sarcophagi and in catacombs with the confident deduction of their meanings: What catacomb painters depicted is, by its very nature, almost always easily and generally understandable: the content must needs correspond to the simple form of composition.27 Given the compositional simplicity of these images, their interpretation must also be clear and definite.28

By contrast with the Viennese stylistic narrative (whether of Eurocentric continuity or of the invasion from the Orient), the Roman continuity story focused on Christian content and meaning. While the Roman school of Christian archaeology was happy (unlike Riegl) to collude in the model of decline as a stylistic description of the chronological development of late Roman art,29 the key issue was ‘to penetrate the ideas of its artists or rather, of those who guided them’ (which one might gloss as the fathers who formulated Christian theology).30 The obsession with meaning led to a focus on symbolism:31 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

See R. Sörries, Josef Wilpert. (1857–1944). Ein Leben im Dienste der christlichen Archäologie (Würzburg, 1998); S. Heid (ed.) Giuseppe Wilpert, archeologo cristiano (Vatican City, 2009); Heid and Dennert (eds.), Personenlexikon zur christlichen Archäologie, 1323–5 (S. Heid). G. B. de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, vol. 1 (Rome, 1864) 78–9. J. Wilpert, Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms (Freiburg, 1903) 141. J. Wilpert, Erlebnisse und Ergebnisse im Dienste der christlichen Archäologie (Freiburg, 1930), 54. E.g. Wilpert, Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms, 125 and 136. See ibid., 149. For some reflections on the methodologies of de Rossi and Wilpert, see A. Recio Veganzones, ‘G. B. de Rossi: iconografo ed iconologo’, in N. Cambi and E. Marin (eds.), Radovi XIII Međunarodnog kongresa za starokršćansku arheologiju, vol. 1 (Vatican City and Split, 1998) 223–74; F. Bisconti, ‘Giuseppe Wilpert: iconografo, iconologo, storico dell’arte’, in Heid (ed.), Giuseppe Wilpert, archeologo cristiano, 249–60.

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From a sign or image we are to infer something else, so that what we see is simply a symbol, a visible token (Sinnbild) of another thing.32

Such symbolism was a matter of reaching back beyond doctrinal and local differentiation to an originary Christian unity of word and image shared as the ‘common property of the entire Church’: Early Christian symbolism is a matter for reason, not fantasy. It is based on simple, sound, rational laws and principles, which can be established only through comparative study of all surviving monuments, both written and figural: namely, what inscriptions sometimes state in words, figural art represents in images. . . . The two explain and complement each other. Such agreement shows that the symbolism found in them was not something understood and used by individual Christian communities but was common property of the entire Church.33

In the teens of the twentieth century, this content-driven emphasis combined with a manifesto for Christian newness was taken up by Riegl’s successor in Vienna Max Dvořák to explain the fundamental transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages as residing in the spiritual content of Christian art.34 Writing in 1919, in the context of the crisis of the First World War and the collapse of the old imperial certainties, Dvořák combines an idealizing sense of radical Christian renewal borrowed from Wilpert’s work on the catacombs with the positive transformative and collective cultural will he inherited from Riegl to adopt a redemptive picture of medieval art as a Christian art – a ‘new conception of art which, because of its extreme spiritual concentration and purity of form, was utterly revolutionary’.35 He subordinates ‘artistic purpose and significance’ to ‘abstract, intellectual and theological content’ which he ties to ‘meaning’ in terms of ideas that are ultimately cashed out in Christian writing.36 This brings about ‘a new spiritual orientation’ which may come with ‘a somewhat inert, rigid 32

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F. X. Kraus (ed.), Real-encyklopädie der christlichen Alterthümer, vol. 2 (Freiburg, 1886) 804 (Dipper). J. Wilpert, Ein Cyclus christologischer Gemälde aus der Katakombe der heiligen Petrus und Marcellinus (Freiburg, 1891) 12. Particularly in a series of courses taught in Vienna in 1917, rewritten in 1919 as his essay ‘The Catacomb Paintings – the Beginnings of Christian Art’, in M. Dvořák, The History of Art as the History of Ideas (London, 1984) 1–25 (published originally and posthumously as ‘Katakombenmalereien. Die Anfänge der christlichen Kunst’, in Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (Munich, 1921) 1–40). See esp. H. Aurenhammer, ‘Max Dvořák and the History of Medieval Art’, Journal of Art Historiography 2 (2010) 1–17, 4–10, available at https:// arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_152487_en.pdf Dvořák, ‘The Catacomb Paintings’, 25. Ibid., 12.

The Viennese Invention of Late Antiquity

appearance’ but ‘does not – as was the case in early oriental art – stem from the immobility of an idol . . .’.37 In the wake of the collapse of the Habsburg state, as in the moment of the fall of Rome as a site of papal power, a Eurocentric (indeed Roman Catholic and Romanocentric) vision of renewal in resistance to Strzygowskian decadence and external threat was promulgated as an almost nostalgic fantasy of better times.

3.

Riegl’s Late Antiquity and the Discipline of Art History

In the larger field of art history, it would be Riegl’s work (in other words, the issue of style rather than content as defining visual culture)38 that proved monumentally influential. In order to justify his argument, Riegl had cause to invent a concept – which he called Kunstwollen – meaning something like ‘artistic will’ or ‘cultural drive’ which is not only untranslatable but was to prove one of the most controversial, influential and radical ideas ever formulated in the history of art.39 While Riegl’s assault on the decadence of late Roman art would be resisted (indeed largely overturned) by scholarship in the decades after his book was published,40 most of his methods (and notably his thesis of Kunstwollen as a collective social force that explained both how objects appeared and how they were generated) were rapidly assimilated, although in rather different ways across both art history and archaeology.41 The idea – frequent and 37 38

39

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41

Ibid., 13–14. See esp. S. Alpers, ‘Style Is What You Make It: The Visual Arts Once Again’, in B. Lang (ed.), The Concept of Style (Ithaca, NY, 1979) 137–62. The style/content problem remains perennial: see now R. Osborne, The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece (Princeton, 2018) for a plea for the return to content. The literature on Kunstwollen is vast; for relatively recent accounts, see M. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park, PA, 1992) 71–2, 129–53; M. Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA, 1993) 6–16, 71–3, 76–83, 96–112; A. Neher, ‘“The Concept of Kunstwollen”, neo-Kantianism, and Erwin Panofsky’s Early Art Theoretical Essays’, Word and Image 20/1 (2004) 41–51; Matthew Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse of History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Detroit, 2006); J. Elsner, ‘From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen’, Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer, 2006) 741–66; M. Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918 (University Park, PA, 2013) 37–44; D. Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna, 1875–1905 (Aldershot, 2014) 202–7. A famous voice affirming decline is Bernard Berenson, The Arch of Constantine, or the Decline of Form (London, 1954) 18–19, 21–3, 32 – all directly against Wickhoff and Riegl. See J. Elsner, ‘Alois Riegl and Classical Archaeology’, in Peter Noever, Artur Rosenauer and Georg Vasold (eds.), Alois Riegl Revisited: Beiträge zu Werk und Rezeption/Contributions to the Opus and its Reception (Vienna, 2010) 45–57.

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uncontroversial in most art history and archaeology, even today – that an object expresses its culture in some way, or embodies the mentalities of those who made and used it, ultimately comes down to the assumption that what Riegl called Kunstwollen is working in the culture as a kind of active force disseminating its world-view. In the relatively new discipline of art history, in the decades after Riegl’s death in 1905, the theoretical battle over what Kunstwollen meant and how it should be employed came to define significant aspects of the field – notably the work of many Austrian scholars in the Vienna School from Max Dvořák to Otto Pächt and Hans Sedlmayr, and of a number of the more theoretical German scholars in the orbit of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg – especially Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind.42 The debates between these scholars, focusing on problems that are at the very heart of writing a history of art (including the place of subjectivity and psychology, the relation of the scholar’s interpretive position to that of the culture he or she studies, the ways form and style may structure content, the question of whether the form of a work of art is an essential expression of its culture of creation or whether its meanings are conventionally attached to it by varieties of interpretation) are beyond a discussion of late antiquity specifically, and indeed the bulk of these scholars were not themselves primarily concerned with late antique art.43 But it is striking that insofar as they were thinking with and against Late Roman Art Industry, their work was informed by a deep reflection on the problems of late antique art as Riegl had inflected them. Take this passage from the end of a classic paper by Panofsky, which attempted to establish a priori principles for the investigation of works of art of any period or culture:

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For some discussion, see e.g. C. Wood, ‘Introduction’, in C. Wood (ed.), The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York, 2000) 9–72; J. Elsner and K. Lorenz, ‘The Genesis of Iconology’, Critical Inquiry 38 (2012) 483–512; J. Elsner and M. Schwarz, ‘The Genesis of Struktur: Kaschnitz-Weinberg’s Review of Riegl and the New Viennese School’, Art History 39/1 (2016) 70–83. The essential papers in this debate – at the core of the theoretical developments of art history in the 1920s – are: E. Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’ (1920), tr. K. Northcott and J. Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8 (1981) 17–33; E. Panofsky, ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’ (1925), tr. K. Lorenz and J. Elsner, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008) 43–71; E. Wind, ‘On the Systematics of Artistic Problems’ (1925), tr. F. Elliott, Art in Translation 1 (2009) 211–57; Kaschnitz von Weinberg, ‘Alois Riegl: Die Spatromische Kunstindustrie’; Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Towards a Rigorous Study of Art’ (1931), tr. M. Fineman, in Wood (ed.), The Vienna School Reader, 133–79; E. Panofsky ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’ (1932), tr. K. Lorenz and J. Elsner, Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012) 467–82.

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We all agree that a certain style could neither emerge from another one nor be followed by another one, as every artistic phenomenon carries only very specific possibilities of development in itself. The development of these possibilities might be regulated by completely unpredictable circumstances, as is demonstrated for example by Gandharan art, Sassanid art, Byzantine art, and the art of the early Nordic middle ages— whose common beginning lies in late antiquity but whose peculiarities of form depend on wholly individual and therefore not predictable contexts. But at the same time we can understand the development that led from late antiquity to these exceptional styles as meaningful insofar as we can recognize the artistic character of late antiquity and also the indefinite multifariousness of elements of modification (which admittedly one can only grasp after the event and never in their completeness).44

At the very least, we may say, in this rather abstract and difficult formulation – which is about the problems of stylistic development in general – the complexities of late antique art, as conceived in both the geographic and the temporal breadth understood by the Empires of Faith project, are directly inherited from Riegl and central to Panofsky’s thinking. The principal point, however, is that Riegl’s reflections on the cultural transformation of forms in relation to late antique art and the multiculturally inflected (but racist) riposte to this, were the spur and foundation to what would be the most creative theoretical moment in the history of art as a discipline, at least as it was conducted in the German-speaking world and by its post-1930s émigrés.

4.

The Continuity of the Dual Narrative of Late Antique Art

One of the striking aspects of the place of late antique art in the history of the discipline is the continuity but also the reversibility of positive and negative or optimistic and pessimistic interpretive frames. Riegl’s account of late antiquity had largely been a story of progressive internal change, actively aimed at contradicting the model of decline. Strzygowski’s narrative was a lament for decadence triggered by the influence of external forces. In the succeeding years, Classicists would broadly follow Riegl’s internalist emphasis on formal change, largely eschewing too much investment in Christianity, but adopting the trajectory of decline (an old story going back to Winckelmann and Vasari), which Riegl had done so much to 44

Panofsky, ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’, 70.

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combat.45 A second model, accepting Eastern influence and tracing a positive medieval story with its origins in the rise of Christian art, effectively had its roots in Strzygowski’s account but transformed into positive mood-music with a much stronger emphasis on Christian renewal.46 Arguably, the model that stresses the origins of Christian art has its roots not only in the Viennese story but also in a romantic Russian narrative of renewal from the East and of the rise of imperial Constantinople as the Christian Second Rome – the ancestor of Moscow as the Third Rome.47 The two lines (with transformation being either positive or negative and the causes of changes being either internal or external) were mutually exclusive.48 In the 1960s – when André Malraux, De Gaulle’s Minister for Cultural Affairs in France from 1958 to 1969, created the Arts of Mankind series of volumes on the history of art for the French publisher Gallimard, which were produced to very high standards and translated into many European languages – the impasse between the two approaches was so great that two entirely different volumes were commissioned for what is effectively the same subject and period of art. In 1966, Gallimard published The Beginnings of Christian Art, 200–395 by André Grabar (1896–1990) which was translated into English the following year. In 1970, the same press published Rome, the Late Empire: Roman Art 200–400 by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli (1900–75), translated in 1971. There are striking overlaps in the images used, in the geographic span (both books effectively focus on the Roman Empire), in the period covered (exactly the same) and in the range of kinds of objects treated by both books.49 But the White Russian, Paris-based, Orthodox-raised exile from the Revolution – Grabar fled 45

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For example, H. P. L’Orange, Art Forms and Civic Life in the Late Roman Empire (Princeton, 1965) 126–31; R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome, the Late Empire: Roman Art AD 200–400, tr. P. Green (London, 1971) 1–38, 369–78: cf. Berenson, The Arch of Constantine, passim. E.g. A Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins, tr. T. Grabar (Princeton, 1968); T. F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, 1993). See further M. Lidova’s Chapter 6 in this volume. The Russian story is fundamentally different from the Roman Catholic one of Josef Wilpert et al. because it places the energy for Christian newness in the Hellenistic Orient by contrast with Italy (Strzygowski’s externalist model for what happened to European art but turned into a positive), while the Roman school placed its apologetic emphasis on Catholic continuity within Rome itself (Riegl’s internalist model, but Christianized through a focus on new content rather than stylistic and formal change). See e.g. J. Elsner, ‘Late Antique Art: The Problem of the Concept and the Cumulative Aesthetic’, in S. Swain and M. Edwards (eds.), Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire (Oxford, 2004) 271–309, esp. 271–86. A. Grabar, The Beginnings of Christian Art, 200–395 (Princeton, 1967) and Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome, the Late Empire. Page numbers of quotations from these works are given in parentheses in the text.

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Petrograd in November 1917, days after the Bolsheviks seized power – and the Italian Marxist presented radically different and frankly incompatible ideological pictures. Those accounts – written well into the second half of the twentieth century – not only enact the fundamental ideological divide of Europe in the era of the Iron Curtain through its surviving late antique material culture (ironically pitting the émigré Russian against the Italian Communist), but also perform the heritages of both lines of interpretation by playing Grabar’s Russian Byzantinism (ultimately looking to Christian Orthodox renewal in the East) in contrast to Bianchi Bandinelli’s Romanism (rooted in a sense of the implosion of the Italic visual tradition). If we compare their conclusions, Grabar speaks of ‘the rise of an art of truly Christian inspiration’, the modesty and ‘highly discrete nature’ of its early stages, ‘its touching quality’ (279–80). This is the cautious optimism of new beginnings.50 Bianchi Bandinelli writes of a ‘problem-ridden yet exhilarating era’ (369) in which he laments the ‘final break with Hellenistic canons of form’ in the context of ‘profound ideological revolution’ and a world that ‘no longer offered either external security or inner peace of mind’ (371). In particular, he regrets the ‘tendency towards the irrational’, which steadily ‘gains ground during the centuries covered by this book’ (375) to culminate in a ‘new, irrational, symbolic vision’ (377). In his final lines about how ‘external forces . . . played a far smaller part in the overthrow of this great civilization than did the internal transformation which took place in the social fabric of the Roman empire’ (378), Bianchi Bandinelli reveals his close allegiance to Riegl’s internalist model and yet his adoption (in espousing multiple centres for artistic production, in lamenting the changes that took place as a form of decline, in deploring their religious inspiration) of most of the driving forces of the Strzygowskian model. Grabar’s focus on Rome and the essentially positive nature of his account speaks forcefully of the influence of Riegl, even if his Christian narrative is much more explicit than Riegl’s. If we fast forward to living scholars, always a more complex act than looking at the dead, since positions are not necessarily fixed,51 most of the

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Elsewhere he is sympathetic to a Strzygowskian model of influence from the margins in the rise of Christian art. See A. Grabar, ‘Le tiers mode de l’Antiquité à l’école de l’art classique et son rôle dans la formation de l’art du Moyen Age’, Revue de l’art 18 (1972) 9–26. For an acute discussion of late antique ivory diptychs in relation to a polarity between traditional art history and the discourse of visual culture (with my own work characterizing the latter, although I am not sure I recognize myself entirely in this) see D. Kinney, ‘First-Generation Diptychs in the Discourse of Visual Culture’, in G. Bühl, A. Cutler and A. Effenberger (eds.), Spätantike und byzantinische Elfenbeinbildwerke im Diskurs (Wiesbaden, 2008) 149–66.

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fundamental parameters of thought traced here have remained in place. In his highly controversial but influential book on early Christian art, The Clash of Gods (1993, revised and expanded in 1999) Tom Mathews – once a monk in Rome – follows Grabar and the line of warm romanticism about the emergence of Christian art in an account that is broadly focused within Europe, but shifts towards Egyptian material especially in the added section of the second edition.52 The positive story of the rise of Christian art – told with something of a New Age spirit (suggesting sexual ambivalence in the early iconography of Christ, for instance)53 and against models of ecclesiastical hegemony – is framed against what would be a much criticized condemnation of imperial political interpretations (for which Mathews blames the nostalgia for lost empire among a group of influential exilic scholars – Grabar, Andreas Alföldi and Ernst Kantorowicz).54 Despite all the shifts and rearrangements of intellectual furniture in the arguments, Mathews’ political frame (which he strongly rejects) is effectively borrowed from the Austro-Hungarian political narrative of change within empire, while the Christian innovatory model comes via Grabar, although this is not acknowledged, from the Romanoff love-affair with imperial Byzantium as an unalloyed good.55 The problems, which this overview has attempted to reveal, are deep. The invention and subsequently the study of late antiquity – themselves simultaneous with the invention of late antique art as a distinct subject – have been fraught with the political and ideological complexities of modern European ancestry and self-fashioning. No story can help being Eurocentric; indeed all stories are quite intentionally so, since they concern 52

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Mathews, The Clash of Gods (1993 and 1999). The new chapter is 177–90 in the 1999 edition. Note also the discussion of the Al-Mouallakah lintel – which is fourth century in the 1993 edition (39–40) and (correctly) eighth century in the 1999 edition (xi and 40). In his 80s, Mathews pursued the Egyptian line still further with his book on the origins of the icon: T. Mathews with N. Muller, The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Paintings and Icons (Los Angeles, 2016). On the sexuality of Christ, see Mathews, The Clash of Gods (1993 edition, 119–41); for what it is worth, I think this an excessive over-reading . . . New Age: see the review by Liz James, The Burlington Magazine 136/1096 (July, 1994) 458–9. Especially in his ch. 1, ‘The Mistake of the Emperor Mystique’. Note the critiques in reviews by P. Brown, The Art Bulletin 77/3 (1995) 499–502 and D. Kinney, Studies in Iconography 16 (1994) 237–42, with the latter’s interesting retraction and second thoughts in D. Kinney, ‘Instances of Appropriation in Late Roman and Early Christian Art’, Essays in Medieval Studies 28 (2012) 1–22, esp. 12–15 and n. 54. Current work on early Christian art from religious studies departments broadly follows the Grabar–Mathews line on positive mood-music: see for instance R. M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London, 2000) and Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, 2005).

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the origins of modernity in the context of the Christian Roman Empire. All accounts are deeply flummoxed about the issue of religion (we may study ‘early Christian art’ as a subset of ‘late antique art’ but no one works on ‘Christian art’), in part because the question of originality and innovation (the newness of Christianity in the Roman world) is deeply at odds with the ideological desire for continuity with Greek art and Roman governance – a Europe that is founded on antiquity. In part also, the rise of secularism especially in academia (hardly separable from the Marxist orthodoxy that governed half of Europe for the bulk of the twentieth century), has made the sympathetic understanding of religion a difficult and alien procedure. The interpretive divisions in relation to cultural change (as a process of natural and internal development, or an invasion of malign foreign influence and so forth) have remained in place from the imperial moment to well after the establishment of the European Community, across two world wars and the Cold War. The need for a new beginning, even in the limited field of the study of Western European and Byzantine late antique art, is pressing; the need for a rethink that removes some of the Orientalist, Aryanist and other nonsense in relation to late antique arts that are not Christian, is at least as urgent.

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The Rise of Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Late Imperial Russia  

Late antiquity could have retained its negative reputation as the ‘dark ages’, a period of crisis that led up to the fall of Rome,1 had it not been for the rich variety of late-antique artworks in European collections.2 Some of these objects, despite what were thought of as coarse forms and a lack of evident aesthetic appeal, nevertheless produced powerful effects on later viewers. A sequence of great discoveries related to late antiquity in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and deeper investigations into what was already known, contributed to a field initially built up primarily around available museum objects and fragmentary examples of visual culture. Among the ways the surviving objects could be narrated into a coherent history were the accounts of late antique art that originated in Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (on which see Elsner, Chapter 5 in this volume), those of early Christian art developed in Rome in the same period and the story of the origins of the Byzantine art that was particularly important for the Russian school, whose representatives

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For the art-historical tendency to define late antiquity as the dark ages see: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Art in the Dark Ages in Europe, circa 400–1000 A.D. (London, 1930); R. A. Smith, ‘Art in the Dark Ages’, The Burlington Magazine 57 (1930) 3–10; The Dark Ages: Loan Exhibition of Pagan and Christian Art in the Latin West and Byzantine East (Worcester, 1937). For the discussion and criticism of the term: D. Talbot Rice, ‘The Myth of the ‘Dark Ages”’, in D. Talbot Rice (ed.), The Dark Ages: The Making of European Civilization (London, 1965) 9–14; F. Harley, ‘Christianity and the Transformation of Classical Art’ in P. Rousseau (ed.), A Companion to Late Antiquity (Chichester, 2009) 306–26. For more bibliography and equivalent trends among historians by 1904: J. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (London, 1989) 133, n. 1. The use of the term persists even today: A. Cameron, ‘Blame the Christians: Review of Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World’, The Tablet (12 September 2017). Many collections of medieval art were indebted to the consequences of the French Revolution when very old church treasuries throughout France were ‘liberated’ of their contents, and the first museums of medieval art created along with the first art-historical discussions of this material: Le ‘Gothique’ retrouvé avant Viollet-le-Duc (Paris, 1979); C. M. Greene, ‘Alexandre Lenoir and the Musée des Monuments Français during the French Revolution’, French Historical Studies 12/2 (1981) 200–22; D. Poulot, ‘Revolutionary “Vandalism”, and the Birth of the Museum: The Effects of a Representation of Modern Cultural Terror’, in S. Pearce (ed.), Art in Museums (London, 1995) 192–214. I am grateful to Jaś Elsner for bringing this aspect to my attention.

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

believed themselves to be direct successors of this tradition.3 Behind this conviction lay the fact that the creation of the Russian state had traditionally been connected to the moment at which Christianity was adopted from Byzantium in 988, an event which, for an extended period, marked Ancient Rus’ as Constantinople’s cultural subordinate.4

1.

N. P. Kondakov and the History of Byzantine Art

The leading role in the formation of the ‘Russian view’ of late antique, Byzantine, and ancient Russian art was played by Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov (1844–1925).5 Born a serf (before the liberation of the serfs in 1861 by Tsar Alexander II) in Khalagne in the Kursk region into a literate family, Kondakov made an outstanding career, especially considering his background, as an academic and achieved quite significant rank within the

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, besides Russian scholarship, Byzantine art was of particular interest to the French. See notes 25, 50. For the range of nineteenth-century catalogues of medieval ‘minor arts’ and a short overview of the collectors of Byzantine art, see the online publication: Before the Blisses: 19th-Century Connoisseurship of the Byzantine Minor Arts (Washington, DC, 2011): http://images.doaks.org/before_the_blisses/ According to the Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kiev probably in the twelth century, art played an important role in this process. The account that justified the choice of Christianity by Prince Vladimir over Islam and other religions, emphasized the reports of his ambassadors, who were speechless on entering the ‘heaven-like’ spaces of the churches of Constantinople: ‘Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.’ S. H. Cross and O. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (tr.), The Russian Primary Chronicle (Cambridge, MA, 1953) 111. For overviews of his life in French and English, see: G. V. Vernadskii, ‘Никодим Павлович Кондаков’, in Recueil d’études, dédiées à la mémoire de N. P. Kondakov (Prague, 1926) ix–xxxiii; W. E. Kleinbauer, ‘Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov: The First Byzantine Art Historian in Russia’, in D. Mouriki, C. F. Moss, and K. Kiefer (eds.), Byzantine East, Latin West: Art-Historical Studies in Honor of Kurt Weitzmann (Princeton, 1995) 637–44. See also: S. Heid and M. Dennert (eds.), Personenlexikon zur Christlichen Archäologie: Forscher und Pernsönlichkeiten vom 16. bis zum 21. Jahrhudert, 2 vols. (Regensburg, 2012) 751–4. For the most recent monographic study of his life and scholarship, see: I. Foletti, From Byzantium to Holy Russia: Nikodim Kondakov (1844–1925) and the Invention of the Icon (Rome, 2017) (previously published in Italian in 2011). For detailed bibliography and a wide range of Russian publications, see: I. Foletti, ‘Kondakov et Prague: Comment l’émigration change l’histoire (de l’art)’, Opuscula historiae artium 63 (2014) 2–11, n. 1 at 9. For a comprehensive historiography of Russian scholarship and the development of Byzantine studies, see: L. Khroushkova, ‘Geschichte der Christlichen Archäologie in Russland vom 18. bis ins 20. Jahrhudert’, Römische Quartalschrift 106/3–4 (2011) 229–52; 107/1–2 (2012) 74–119; 107/ 3–4 (2012) 202–48; 108/3–4 (2013), 254–87.

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Figure 6.1 N. P. Kondakov, his son Petr and Anton P. Chekhov in Yalta, 1904. © I. L. Kyzlasova (ed.), Мир Кондакова: публикации, статьи, каталог выставки [Kondakov’s World: Publications, Articles, Exhibition Catalogue] (Moscow, 2004)

social hierarchy of his time.6 Despite his reserved and somewhat irritable nature, his professional duties as a university professor as well as active involvement in various committees and even family connections led to the acquisition of a wide and prominent circle that embraced, among others, various representatives of the Romanov family and literary ‘voices’, such as Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov7 (Figure 6.1). However, the October Revolution of 1917 instantly and fundamentally broke his way of life, forcing him from Moscow to Odessa and then to follow the standard route of the Russian elite fleeing a homeland that had ceased to be theirs: travelling first to Constantinople by sea and then on to Europe or America.8 6

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According to the complex system of ranks used in late imperial Russia, the highest title Kondakov achieved before the Revolution was ‘active secret counsellor’ – a bureaucratic equivalent to the rank of general in the army. Kondakov was personally acquainted with the members of the royal family, in particular prince Constantine Nikolaevich, and was in contact with close friends and advisers of the Russian tsars, such as Count Sergei Sherement’ev. On Kondakov and Chekhov, see: N. Andreev, ‘Н.П. Кондаков в письмах А.П. Чехова [N. P. Kondakov in the letters of A. P. Chekhov]’ Seminarium Kondakovianum 3 (1929) 271–82. He left the country on the same ship that carried the future Nobel winning writer Ivan Bunin.

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

After a couple of years in Sofia (Bulgaria), Kondakov settled in Prague, where he was hosted by President Tomáš G. Masaryk and invited to teach at Charles University.9 Notwithstanding his advanced years and the drastic changes in his lifestyle, Kondakov continued to work and prepared several monographic studies for publication, primarily those that he had brought with him from Russia.10 The circle of colleagues and students that formed around him started holding regular meetings on Byzantine art and culture. After Kondakov’s death in 1925, the participants were motivated to give a more formal structure to their gatherings and academic initiatives by creating an archaeological institute in his honour. This institute was destined to serve as a platform for research seminars, publications (such as, for example, Seminarium Kondakovianum), and other kinds of scholarly work.11 The lack of funding, the premature deaths of its most active leaders, and the outbreak of the Second World War led de facto to the closure of the Seminarium and the end of any editorial activity, silencing the last fading echo of the Russian founder of the history of Byzantine art. Almost a century after his death, it is important to remember Kondakov’s scholarly legacy because his ideas, scholarly work, and even misconceptions continue to define the field of Byzantine studies in many ways. The approach to Byzantine material developed in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was transmitted to the West and elaborated in the works of several of his students. Suffice it to mention

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On the final years of Kondakov in Prague and extensive archival information, see: I. L. Kyzlasova, История отечественной науки об искусстве Византии и Древней Руси, 1920–1930 годы: по материалам архивов [A History of the Study of Byzantine and Early Russian Art in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, based on Archival Materials] (Moscow, 2000); Foletti, ‘Kondakov et Prague’. In particular the fundamental study on the Russian Icon, an abridged version of which was translated into English and published in Oxford: N. P. Kondakov, The Russian Icon, tr. E. H. Minns (Oxford, 1927); N. P. Kondakov, Русская икона [The Russian Icon], 4 vols. (Prague, 1928–33; repr. Moscow, 2004). Kondakov was also eager see in print his third volume of the Iconography of the Virgin which was translated into French and prepared for publication during these years. Unfortunately, it remained unpublished until very recently, when rediscovered by Ivan Foletti in the archives of the Vatican library. It has now been published with an extensive introduction: N. P. Kondakov, Iconographie de la Mère de Dieu, vol. 3, ed. I. Foletti (Rome, 2011) xv–lv. Note particularly the publication of the periodical Seminarium Kondakovianum which survived into eleven issues from 1928 to 1940, when the Second World War intervened. The periodical has been revived under the title Convivium, based in Lausanne and Brno, see: I. Foletti, ‘From Nikodim Kondakov to Seminarium Kondakovianum and to Convivium’, Convivium 1/1 (2014) ix–xi.

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only émigré Russian scholars such as Mikhail Rostovtzev (1870–1952),12 André Grabar (1896–1990)13 and George Ostrogorsky (1902–76),14 who became key figures in the European and American academy. Some were Kondakov’s students in St Petersburg; others joined his circle in Prague. Although the nature of these relationships did not always fit the standard pattern of student–teacher interaction, Kondakov was a key inspiration: not only lectures and publications but above all his method left an imprint

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Recent studies of Rostovtzev present his involvement with Kondakov as minimal or irrelevant (M. A. Wes, Michael Rostovtzeff, Historian in Exile: Russian Roots in an American Context (Stuttgart, 1990); H. C. Meyer, Greco-Scythian Art and the Birth of Eurasia: From Classical Antiquity to Russian Modernity (Oxford, 2013)). However, in a memoir (written in Oxford) published in the Festschrift for Kondakov’s eightieth birthday, Rostovtzev openly states that he was a third year student of classical philology at St Petersburg University when he was introduced to archaeology and art history through the influence of Kondakov’s lectures on classical art: L. Niederle (ed.), Никодим Павлович Кондаков, 1844–1924: К восьмидесятилетию со дня рождения [Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov, 1844–1924: On the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday] (Prague, 1924) 23–34; Tikhonov, in E. N. Petrova (ed.), Никодим Павлович Кондаков, 1844–1925: личность, научное наследие, архив [Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov: Personality, Scholarly Legacy, Archive] (St Petersburg, 2001) 27–34, esp. 28. See also for mention of Kondakov’s influence on Rostovtzev: G. V. Vernadskii, ‘М.И. Ростовцев: к 60-летью его [M. I. Rostovtzev: On the Occasion of his Sixtieth Anniversary]’, Seminarium Kondakovianum 4 (1931) 240. Their relationship went on uninterrupted and consisted of both formal and informal meetings, as well as field trips. It is not surprising that Rostovtzev contributed an article (in Russian with French summary) to a collection of papers published in memory of Kondakov in Prague after his death: M. Rostovtsev, ‘Сарматские и индо-скифские древности [Les antiquités sarmates et les antiquités Indo-Scythes]’, in Recueil d’études, dédiées à la mémoire de N.P. Kondakov (Prague, 1926) 239–58. Here Rostovtzev tries to demonstrate the importance of Sarmate art and its possible links with subsequent early Byzantine and ancient Russian traditions. Before proceeding to the main body of his argument, he notes that: ‘Only the eagle eye of N.P. Kondakov and that of his distinguished student, the late, Ia.I. Smirnov, with their outstanding expertise in the field of Eastern art, including India and China, have demonstrated the links that I would like to pursue to the best of my ability here’ (241). Besides, Rostovtzev was actively involved with Seminarium Kondakovianum: Wes, Michael Rostovtzeff, Historian in Exile, 6–7. On Rostovtzev’s position and use of Dura Europos as a new source of information in the old polemic on the origins of Christian art: M. Ghilardi, ‘“La trouvaille la plus sensationnelle”: M.I. Rostovtzeff, la domus ecclesiae di Dura Europos e la nascita dell’arte cristiana’, Mediterraneo antico: economie, società, culture 5/2 (2012) 601–12. Grabar was closely involved with Kondakov and his students (Smirnov and Ainalov) during his student years in St Petersburg. He left an autobiographical account of Smirnov’s museum-based seminars and Ainalov stayed in Grabar’s flat in Kiev. After emigration, Grabar met with Kondakov in Sofia (attested among other things by a group photo taken in 1922) and, in an act of homage two years later, dedicated an early book (A. Grabar, L’église de Boïana (Sofia, 1924)) to Kondakov, on his eightieth birthday. See A. Grabar ‘Kondakov and the Treasure of NagySzent-Miklós’, Bulletin of the Byzantine Institute 1 (1946) 3–5. Ostrogorsky joined Kondakov in Prague and stayed until 1927: I. Ivanov, ‘Русская византология в Европе и труды академика Г.А. Острогорского [Russian Byzantinistics in Europe and the Works of Academician G. A. Ostrogorsky]’, Христианское чтение 1 (2010) 88–121.

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

on the formation of subsequent generations of Russian-speaking scholars both in the USSR and in exile. His main followers within Russia were Dmitry Ainalov (1862–1939), Egor Redin (1863–1908) and Iakov Smirnov (1869–1918).15 In a context of almost complete silence about Byzantine material culture during his student years in Moscow, Kondakov was inspired to Christian studies by the lectures and works of Fyodor I. Buslaev (1818–97).16 The latter was a great connoisseur of medieval Russian literature, manuscripts and book illumination, deeply interested in medieval art and icons. He was also an exponent of the so-called historic comparative method that provided the initial basis for Kondakov’s approach.17 In his early career Kondakov, although already interested in Christian tradition, studied the art of Classical Greece.18 In 1873, by which point he was already teaching art history at Odessa University, Kondakov defended and published his ‘magister’ (equivalent to a doctoral) dissertation on ‘The Harpy Monument in Asia Minor and the Symbolism of Greek Art’, followed by a selection of other specialized studies19 (Figure 6.2). In this work he was particularly

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Rostovtzev characterizes Smirnov (d. 1918) as the most brilliant of Kondakov’s students and points out that he was ‘the first victim of the systematic starvation for intelligentsia . . . invented by the Bolsheviks’. Niederle, Никодим Павлович Кондаков, 1844–1924 [Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov, 1844–1924], 25. This information is provided by Kondakov’s autobiography, started in Odessa in 1919. This text was published in Prague in 1927, see N. P. Kondakov, ‘Воспоминания и думы [Memories and Thoughts]’, in I. L. Kyzlasova (ed.), Мир Кондакова: публикации, статьи, каталог выставки [Kondakov’s World: Publications, Articles, Exhibition Catalogue] (Moscow, 2004), 9. For Buslaev’s works, see F. I. Buslaev, Исторические очерки русской народной словесности и искусства [Historical Essays on Russian Folk Literature and Art] (St Petersburg, 1861). The method was focused on finding similarities between the works of art and literature belonging to the same period of time, seen as reflective of a particular historic moment and/or cultural context: F. I. Buslaev, Древнерусская литература и православное искусство [Medieval Russian Literature and Orthodox Art] (St Petersburg, 2001). Buslaev’s and Kondakov’s methodological approaches to medieval art have been discussed by I. L. Kyzlasova, История изучения византийского и древнерусского искусства в России. Ф. И. Буслаев и Н.П. Кондаков: методы, идеи, теории [A History of the Study of Byzantine and Early Russian Art in Russia. F. I. Buslaev, N. P. Kondakov: Methods, Ideas, Theories] (Moscow, 1985). Buslaev in return held the young scholar in great esteem and performed the role of opponent for his doctoral dissertation. He followed this course partially because the main focus of art history at Moscow University at the time was ancient Greece. See, for example, his essay on a marble relief from Panticapaeum: N. P. Kondakov, ‘Мраморный рельеф из Пантикапеи [A Marble Relief from Panticapaeum]’, Записки Одесского общества истории и древностей 10 (1877) 16–25; and, more importantly, his study of Greek terracotta statuettes in relation to art, religion and everyday life: N. P. Kondakov, ‘Греческие терракотовые статуэтки и их отношение к искусству, религии и быту [The

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Figure 6.2 The Harpy Tomb, from Xanthus in Lycia. 480–470 BC, British Museum London (1848,1020.1). Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

interested in understanding the complex interactions of various cultures and elements of religious symbolism reflected in ancient monuments. The interest in Greek antiquity, which was much in fashion at this time,20 was probably to an extent responsible for Kondakov’s strong sensitivity to the survival of the classical legacy in the art of the Eastern Christian Mediterranean, leading him to state that: All subsequent accounts of the history of the Byzantine miniature will serve to demonstrate that Byzantine art was, and remained, the carrier of the antique tradition, the guarantor of communication between the Christian and Classical worlds, the transmitter of those principles into the whole of European art.21

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Greek Terracotta Statuettes and their Relation to Art, Religion and Everyday Life]’, Записки Одесского общества истории и древностей 11 (1879) 75–179. The published version of his dissertation, which analyses the monument through the prism of religion and religious symbolism, bears a slightly different title: N. P. Kondakov, ‘Памятник Гарпий из Ксанфа в Ликии: опыт исторической характеристики [The Harpies’ Monument from Xanthus in Lycia: An Attempted Historical Characterization]’, Записки Императорского Новороссийского университета 12 (1874) 1–234. The sculptural reliefs of the so-called Harpy Tomb have been among the highlights of the British Museum collection since 1848: www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId= 461915&partId=1 (accessed 30 March 2016). On the use of Greek antiquity for political purposes and identity construction in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Russia: Meyer, Greco-Scythian Art and the Birth of Eurasia; A. Zorin, By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late-Eighteenth- and Early-NineteenthCentury Russia, tr. M. C. Levitt et al. (Brighton, MA, 2014) 24–60. N. P. Kondakov, История византийского искусства и иконографии по миниатюрам греческих рукописей [A History of Byzantine Art and Iconography on the Basis of Greek Manuscripts], ed. G. Parpulov and A. Saminskii (Plovdiv, 2012), 47.

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

After spending almost eighteen years in Odessa, Kondakov was called to the chair of art history at the University of St Petersburg, a post he combined with being head curator at the Hermitage.22 The presence of Kondakov in the capital was significant and contributed to the growth of a circle of medieval scholars within the university, which, according to Kleinbauer, ‘made St Petersburg the premier international center of Byzantine studies, surpassing even Vienna at the fin de siècle’.23 The major milestone in Kondakov’s early career was the publication, in 1876, of his doctoral (Habilitation) dissertation, The History of Byzantine Art and Iconography based on the Miniatures of Greek Manuscripts, followed by a carefully edited and revised French edition (1886–91).24 This late Romanov research project anticipated a number of general publications on Byzantine art in France, such as those by Charles Bayet (1849–1918).25 Effectively Kondakov acted as forerunner to the formation of Byzantine art history as an independent scholarly discipline in Europe. In his works Byzantium was finally granted an adequate and self-sufficient place within the range of post-Roman visual traditions. The private

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Vernadskii, ‘Никодим Павлович Кондаков’, xviii–xix; I. Foletti, Da Bisanzio alla Santa Russia: Nikodim Kondakov (1844–1925) e la nascita della storia dell’arte in Russia (Rome, 2011), 44–6. Kondakov’s engagement with museum work fell mainly within the period 1888–93. By 1891 he had compiled a 369-page catalogue of the collection for the department of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which had been created in 1885 following the acquisition of the Basilevsky collection (http://images.doaks.org/before_the_blisses/exhibits/show/collectors/basilevsky): N. P. Kondakov, Императорский Эрмитаж: Указатель отделения Средних веков и эпохи Возрождения [The Imperial Hermitage Museum: A Catalogue of the Department of the Middle Ages and Renaissance] (St Petersburg, 1891). Kondakov’s position is interestingly defined in the second volume of the French edition of his Histoire, published in the same year, as ‘Directeur au Musée Impérial de l’Ermitage’, which should probably still be taken to mean head curator of the department. The Vienna school (with the exception of Strzygowski who would be appointed only in 1909) was not at the time focused on Byzantine art: Kleinbauer, ‘Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov’, 639. N. P. Kondakov, Histoire de l’art byzantin considéré principalement dans les miniatures, tr. F. Trawinski, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886–91). Ch. Bayet, Recherches pour servir à l’histoire de la peinture et de la sculpture chrétienne en Orient avant la querelle des iconoclastes (Paris, 1879); Ch. Bayet, L’art byzantin (Paris, 1883). For some general considerations on the tradition of French studies on Byzantine art preceding Bayer: J.-M. Spieser, ‘Héllénisme et connaissance de l’art byzantin au XIXe siècle’, in S. Saïd (ed.), Ἑλληνισμός: quelques jalons pour une histoire de l’identité grecque (Leiden, 1991) 337–62. On Bayet: www.inha.fr/fr/ressources/publications/publications-numeriques/dictionnairecritique-des-historiens-de-l-art/bayet-charles.html (accessed 4 April 2016). More generally on the development of the historiography: R. Ousterhout, ‘The Rediscovery of Constantinople and the Beginnings of Byzantine Archaeology: A Historiographic Survey’, in Z. Bahrani, Z. Çelik and E. Eldem (eds.), Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul, 2011) 181–211.

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correspondence and published writings of Kondakov’s contemporaries clearly demonstrate a universal ‘pro-Vasarian’ feeling of disdain towards the awkward, standardized forms of Byzantine art, devoid of the ‘ideals’ of classical beauty and Renaissance naturalism which was predominant among Russian and European intellectual circles.26 Kondakov was fully conscious of being a pioneer in the field and, therefore, of the necessity of building a full scholarly basis on which to justify the study of Byzantine art as an academic discipline (both aspects find reflection in his writings). To substantiate an understanding of Byzantine art as a completely distinct entity, Kondakov had to develop a clear and convincing systematic approach in which he proposed a detailed periodization, articulated the basic features of Eastern Christian art, and also pointed out the changes between historical shifts. In a situation where known material was rather limited, dating (in most cases) very problematic, and methods still in a rudimentary state, it required great confidence and knowledge of the surviving material (obtained during multiple field trips as well as library work) to compose an intelligible narrative of a thousand-year-long artistic tradition.27 In the Introduction to his History Kondakov justifies the construction of his account on the basis of book illuminations and provides various reasons for privileging this medium. This specific kind of art production was particularly significant for research on late antique and early Christian art since, as Kleinbauer notes, ‘at the time European scholars still classified manuscript illumination as examples of “industrial” or “minor” arts’ and miniatures fell outside the normal set of objects discussed in relation to antiquity and the Renaissance.28 One study in particular was the seminal starting point for the Viennese school and a source of constant reference in 26

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As Kondakov himself puts it: ‘Certainly, a lot of time will pass before the statements on “Byzantine darkness”, centuries-long sleep, Byzantine mummies, etc. would move away from the sphere of our everyday judgements to join the history of our misconceptions.’ Kondakov, История византийского искусства и иконографии [History of Byzantine Art and Iconography], 46. The geography of Kondakov’s trips is impressive, especially considering that they were all accomplished within a relatively short period of time, long before aviation reduced travel times. He travelled extensively in Europe to work with manuscripts and museum collections in Italy, Germany and France, but also spent a lot of time in the East, compiling and publishing his observations in detailed scholarly descriptions of his trips to Sinai, Mount Athos, Istanbul and Turkey, Georgia, Syria, Palestine and Macedonia: See T. Murray (ed.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists (Santa Barbara, 1999), 166–72. Needless to say, at the same time he was a great connoisseur of the ‘Russian antiquities’ and archaeological finds in Crimea, Caucasus and other parts of the empire. Kleinbauer, ‘Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov’, 638.

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

subsequent decades: Wickhoff’s book on the manuscript known as the Vienna Genesis.29 The grandeur of approach in this book, narrating the entire history of Roman art and proposing its homogeneity and dominance in late antique tradition, set the tone and scope of subsequent discussions in the West. Both Kondakov’s History and Wickoff’s research on the Vienna Genesis clearly demonstrate a preference for the artistic medium of book illumination at a time when the basic questions (including the genesis of Christian imagery and the evolution of both Hellenistic and Roman art) had to be formulated.30 Several factors explain this phenomenon. In this period, before the ubiquity of archaeology and the rise of systematic models of conservation, manuscripts were in a much better state of preservation by comparison with other material. They were easily systematized within the collections of individual libraries and often contained clear indications of both the time of their production and their place of origin. An increasing scholarly focus on literary studies of ancient authors contributed to the further discovery, research on, and publication of early Christian manuscripts. In Russia this process was particularly intense and, as Vzdornov remarks, in the second half of the nineteenth century hardly a year went by without an important medieval text or manuscript being published.31 The variability, richness and, in many cases, outstanding quality of miniatures provided Kondakov and his followers with good grounds for the formulation of ideas on iconography, including the visual rendering of biblical scenes and a fixed system of features for the saints, as well as aesthetic principles or forms connected to particular regions. In contrast to other media (mural decoration, for example), miniature painting was devoid of significant historical gaps, while its rich and variegated material allowed the pursuit of longue durée artistic 29

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F. Wickhoff, Die Wiener Genesis (Vienna, 1895). See also his engagement in: F. Wickhoff, M. Dvořák and J. Ritter von Schlosser, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der illuminierten Handschriften in Österreich, 7 vols. (Leipzig, 1905–38). The emphasis on manuscripts remained persistent until the 1970s and is well exemplified by the works of such scholars as Hugo Buchtal, Kurt Weitzmann and others, continuing in the studies of their students. A particular emphasis on manuscript illumination still underlies the studies of many contemporary Russian scholars of Byzantine art, primarily Olga Popova and her students. For some general consideration on the state of the field: G. Parpulov, ‘The Study of Byzantine Book Illumination: Past, Present, and Future’, Palaeoslavica 21/2 (2013) 202–22. G. I. Vzdornov, История открытия и изучения русской средневековой живописи: XIX век [A History of the Discovery and Study of Russian Medieval Painting: The Nineteenth Century] (Moscow, 1986), 216. See also: G. I. Vzdornov, Реставрация и наука: очерки по истории открытия и изучения древнерусской живописи [Restoration and Scholarship: Essays on the History of the Discovery and Study of Medieval Russian Painting] (Moscow, 2006).

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development. Moreover, the world of illustrated manuscripts represented, for Kondakov, a reliable source of information for the general tastes and trends predominant in Byzantium in a given period.32 Kondakov saw the urge to create numerous images on the pages of codices in conjunction with biblical, liturgical and other ecclesiastical texts as the main driving force behind the devising of new visual formulae and iconographies. Once accepted, he saw these as later transferred over to and appropriated by other media, finding their most spectacular realizations in monumental church decorations.33 Among the main goals formulated by Kondakov in his History was the need to identify the exact moment of the appearance of Byzantine art and of singling out features that distinguish it from earlier Christian visual culture. In conjunction with this, questions of chronology, typological and stylistic modifications, and the provenance of the ‘impulses’ determining these changes had to be formulated and discussed. In his monograph Kondakov writes: Ultimately this analysis of miniatures must provide the history of the general development of the Byzantine art and define its most crucial questions – where and when did Byzantine art begin? whence did it originate? what are its essential features? We cannot yet strive for a fully scientific account of these elements, however, because in the current state of scholarship even the primary questions have not yet received satisfactory answers.34

Kondakov dates the appearance of Byzantine art to the sixth century, which he considers to be the first culminating moment of early Christian art. For him the preceding period of the fourth and fifth centuries, still permeated by the exuberance and sensuality of antique art, had already gone through a process of transformation incited by the new religion and foreign ‘non-Roman’ infusions of visual culture. The shift from antique iconography was mainly conditioned by the new scope of art – that is, the Christian demand for the adaptation of existing visual languages for new purposes. Generally, Kondakov’s descriptions of the earliest manuscripts show the following pattern of analysis: the manuscripts’ stylistic aspects and artistic rendering are taken as basic remnants of the past while the compositions and (most importantly) iconography were the means by 32

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Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

which the chaotic and effervescent world of classical forms underwent Byzantine regulation. Moreover, in accordance with his commitment to the Eastern as opposed to Roman sources of Byzantium, Kondakov was one of the first to understand the importance of the Eastern provinces for the formation of Byzantine visual culture. His paper ‘On the Eastern, Syro-Palestinian origins of the Byzantine Art’, given in Jerusalem and published in 1892, set a precedent for subsequent discussion of the Eastern origins of the Christian visual tradition.35 The talk was delivered at the aftermath of a big research expedition in Jordan and Palestine in 1891, members of which, in addition to Kondakov and Smirnov, included two painters and a photographer whose jobs were to document the monuments encountered by the travellers on their way.36 The full results of this trip came out many years later in 1904 in a book published by Kondakov whose text was accompanied by an exceptionally rich range of photographic material37 (Figures 6.3a and 6.3b). The opening chapter of this monograph represents a detailed outline of the recent explosion of studies of late antique art, embracing the work of Riegl, Strzygowski and Ainalov, and thus provided the first critical historiography of the field by a ‘voice’ contemporary to the time and key to the arguments.38 In the third chapter of this book, Kondakov formulates a view on the origins of what he called ‘Arabic style’ in art, anticipating in a few paragraphs ardent discussions of this question by future specialists of Islamic art.39

2.

The Origins of Byzantine Art

The ideas of Kondakov on the importance of the Eastern provinces in the formation of Christian art were picked up in the works of his students and 35

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N. P. Kondakov, ‘Доклад о восточно-палестино-сирийском происхождении византийского искусства [On the Eastern, Syro-Palestinian Origins of Byzantine Art]’, Сообщения Императорского Православного палестинского общества 3/2 (1892) 144–60. Here Kondakov sets the chronological boundaries of Byzantine art as developing from the fourth to the fourteenth century and suggests that the origins of the Byzantine art may be found in the place where Christianity was born, i.e. Palestine (144–5). See also: N. N. Bolgov, ‘Античные основы ранневизантийского искусства в трудах Н.П. Кондакова [The Antique Foundations of Early Byzantine Art in the Works of N. P. Kondakov]’, Научные ведомости Белгородского университета 1 (2007) 5–10. J. Strzygowski could have theoretically known about the trip and its results via Smirnov. N. P. Kondakov, Археологическое путешествие по Сирии и Палестине [An Archaeological Journey through Syria and Palestine] (St Petersburg, 1904, repr. Moscow 2017). Kondakov, Археологическое путешествие [Archaeological Journey], 1–46. Ibid., 131–4.

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Figure 6.3a Al-Qasr, Umayyad Palace in Amman, first half of the eighth century, Jordan. Exterior. From: N. P. Kondakov, Археологическое путешествие по Сирии и Палестине [An Archaeological Journey through Syria and Palestine] (St Petersburg, 1904), 127. Public domain

Figure 6.3b Al-Qasr, Umayyad Palace in Amman, first half of the eighth century, Jordan. Interior. From: N. P. Kondakov, Археологическое путешествие по Сирии и Палестине [An Archaeological Journey through Syria and Palestine] (St Petersburg, 1904), 129. Public domain

followers. Conscious of the lack of systematic discussion of early Christian monumental decorations in his History (they are mentioned in passing in relation to various illuminated manuscripts), Kondakov entrusted two of his students – Dmitriy Vlas’evich Ainalov and Egor Kuzmich Redin – with ‘magister’ dissertation projects in this area: the former on the mosaics of Rome, Naples, Capua and Milan and the latter on those of Ravenna.40 In 40

D. V. Ainalov, Мозаики IV и V веков: Исследования в области иконографии и стиля древнехристианского искусства [Mosaics of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries: Studies on the Iconography and Style of Early Christian Art] (St Petersburg, 1895); E. K. Redin, Мозаики равеннских церквей [The Mosaics of the Ravenna Churches] (St Petersburg, 1896). See also: Vzdornov, История открытия и изучения русской средневековой живописи [History of the

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

the meantime, Iakov Smirnov compiled a general study on the earliest mosaics of Cyprus.41 These overviews of the earliest wall-mosaic cycles covered a wide range of questions and topics (some of which are still relevant today), and provided a well-researched and rich choice of comparanda and historical sources. A focus on the early Christian heritage of the Italian Peninsula inevitably forced Russian scholars into interpretations of the same material as that proposed by Italian researchers, in particular those of Roman School of Christian archaeology, whose famous exponents included G. B. De Rossi, R. Garucci, F. X. Kraus and J. Wilpert.42 These Roman Catholic scholars, in their resistance to Protestant models of early Christian aniconism (see Jaś Elsner’s discussion in Chapter 5), used the vast supply of material evidence uncovered or preserved in Rome (primarily catacomb paintings and the reliefs of sarcophagi), to position the Papal capital as the most important late antique cultural and artistic centre. Christian Rome, the apostolic seat of St Peter, with its status as a direct successor of the ancient Urbs, appeared to be the natural place to locate the origins of early Christian art and, therefore, of all subsequent Christian traditions.43 Consequently,

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Discovery and Study of Russian Medieval Painting], 268–70. In one of his letters Ainalov states that he found the topic for his dissertation while executing colour copies of the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore from a close distance: A. N. Anfert’eva, ‘Айналов: жизнь, творчество, архив [Ainalov: Life, Works, Archive]’, in I. Medvedev (ed.), Архивы русских византинистов в Санкт-Петербурге [Russian Byzantinists’ Archives in Saint Petersburg] (St Petersburg, 1995) 259–312, 265. Ainalov spent a lot of time in Italy in 1891–93 while preparing his dissertation: M. Marcenaro, ‘Dmitrij Vlas’evič Ajnalov: il “Viaggio in Italia”, di uno storico dell’arte russa sul finire dell’Ottocento’, Rivista dell’Istituto nazionale d’archeologia e storia dell’arte 58 (2003) 189–213. Ia. Smirnov, ‘Христианские мозаики Кипра [The Christian Mosaics of Cyprus]’, Византийский временник 4/1 (1897) 1–93. To cite just some of their most important works: G. B. de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, 3 vols. (Rome, 1864–77); R. Garucci, Storia dell’arte cristiana nei primi otto secoli della chiesa, 6 vols. (Prato, 1872–81); J. Wilpert, Principienfragen der christlichen Archäologie (Freiburg, 1889); J. Wilpert, Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms (Freiburg, 1903); J. Wilpert, Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert (Freiburg, 1916). On De Rossi and Wilpert see: A. Baruffa, Giovanni Battista de Rossi (Vatican City, 1994); S. Heid (ed.), Giuseppe Wilpert, archeologo cristiano (Vatican City, 2009). See also: L. Khroushkova, ‘De Rossi, fondateur de l’archéologie chrétienne, et Kondakov, fondateur de l’histoire de l’art byzantin deux traditions scientifiques’, in Acta XIII Congressus internationalis archaeologiae christianae (Vatican City and Split, 1998) 373–9; G. Gasbarri, Riscoprire Bisanzio: lo studio dell’arte bizantina a Roma e in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Rome, 2015). On the relationship between Russian and Italian scholars of Byzantine art: G. Gasbarri, ‘Bridges between Russia and Italy: Studies in Byzantine Art at the Beginning of 20th Century’, Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art, I (St Petersburg, 2011) 101–8. To cite just one writing example from Garucci’s History of Christian Art: ‘It is therefore the Church, founded by Christ in Rome under the rule of the visible leader, which should be seen as

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although in their monographic studies, neither Ainalov nor Redin directly opposed Italian scholarship, they nevertheless developed an alternative line of reasoning and ‘reading’ of the monuments. Their deployment of argument and their analyses of images were intended to unsettle the idea that Rome and Roman art were the predominant sources of inspiration for subsequent Byzantine traditions. Instead, their gaze, following Kondakov, was directed towards the East as the source of the innovative force that regenerated the classicizing nature of art in the West after its collapse in the aftermath of barbarian conquests.44 This conceptual strategy extended to others in Kondakov’s circle working on pre-Christian material. Mikhail Rostovtsev’s monumental article on landscape in Pompeian wall painting, published in German in just under 200 pages in 1911, which invented the concept of sacro-idyllic landscape painting in antiquity, is entitled ‘Hellenistic-Roman Architectural Landscape’ and argues that most of the Italian material from Campania is evidence for the visual practices and sacred interests of the Greek East.45 The conceptual model of placing origins and impetus away from Italy in matters of visual culture is fundamental. The understanding of the East in the late Romanov Russian model was somewhat broad and coincided relatively closely with the geographical limits of the Eastern Roman Empire of the fifth century, encompassing Asia Minor, Greece, Palestine, Syria and Alexandria. These territories were seen by the Russian authors as largely Greek-speaking and Hellenistic in culture, being Christian from the fourth century and of course the core provinces of Christian Byzantium. A suitably major late antique centre for

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the first to dictate the laws [of artistic production], that were universally followed in the West and in the East’ (Garucci, Storia dell’arte cristiana, vol. I, 6). ‘The analogies that we have drawn on numerous occasions in the compositions, types and multiple details between the Italian mosaics and the Eastern monuments represent only the trifling, barely discernible trend of Eastern art, that penetrates the West’ (Ainalov, Мозаики IV и V веков [Mosaics of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries], 60). See the echoes of these interpretations in an alternative opinion on the origins of the Roman catacombs that Theodor Schmidt expresses in passing in one of his papers that chronologically followed the archaeological discoveries in Kom esh-Shuqafa: ‘It is highly plausible that Christians of Naples and Rome adopted the Alexandrian Egyptian idea [of the catacombs], and on discovering the very best geological conditions realized it at a grand scale. But the idea itself is foreign and comes specifically from Egypt’, F. I. Schmidt, ‘Благовещение [The Annunciation]’, Известия Русского археологического института в Константинополе 15 (1911) 31–72, 43. M. Rostovtsev, ‘Die hellenistisch-römische Architekturlandschaft’, Römische Mitteilungen 26 (1911) 1–186. The project of studying Pompeian wall painting was itself suggested to Rostovtzev by Kondakov: see Tikhonov, in Petrova (ed.), Никодим Павлович Кондаков [Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov], 30.

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these territories was appropriately found in the newly built capital of the empire – Constantinople. The idea that the ancient Greek heritage had been preserved in this area and that this was the revitalizing force for the transformation of visual and material culture in the early Christian period was a vision of late antiquity bequeathed by Kondakov, who made the point on several occasions in his History: Byzantine art was founded on Greek antiquity, from it, it drew its artistic means and in part its language.46 That is why, not finding on Roman soil anything that could explain this new life of art, we believe that it is explained by the transmission of artistic activity on Greek soil and, as a consequence, actually represented a revival of Greek art. Clearly these circumstances explain even better the direct connections between the art of antiquity and that of Byzantium, serving to determine all known features and trends in Byzantine miniature painting.47

Both Ainalov and Redin substantiated similar ideas on the basis of the early Christian wall-decorations: After having examined the Italian church paintings and mosaics surviving outside Italy, together with literary evidence, we can get quite a clear understanding of the decorative features of the new style as it appeared in the East and in its analogous forms disseminated to Italy in the fifth century.48

Of course the idea of the possible Eastern Hellenistic origins of Byzantine art was not exclusive to Russian scholarship. Similar approaches can be found in French (Ch. Bayet)49 and Austrian studies

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Kondakov, История византийского искусства и иконографии [History of Byzantine Art and Iconography], 47. Ibid., 70. Ainalov, Мозаики IV и V веков [Mosaics of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries], 66. For the French school, see note 25. There are a number of differences in the way the question of Hellenism in Byzantine art was approached by French scholars by contrast with Kondakov and his followers. This topic deserves investigation. For the French, Greece was an idealized ancestor and Byzantium, though inheriting the Hellenistic legacy, demonstrates decline and eventual crisis. In other words, Classical Greek antiquity is seen as a climax of creative powers and human reason that finds a fading echo in the Byzantine tradition. This is quite the opposite of Russian scholarship, which from the start acknowledges the great value of the Byzantine visual tradition and looks for the presence of its individual artistic expressions in ancient forms. Besides de facto different reference points in Greek antiquity, French studies are also characterized by the positivist effort to re-evaluate Byzantine art without engaging its strongly religious component, which is seen as diminishing the appeal of the ‘true’ art.

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(J. Strzygowski).50 But for the French, Byzantium remained associated with cultural decline by comparison with Greece and for the Viennese was either undifferentiated from late antiquity in general (as in the work of Riegl) or succumbed to Semitic decadence (as suggested by Strzygowski).51 What the Russian school emphasized was a positive Christian East born of a living, non-Roman, Hellenism in antiquity. A mature late imperial Russian response to these questions emerged in the seminal study by Ainalov on The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art published in 190052 (Figure 6.4). Unfortunately, the attempts to produce a German translation of this book in 1913 were never realized and it was not until the English publication of 1961 (edited by Cyril Mango and accompanied by his preface) that the study became accessible to a non-Russian speaking audience.53 The gap 50

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On the construction of late antiquity in the Vienna school, see J. Elsner, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901’, Art History 25 (2002) 358–79, also Chapter 5 in this volume (with further bibliography). It is worth dedicating a few words to the perception of Byzantine art by the Viennese who formed both a model and an academic rival for the Russians. Riegl was never concerned with Byzantium per se; for him Byzantine art was a continuation of the Roman world, nothing more than a later development of Roman visual culture. He implicitly denied Byzantine art an individual character or special significance. Strzygowski, on the other hand, was the principal historian of Byzantine art in the Germanspeaking world before the First World War. He clearly positioned himself as a Byzantinist, and dedicated several studies to monuments from Constantinople. He even wrote a paper on the status quaestionis of Byzantine art (J. Strzygowski, ‘Die byzantinische Kunst’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 1/1 (1892) 61–73). But from the beginning of his career he was closely engaged with Armenian material and subsequently directed his gaze towards the lands even further in the East, becoming more and more interested in the ‘Aryan’ Orient as the source of new art forms in late antiquity. Strzygowski explores this material at length, often publishing it for the first time, and discussing it in relationship to the Classical legacy. The question of Byzantium and Byzantine art, as a field of study with its own questions, became secondary within his scholarly goals. For an alternative view of Hellenism characteristic of Greek scholarship and remarkably antiByzantine in its attitudes, see D. Christodoulou, ‘Byzantium in Nineteenth-Century Greek Historiography’, in P. Stephenson (ed.), The Byzantine World (London, 2010) 445–61. D. V. Ainalov, Эллинистические основы византийского искусства: исследования в области ранне-византийского искусства [The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art: Studies on Early Byzantine Art] (St Petersburg, 1900). D. V. Ainalov, The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art, tr. E. Sobolevitch and S. Sobolevitch (New Brunswick, 1961). An earlier English translation is known to have been prepared in 1920 but it also remained unpublished. A complete copy of another German translation of the text is apparently preserved at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome: Hellenistische Grundlagen der byzantinischen Kunst. Mention of it in: S. Heid, Kreuz, Jerusalem, Kosmos: Aspekte frühchristlicher Staurologie (Münster, 2001) 267. There were also attempts of French translation as the book was generally well received in France, see for example the letter of G. Millet: ‘C’est une étude de première valeur, plein d’idées originales et qui mérite d’être bien connues’. Anfert’eva, ‘Айналов: жизнь, творчество, архив [Ainalov: Life, Works, Archive]’, 273.

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

Figure 6.4 Front page of the original copy of Ainalov’s The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art (St Petersburg, 1900). Public domain

of more than half a century was enough to deprive this book of both its historical context and the topical relevance of its content. The language barrier, by preventing the original text from wide dissemination at the time of its appearance, led to Ainalov’s work becoming one of the greatest missing chapters in the early twentieth-century European historiography of early Christian art. It is usually claimed that the book’s contents were primarily or even exclusively known to European scholars via an extensive review by O. Wulff, but a few are aware of one significant exception.54 Both in its topic and structure, Ainalov’s monograph represents a direct Russian counterpart to the other response to the ‘Eastern’ question in early

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O. Wulff, Review of D. Ainalov, Эллинистические основы византийского искусства, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 26 (1903) 35–55. Is it a coincidence that Oskar Wulff published his summary in the same journal in which one the earliest reviews of Strzygowski’s Orient oder Rome appeared (A. Goldschmidt, Review of J. Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom?, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 24 (1901) 145–50)? Wulff (1864–1946) is himself an interesting scholar of German origin but born in Russia. Though his family moved several times, he did study for a while at St Petersburg (probably under Kondakov) and then went back to Germany. He later became the keeper of the Byzantine and Early Christian collection at the Bode Museum and published extensively on early Christian art.

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Christian art – Strzygowski’s famous Orient oder Rom.55 L. Khrushkova in her recent article on the perception of Strzygowki and Wilpert among Russian scholars makes a reference to a letter from 9 March 1900 in which Strzygowski thanks Ainalov for sending him his book.56 Able to read Russian, Strzygowski had visited Russia on several occasions and was elected a member of the Moscow (1900) and subsequently the Russian archaeological society (1907).57 He was well aware of recent publications and discoveries produced on Russian soil, a fact which is reflected in his published work.58 In one instance in Orient oder Rom, the Austrian scholar remarks that he did not have the time to read Ainalov’s book, but a number of references and an alternative dating of the marble relief of Christ and the disciples, first published in the Hellenistic Origins, indicate that Strzygowski must have consulted the work and obtained a general idea

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J. Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom: Beiträge zur Geschichte der spätantiken und frühchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig, 1901). L. Khroushkova, ‘Йозеф Стриговский и Йозеф Вильперт в России: идеи, дискуссии, сотрудничество [Joseph Strzygowski and Joseph Wilpert in Russia: Ideas, Discussions, Collaboration]’, Труды Государственного Эрмитажа 69 (2013) 544–85, 549; L. Khroushkova, ‘Joseph Strzygowski, Joseph Wilpert and the Russian School of Byzantine Studies’, Cahiers archéologiques 56 (2015) 173–88. More generally on Ainalov and this letter: See Anfert’eva, ‘Айналов: жизнь, творчество, архив [Ainalov: Life, Works, Archive]’, 310. Khroushkova, ‘Йозеф Стриговский и Йозеф Вильперт в России [Joseph Strzygowski and Joseph Wilpert in Russia]’, 570. Suzanne Marchand argues (S. Marchand, ‘The View from the Land: Austrian Art Historians and the Interpretation of Croatian Art’, in A. Payne (ed.) Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence (Leiden, 2014) 21–58, 39–41) that Strzygowski must have entered into contact with the Russian community already during his student years in the mid-1880s, first via Professor Eduard Dobbert (raised in St Petersburg) and then more directly in Rome via the Russian princess Nadejda Schakowskaya. Subsequently Strzygowski would develop a particularly good relationship with Iakov Smirnov, Kondakov’s successor at St Petersburg University. (According to the opinion of Liudmila Khroushkova, for which I am grateful, Smirnov and Strzygowski could have originally met in Moscow in 1890 at the VIIIth Archaeological Conference or in the same year in St Petersburg, at the Hermitage.) Finally, we have evidence that Strzygowski himself acknowledged Russian scholars among the few interested in Byzantine art at the time, for example in his paper on Byzantine art for the first issue of Byzantinische Zeitschrift, in which he provides an insightful image of the field in terms of personae and academic ‘geography’: ‘. . . besitzt aber noch zu wenig Erfahrung auf dem Gebiete der byzantinischen Kunst. Bayet läfst leider gar nichts mehr von sich hören. Daher bleiben nur Kondakoff in Petersburg und seine Schüler, Schlumberger in Paris, Charles Diehl in Nancy, Tikkanen in Helsingfors und der Verfasser’. Strzygowski, ‘Die byzantinische Kunst’, 62. For example, on Sinai encaustic icons from Kiev (J. Strzygowski, ‘Zwei enkaustische Heiligenbilder von Sinai im Museum der Geistlichen Akademie zu Kiew’, in J. Strzygowski, Das Etschmiadzin-Evangeliar (Vienna, 1891) 115–24) or the Alexandrian chronicle from the Golenischev collection: J. Strzygowski, Eine alexandrinische Weltchronik: Text und Miniaturen eines griechischen Papyrus der Sammlung W. Goleniščev (Vienna, 1905).

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

Figure 6.5 Christ and Disciples, remains of a sarcophagus from Psamathia, Istanbul. Now in the Bode Museum Berlin. Fourth century. This photograph, which is the earliest publication of this artwork, demonstrates how it was originally discovered together with two thirteenth-century marble panels with Virgin Orans and Archangel. From: D.V. Ainalov, Эллинистические основы византийского искусства: исследования в области ранне-византийского искусства [The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art: Studies on Early Byzantine Art] (St Petersburg, 1900), plate IV. Public domain

of its thrust before his own manuscript went to press.59 It is telling that two books making the case for the importance of the East in the formation of Christian art would both focus on the same piece of work of art, in both cases integrating it in a complex line of arguments on late antique sculpture60 (Figure 6.5). Ainalov’s book represents a thorough study, carefully weighted in its arguments, demonstrating at length the ‘Hellenistic basis’ of Byzantine art.

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‘Ich habe dieses Buch leider bisher nicht lesen können und wurde nur durch die Abbildung auf die hier und im Nachfolgenden citierte Stelle aufmerksam’, Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom, n. 3 at 43. For the general references to Ainalov’s book and other studies, see: Orient oder Rom, n. 3 at 56, n. 9 at 59, 60, 62, etc. Interestingly in comparison with the first note, the spelling of Ainalov’s surname changes from Ajnalov to Ainalov in the main text. The monument in question was a fragment of a late antique sarcophagus, discovered in Istanbul by an excavation conducted by the Russian Archaeological Institute and subsequently acquired by the Berlin Bode Museum. On the engagement of Strzygowski with getting artworks for the Berlin museums: G. Mietke, ‘Josef Strzygowski und die Sammlung spätantiker und byzantinischer Denkmäler’, in A. Bärnreuther and P.-K. Schuster (eds.), Zum Lob der Sammler: Die Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin und ihre Sammler (Berlin, 2009) 112–21; G. Mietke, E. Ehler, C. Fluck and G. Helmecke, Josef Strzygowski und die Berliner Museen (Berlin, 2012).

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Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a particular artistic medium, beginning with analysis of miniatures in early Alexandrian and Syrian manuscripts. Later in the book, attention shifts towards reliefs and early Christian ivories, and this is followed by an overview of early Byzantine painting. The final chapter of the book adds further examples in its summary of earlier chapters and brings to the fore the central role of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople. Ainalov’s descriptions of artworks display accuracy and a range of approaches, emphasizing particular aspects or features characteristic to the making of late antique art. This fluid movement of focus leads to a narrative composed of a series of individual sections, reuniting objects and drawing comparisons in unexpected and thought-provoking ways, a combination that results in a compelling experience for the reader. Perhaps in an attempt to overcome the medium-focused character of his chapters, Ainalov pays attention to features which at first seem at odds with particular kinds of art production. For example, he is interested in the ‘pictorial’ nature of late antique reliefs and in the way that architecture was represented in mural decorations. He draws comparisons with ease and even makes direct links between the iconographies of miniature images (either painted or made in metal) and the monumental compositions that once decorated the walls of famous churches.61 Ainalov’s main focus, however, was on the significant role played by the Hellenistic East in the formation of Byzantine art: When we speak of the antique foundations of Byzantine art, we have in mind the art of Alexandria, Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor – places which from early times had assimilated the culture and art of Greece.62

Central to this claim was Ainalov’s emphasis on ‘the historical importance of Constantinople’, which ‘united all the characteristics of Hellenistic art . . . with the arts and styles of the Orient’.63 Neither Kondakov nor Ainalov were afraid to acknowledge strong Oriental influences, including Sasanian and even ‘barbaric’ features.64 In contrast to Strzygowski, they did not see this as an essentially negative infusion that would weaken or 61

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This aspect is one of the few that were noticed in modern scholarship: see e.g. C. Ihm, Die Programme der christlichen Apsismalerei vom 4. Jahrhundert bis zur Mitte des 8. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1960) 52. Ainalov, Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art, 280. Ibid., 281. This tendency found its culmination in Kondakov’s last works, for example: N. P. Kondakov, ‘Les costumes orientaux à la cour byzantine’, Byzantion 1 (1924) 7–49. The approach is also clearly predetermined by the interest in artworks of nomadic peoples and archaeological findings on Russian territories: Meyer, Greco-Scythian Art.

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suppress the Hellenistic legacy; on the contrary, they interpreted it as something which both strengthened and enriched the classicizing repertoire of early Byzantine art with new patterns and motifs. This difference in emphasis is very significant, since the Russian school was not at the time tinged by the racial theories and ethnic considerations that became dominant in the German-speaking world. On the contrary, it proposed an ‘all inclusive’ model of early Byzantine art, reuniting various cultural currents of late antiquity into a single whole, just as the Russian empire of the nineteenth century fostered an ideal of embracing different peoples and territories by granting every one of them value and importance, as long as they formed an organic part of a world mytho-poeticized as a pan-Slavic entity.65

3.

Sinai and the Discovery of the Earliest Icons

One of the most significant contributions of late Romanov scholarship to the European historiography of late antiquity concerned the discovery and publication of treasures in St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai and in particular a few of its earliest icons. Built by the emperor Justinian (527–65) in the middle of the sixth century, this desert monastic ‘fortress’ still contains the richest and most important collection of Byzantine icons.66 There was a continuous and active historical presence of Russian pilgrims at Sinai which is attested in numerous travelling accounts and 65

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On pan-Slavism and the notion of Slavdom: P. Rakitin, ‘Byzantine Echoes in the Nineteenth Century Press and in the Writings of Russian Intellectuals’, Opuscula historiae artium 63 (2013) 94–104. Similar tendencies characterize Russian academic interpretations of other aspects of the Orient. As Rachel Polonsky wonderfully puts it in her recent review: ‘the Russian imperial scholars and their “minority associates” were redefining certain ethnic groups as national communities, and creating a picture of Russia as a distinctive “political and cultural space”, open and multi-polar, in which there was no discernible boundary between East and West’. R. Polonsky, ‘Is This Not Paradise? The East through Western Eyes, or How the Steppe Came to St Petersburg: The Paradoxes of Russian Orientalism’, The Times Literary Supplement 5658 (9 September 2011) 3–5. I would like to thank Jaś Elsner for bringing this article to my attention. Recent books on Russian Orientalism include D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, 2010) and V. Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Soviet Periods (Oxford, 2011). K. Weitzmann and G. H. Forsyth, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Church and Fortress of Justinian (Ann Arbor, 1973); K. Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Icons, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1976); A. Lidov, Византийские иконы Синая [Byzantine Icons of Sinai] (Moscow 1999); R. S. Nelson and K. Collins (eds.), Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai (Los Angeles, 2006).

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works of art that were brought there either by common travellers or by the official envoys of Russian rulers.67 The famous apse mosaic of the Transfiguration survives in a more or less integral state only because of the intervention conducted by the Russian hieromonk Samuel, who in 1847 tried to consolidate the early Byzantine decoration of the sanctuary and filled some lacunas with painted imitations.68 The trip to Sinai was a well-trodden route for Russian Orthodox pilgrims and it is not surprising that soon it was followed by secular and ecclesiastical scholars interested in Eastern Christian antiquities.69 One of them was the archimandrite Porphiry Uspensky (1804–85), theologian and church historian, as well as for many years the head of the Russian Religious Mission in Jerusalem.70 After his second trip to the Sinai monastery he brought back twenty-six icons.71 Four of them, restored in St Petersburg, were revealed to have been made with wax colours (in encaustic) and to be 67

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On Russian icons and presence on Mount Sinai see fundamental recent study: Русские иконы Синая: Жалованные грамоты, иконы и произведения декоративно-прикладного искусства XVI–XX веков из России, хранящиеся в монастыре Св. Екатерины на Синае [The Russian Icons of Mount Sinai: Charters, Icons and Decorative and Applied Arts of the 16th to 20th Centuries from Russia in the St Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, Egypt] (Moscow, 2015). Notwithstanding the embryonic state of scientific restoration in the nineteenth century, Samuel’s work was executed with great care and respect for the monument. As a consequence, it was highly appraised by Italian specialists that have concluded the most recent restoration of the apse mosaic: www.solo-mosaico.org/portfolio/restoration-of-the-mosaic-of-thetransfiguration-in-st-catherine-monastery-on-mount-sinai/?lang=en. See also paper by Igoshev, in Русские иконы Синая [Russian Icons of Mount Sinai], 481–84. For an overview on Russian scholars writing on Sinai: A. Lidov, ‘Иконное собрание Синайского монастыря и его русские исследователи [The Collection of Icons of the Sinai Monastery and its Russian Researchers]’, in Русские иконы Синая [The Russian Icons of Mount Sinai], 117–39. On Porphiry and his Sinai expeditions: F. Thomson, ‘Konstantin (in Religion Porphyry) Uspensky and the Hilandar Monastery Collection of Manuscripts’, in Ch. Griblle and P. Matejić (eds.), Monastic Traditions: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth International Hilandar Conference (Bloomington, 2003) 305–40, 305–16; O. E. Ėtingof, Византийские иконы VIпервой половины XIII века в России [Byzantine Icons (6th–First Half of 13th Century) in Russia] (Moscow, 2005) 230–43; Heid and Dennert (eds.), Personenlexikon zur Christlichen Archäologie, vol. II, 1261. On Porphiry’s role and engagement of Russian scholars in the discovery and cataloguing of the earliest Greek manuscripts on Mount Sinai: G. Parpulov, ‘The Greek and Latin Manuscripts of the Mount Sinai and the Scholarly World’, in C. Mango (ed.), St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai: Its Manuscripts and Their Conservation (London, 2011) 35–42, esp. 35–8. The accounts of his trips were published and provide a lot of detailed information on the state of the monastery in the middle of the nineteenth century: Porphiry [Uspensky], Первое путешествие в Синайский монастырь в 1845 году [My First Journey to the Sinai Monastery in 1845] (St Petersburg, 1856); Porphiry [Uspensky], Второе путешествие в Синайский монастырь в 1850 году [My Second Journey to the Sinai Monastery in 1850] (St Petersburg, 1856).

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

Figure 6.6 Icon of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, encaustic on wooden panel, sixth–seventh century, one of the four early icons brought by Porphiry Uspensky from Mount Sinai. Museum of Western and Oriental Art, also known as Bogdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Art, Kiev. Photograph: author. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

very early (sixth century). These images, now preserved in the Bogdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Art, represent John the Baptist, the Virgin and Child, Sts. Sergius and Bacchus and a panel with two saints, identified as Plato and Glyceria (?) (Figure 6.6). From the accounts of the ‘inquisitive monk’, as Porphiry defines himself, we learn that in the state in which he found them these icons were barely visible because of the blackening of the upper layers and centuries-old dirt covering their surface. Unfortunately, the main part of Porphiry’s collection that included, alongside the Sinai panels, icons and objects from the Holy Land and Mount Athos (forty-two in total), disappeared, together with multiple treasures from the Kiev monastic collections, when they were confiscated by Nazi troops in 1942–3 during the Second World War. It is likely that hundreds of icons and church objects looted from the Ukrainian capital vanished in the great fire following the bombing of Wildenhof castle near Köningsberg where, it is believed, they were temporally stored.72 72

Ėtingof, Византийские иконы [Byzantine Icons], 242–3. The four encaustic icons and a small mosaic image of St Nicholas from Porphiry’s collection escaped this destiny because they were separated from the rest of the collection before the Second World War. On the initiative of the director of the Kiev Museum of Western and Eastern Art (old name of the Bogdan and Varvara

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The discovery of the encaustic icons among the twenty-six panels brought from Sinai was an unexpected coincidence. On his return to St Petersburg, Porphiry decided to restore some of the images and, after making inquiries, found the painter Aleksey Ivanovich Travin. The latter was a self-taught restorer who developed his own methods for cleaning the surfaces of ancient icons without damaging the original paint. According to Porphiry’s memoirs, Travin applied a liquid (apparently invented by him) that removed the superficial dirt and old varnish. After testing the skills of the painter, Porphiry entrusted him with the ‘Sinai collection’. The description of these matters, which took place in 1863 and 1864, marks the moment of the discovery of the earliest Christian encaustic images and, at the same time, their first restoration. The four encaustic icons in Kiev were thoroughly studied in a paper published by Ainalov in the 1902;73 this argued for a sixth century dating of the panels through a careful analysis of iconography and with particular attention to questions of provenance and technical execution. The Sinai images incited Russian scholars to formulate new hypotheses on the process of painting and the method of application of wax colours to the wooden surface.74 Kondakov himself travelled to Sinai in 1881 and left a detailed account of his journey along with a description of loca sancta and the treasures of the monastery.75 However, little attention was given to icons in this text. At that stage, Kondakov was not yet interested in this type of material and he was not allowed to go into the Old Library where

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Khanenko Museum of Art) V. F. Ovchinnikov, the panels were moved from the storage spaces of ex-convent Kiev Lavra (at the time an anti-religious museum) where, according to him, they were neglected and ran the risk of destruction. They were, instead, moved to the show rooms of the museum of which he was in charge. Therefore, they were evacuated as an integral part of this museum’s collection in 1941 and are still preserved today. Ėtingof, Византийские иконы [Byzantine Icons], 240–1. D. V. Ainalov, ‘Синайские иконы восковой живописи [Sinai Icons Painted in Encaustic]’, Византийский временник 9 (1902) 344–77. Two of the four encaustic icons were published earlier by Strzygowski, who was in a hurry to be first: Strzygowski, ‘Zwei enkaustische Heiligenbilder von Sinai’; Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom, 123–5. D. V. Ainalov, ‘К вопросу о технике восковой живописи [On the Question of the Technique of Encaustic Painting]’, Журнал Министерства народного просвещения II.15 (1908) 193–200; V. N. Beneshevich, Памятники Синая, археологические и палеографические [Sinai Monuments, Archaeological and Palaeographical], 2 vols. (St Petersburg, 1912–25), 18; Anfert’eva, ‘Айналов: жизнь, творчество, архив [Ainalov: Life, Works, Archive]’, 271. N. P. Kondakov, Путешествие на Синай в 1881 г.: Из путевых впечатлений; древности Синайского монастыря [A Journey to Sinai in the Year 1881: Travel Impressions; the Antiquities of the Sinai Monastery] (Odessa, 1882). A general discussion of Kondakov’s studies on Sinai: I. Belov, ‘Н.П. Кондаков и его исследования на Синае [N. P. Kondakov and his Studies at Sinai]’, Богословские труды 28 (1987) 262–71.

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most of the icons seem to have been kept.76 On this trip Kondakov was accompanied by a professional photographer from Odessa, J. X. Raoult, and the result of their photographic campaign would appear a few years later in the form of the Sinai Album, consisting of 100 selected black and white photos, two thirds of which represented images from illustrated manuscripts77 (Figure 6.7). This publication was an innovative and costly initiative at the time, providing a unique possibility to present Sinai to the Russian public.78 Kondakov did end up studying the Sinai icons when he prepared a small catalogue of Porphiry Uspensky’s collection in 1902, at the same time as Ainalov’s article.79 Kondakov’s movement of interest towards religious painting on wood was influenced by his trip to Mount Athos where he encountered very rich monastic traditions in liturgical use and the veneration of panel images.80 The treasures of Mount Athos contributed significantly to the study of the icons and medieval art more generally in Russia. Before Kondakov, a big Athos project had been organized by the Academy of Arts. It was made possible with the help of the famous art collector and traveller P. I. Sevastyanov, who managed to obtain funding from the imperial family in 1859, enabling an unprecedented multidisciplinary

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Foletti compares Kondakov’s negligence towards the panel paintings of Sinai with that of Kurt Weitzmann – later the famous compiler of the catalogue of Sinai icons – who initially came to the monastery to study the manuscripts. Weitzmann discovered the panel paintings by chance, thanks to the invitation of a monk to visit the Old Library where most of the panels were stored at the time: I. Foletti, ‘L’icona, una costruzione storiografica? Dalla Russia all’Occidente, la creazione di un mito’, Annali di critica d’arte 12 (2016) 175–94. J. X. Raoult and N. P. Kondakov, Атлас 100 фотографических снимков с видов древностей Синайского монастыря [An Atlas of 100 Photographic Views of the Antiquities of the Sinai Monastery] (Odessa, 1883). Due to its costs it was printed only in a few copies (15 ca). See also: S. O. Vialova, ‘Синайский альбом Н.П. Кондакова [N. P. Kondakov’s Sinai Album]’, Россия и Христианский Восток 1 (1997) 207–25; S. O. Vialova, in Petrova (ed.), Никодим Павлович Кондаков [Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov], 46–50; S. O. Vialova, ‘Фотографическое наследие XIX века: Н.П. Кондаков и его “Альбом видов и древностей синайских” [The Photographic Heritage of the 19th Century: N. P. Kondakov and his “Album of Sinai Views and Antiquities”]’, Фотография. Изоражение. Документ. 1 (2010) 15–21. From archival documents we know that the initiative and the trip had a private character, and Kondakov was lamenting on the lack of means to publish the volume on several occasions. After his death Porphiry left his collection to the museum of the Kiev Theological Academy but sent 23 lithographic images made from painted reproductions of these icons to the Academy of Sciences with the request to publish them in a separate volume. The project was entrusted to Kondakov: N. P. Kondakov, Иконы Синайской и Афонской коллекций преосв. Порфирия [Icons of Bishop Porphirii’s Sinai and Athos Collections] (St Petersburg, 1902). N. P. Kondakov, Памятники христианского искусства на Афоне [Monuments of Christian Art on Mt Athos] (St Petersburg, 1902). This view is also shared by Foletti, ‘L’icona, una costruzione storiografica?’

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Figure 6.7 View of the St Catherine’s monastery library and Mount Horeb, Sinai. From: J. X. Raoult and N. P. Kondakov, Атлас 100 фотографических снимков с видов древностей Синайского монастыря [An Atlas of 100 Photographic Views of the Antiquities of the Sinai Monastery] (Odessa, 1883), image on page 8. Public domain

research trip for a group of specialists that lasted for more than a year. During this expedition, among other data, drawings and copies of several hundred of icons as well as thousands of photographs were made and brought back to Russia.81 After his trip to Mount Athos, Kondakov dedicated more and more attention to icons, re-evaluating the importance of panel painting in Byzantine art. Particularly important in this respect are several chapters in his most cited work On the Iconography of the Virgin.82 This study of the development of Marian iconography remains unsurpassed in many respects. Ancient images and icons of the Virgin play a particular role in the narrative, which – among other questions – aimed to discern the origins of later iconographic types in early Christian imagery and to reconstruct the formative stages of the Byzantine visual repertoire.

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Y. Pyatnitsky, ‘Византийские и поствизантийские иконы в России (часть 2) [Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Icons in Russia (part 2)’, Византийский временник 56 (1995) 247–65, 248–9. For the constantly increasing Russian presence on Mt. Athos during the nineteenth century see: Rakitin, ‘Byzantine Echoes’, 95. N. P. Kondakov, Иконография Богоматери [Iconography of the Mother of God], 2 vols. (St Petersburg, 1914–15; repr. Moscow, 2003); Kondakov, Iconographie de la Mère de Dieu, vol. 3; N. P. Kondakov, Iconografia della Madre di Dio, vol. 1, ed. and tr. I. Foletti (Rome, 2014).

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

The interest in ancient examples was strongly linked with subsequent Byzantine and Russian tradition.83 Appointed to the board of the Trustees of the committee dedicated to Russian icons (the Committee for the Encouragement of Russian Icon-Painting), Kondakov was responsible for the initiative to publish the collection of model drawings (Ikonopisniy podlinnik) used by Russian icon painters from the late Middle Ages.84 His volume on the iconography of Christ was prepared as part of that endeavour.85 The edition was expected to contribute to the revival of icon painting in Russia and Kondakov was personally involved in inspecting icon painters’ workshops around the country.86 Interestingly enough, this work opens with an extensive chapter dedicated to late antique imagery of Jesus indicating that early Christian imagery was seen as highly relevant for nineteenth-century Russian icon production and the training of painters. The culmination of Kondakov’s research on icons would see light only after his emigration. This first comprehensive study of Russian icons was immediately translated and published in English prior even to the Russian edition.87 Of particular importance for the present discussion is the first chapter, entitled ‘Origins: The Orient and Greece’, in which the author offers one of the first overviews of the origins of Christian icons, a topic still debated today.88 Ivan Foletti in his recent monograph points out the paradoxical neglect of Kondakov’s pioneering work on icons for the formation of the field and research in general.89 Part of Kondakov’s legacy is focused on the unveiling

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The strong interest in icons as an art form and their religious significance was predetermined by the valorization of the Russian tradition of icon painting from the second half of the nineteenth century. See especially the text by Buslaev on Russian icon painting published in 1861: Buslaev, Древнерусская литература и православное искусство [Medieval Russian Literature and Orthodox Art], 36–186. N. P. Kondakov, Современное положение русской народной иконописи [The Current State of Russian Popular Icon Painting] (St Petersburg, 1901); Sosnovtzev, in Petrova (ed.), Никодим Павлович Кондаков [Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov], 115–30. N. P. Kondakov, Иконография Господа Бога и Спаса нашего Иисуса Христа [Iconography of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ] (St Petersburg, 1905). During these trips Kondakov collected some of the icons, primarily of the nineteenth and twentieth century. He gave his small collection (around 100 icons) in 1909 to the Russian Museum in St Petersburg: Petrova (ed.), Никодим Павлович Кондаков [Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov], 133–52. Kondakov, The Russian Icon, tr. Minns, with an interesting preface by Ellis H. Minns, vii–xi. T. F. Mathews with N. Muller, The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Paintings and Icons (Los Angeles, 2016); J. Elsner, ‘Panel Painting in Late Antiquity’, in C. Barber and M. Vassilaki (eds.), The Icon (Cambridge, forthcoming). The word ‘icon’, although known previously, started to be used systematically as a technical term for Byzantine religious painting on wood by Russian medievalists. See Foletti, ‘L’icona,

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of ancient Russian icons from centuries of over-painting, restoration and metal covers. This process changed the perception of medieval cult images on wood, and made an extraordinary impact on artistic life resulting in numerous experiments and innovations by the painters of the Russian avant-garde immediately before the Revolution (K. Malevich, V. Tatlin, N. Goncharova, A. Lentulov and many others)90 (Figure 6.8). In Russia after the Revolution, Kondakov’s studies were intentionally silenced or completely ignored in the wake of a fundamental transformation in society and ideology. The first decades of the Soviet regime appropriated the aesthetics of the icon into a nationalist discourse that completely deprived sacred panel painting of its original religious context.91 Thousands of panels, transported into museums, inspired the idea that icons were one of Russia’s most distinctive national cultural achievements.92 However, scholarship was expected to strip these pinnacles of national identity and the historic past of forever-erased prejudices and passé beliefs. Kondakov’s thesis of the primarily religious value of panel images and the profound theological content of their imagery were outdated and out of place in this construct. Strzygowski’s ideas of the harmful effect of Eastern art on the classical tradition and his attention to ethnic origins, were an easy fit with the

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una costruzione storiografica?’, 169–70 and his reference to A. Muñoz, Review of N. P. Kondakov, Памятники христианского искусства на Афоне [Monuments of Christian Art on Mt Athos] (St Petersburg, 1902), L’arte 7 (1904) 414–15. A. Grishchenko, Русская икона как искусство живописи [The Russian Icon as a Pictorial Art Form] (Moscow, 1917). To cite just a few general studies on Russian avant-garde and medieval icons: L. Graziano (ed.), Icona e avanguardie: percorsi dell’immagine in Russia (Turin, 1999); A. Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Aldershot, 2008); J. J. A. Gatrall and D. Greenfield (eds.), Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity (University Park, PA, 2010); C. A. Tsakiridou, Icons in Time, Person in Eternity: Orthodox Theology and the Aesthetics of the Christian Image (Farnham, 2012), 75–94. At the end of 1920s and early 1930s the Soviet government organized a number of touring exhibitions of Russian icons in Europe and the United States (initially with the pragmatic intent of selling some). It is strange, to say the least, that the new regime would use medieval religious art to promote itself in the West: L. Kyzlasova, ‘L’exposition d’icônes russes en Europe et aux USA de 1929 à 1932, en tant que début de la gloire mondiale de la peinture russe ancienne’, in I. Foletti (ed.), La Russie et l’Occident: relations intellectuelles et artistiques au temps des révolutions russes (Lausanne, 2010) 181–96; W. R. Salmond, ‘How America Discovered Russian Icons: The Soviet Loan Exhibition of 1930–1932’, in Gatrall and Greenfield (eds.), Alter Icons, 128–43; E. Osokina, Небесная голубизна ангельских одежд. Судьба произведений древнерусской живописи 1920-1930-е [The Heavenly Blue of Angel’s Garments. The Fate of Russian Medieval Paintings 1920s–1930s] (Moscow, 2018). In 1929, a Russian show opened to public success in the Victoria & Albert Museum accompanied by a well-illustrated catalogue. This is when existing collections were enriched by multiple panels expropriated from churches, combined with the active cleaning and restoration of ancient icons, the results of which contributed significantly to our knowledge: Pyatnitsky ‘Византийские и поствизантийские иконы в России [Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Icons in Russia]’, 262–4.

Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Imperial Russia

Figure 6.8 Natalia Goncharova, The Virgin and Child, oil on canvas, 1911. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 150  107 cm. Photograph: author. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

ideology of the new regime in Germany of the 1930s; Kondakov’s vision of the sacral Byzantine tradition as an evolving and, at the same time, partially unchanging entity, rooted in late antiquity and surviving until Tsarist Russia (where it would flower anew), absorbing numerous influences from the Eastern and Western worlds alike, was neither nationalistic nor secular enough for, nor ideologically compatible with, the rhetoric of the new Soviet regime.

4.

Byzantine Reflections (Concluding Remarks)

The Russian historiography of Byzantium of the second half of the nineteenth century was not, and perhaps could not have been, immune from the drives of contemporary politics. In the world after the Russo-Turkish

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wars (fought sporadically between 1768 and 1829), and the unrealized dreams of the eighteenth-century ‘Greek project’ that presupposed the return of Constantinople, the Second Rome, into the realms of the Orthodox Christian world under Russian suzerainty, relations with the Ottoman Empire were extremely tense.93 In this climate, historical and cultural ancestral links to Byzantium and its original territories were particularly resonant, stimulating but also responding to the current political situation. Kondakov’s trip to Constantinople of 1884 with ‘the purpose of investigating the city’s mosques that had once been Byzantine church buildings’, was symptomatic of this trend.94 In 1898 on the commission of the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Grand-Prince Constantine Constantinovich, Kondakov undertook a trip, paid for and organized by the government, to Macedonia as a member of what would today be called a multidisciplinary group of scholars consisting of historians, Slavicists, painters and others.95 Three imperial powers (Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian) considered the Balkans to be a playing field for their own political interests. A research expedition in these fragile and tense circumstances, which would explode into the First World War only a few years later, could have hardly been authorized at the highest imperial level by exclusively scientific goals. To what extent an overview of the current political situation was part of the research team’s goals, travelling to distant locations in the constant company of an Ottoman military escort, cannot be fully determined; but even Kondakov’s purely historical and cultural conjectures on people and monuments of the region, published after the trip, were inevitably fuelled with implicit political assumptions and messages, consonant with Russian imperial aspirations.96 Even more complex was the cultural and political climate within the country. Under Nicholas I (1825–55), a new ideology was introduced to

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On Greek project: Zorin, By Fables Alone, 24–60. N. P. Kondakov, Византийские церкви и памятники Константинополя [The Byzantine Churches and Monuments of Constantinople] (Odessa, 1887; repr. Moscow, 2006); Kleinbauer, ‘Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov’, 639. It must be pointed out that the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople opened in 1895 was the first foreign institution in the Ottoman Empire to obtain the right to excavate Byzantine churches that had been converted into mosques. On the whole, the policy of the Institute differed from similar foreign institutions in Istanbul in its specific interest in Byzantine antiquities. Kleinbauer, ‘Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov’, 640; Vzdornov, Реставрация и наука [Restoration and Scholarship], 291–2. N. P. Kondakov, Македония: археологическое путешествие [Macedonia: An Archaeological Journey] (St Petersburg, 1909). Similar thoughts: Foletti, ‘Kondakov et Prague’, 4.

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serve the political goals of the tsar. Among the main ideologists was the head of the Academy of Science, Count S. S. Uvarov, the author of the principles ‘orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality’, which were laid out as the basis for the development of cultural life in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century.97 The great role given here to religion as the foundation of appropriate social conduct and state ideology was extraordinary, and both positive and negative reactions to it would echo through the political, cultural and artistic life of Russia in the decades to come. Byzantium reappears in this context as the sole role-model and the main ancestor in which Russia was rediscovering its ancient roots. The so-called pseudo Russian and Byzantine styles were introduced at this point as the main trends of religious architecture.98 The greatest artistic project of the state at the time was the construction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (1839–83), which was conceived as a monument celebrating victory in the Napoleonic Wars, but quickly became the main platform for the ‘revival’ of Russian artistic life.99 The changes in building styles and new forms of architecture demanded the elaboration of appropriate principles for religious monumental painting which initially created complications for painters trained according to the standards of European academies of art. Byzantine principles of religious imagery had to be rediscovered anew, and this process, engaging a majority of artists, would often be seen by contemporary press as a kind of Russian ‘Renaissance’. In this context, the scholarly works of Kondakov and his students were a signal source of information and inspiration that finally provided a proper historical overview of the Byzantine visual tradition.100

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Vzdornov, История открытия и изучения русской средневековой живописи [History of the Discovery and Study of Russian Medieval Painting], 26–7. The principles were announced in 1834 in the first issue of the Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveschenia [Journal of the Ministry of Public Education], 5–7. E. Kirichenko, The Russian Style, tr. A. Tait (London 1991). E. Kirichenko, Храм Христа Спасителя в Москве: история проектирования и создания собора [The Church of Christ the Saviour’s in Moscow: A History of the Cathedral’s Designing and Construction] (Moscow, 1992); Rakitin, ‘Byzantine Echoes’, 95. In the late Romanov era, artists, historians, philosophers and writers were in constant interaction with each other. Ainalov had a close relationship with painter Nesterov from their meeting in Rome in 1893. Nesterov together with Vasnetsov was one of the artists who tried to resuscitate the aesthetic principles and religious content of ancient church decorations in one of the most ambitious projects of the century – St. Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kiev. In one of his letters Ainalov remarks: ‘Painters look at painting differently from art historians, and that is why the exchange [with Nesterov] was so interesting for me’, Anfert’eva, ‘Айналов: жизнь, творчество, архив [Ainalov: Life, Works, Archive]’, 266; Marcenaro, ‘Dmitrij Vlas’evič Ajnalov’, 196–7.

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One of the markers of Russian historiography discussed in this chapter was the creation of the image of Byzantium as a straight parallel, or as a response, to the Russian question. In one place Kondakov writes: ‘Let the final result of the study of Byzantine archaeology be targeted towards getting to know the Russian antiquities . . .’.101 Similar ideas were voiced by Ainalov: ‘By studying the art of Byzantium and its origins we approach the question of the origins and nature of Ancient Russian art’.102 This fusion of historic landscapes and the identification with previous tradition would create an interesting paradox in which each entity, the reconstructed world of Byzantium and the nineteenth-century Russian empire, would influence the ‘image’ of the other. This process was predetermined not so much by the conscious choices of writers and scholars, but by the narcissistic enchantment of a time concerned with finding its self-reflection in the ‘waters’ of history. In the context of the cultural and political situation briefly discussed here, the question of the rise of Byzantine art assumed an unprecedented importance. The discourses of Russian historical and art-historical scholarship were marked by an orientation towards Constantinople and the Christian East, as opposed to Rome, as the artistic centre of the late antique world. It insisted on the survival of Greek antiquity in Byzantine art, in resistance to the Roman heritage that eventually determined the development of art in the Latin West. This approach was the only way to provide the Eastern Christian traditions, of which Ancient Rus’ was seen as the most important successor after the fall of Constantinople, with a suitable ancestral genealogy.103

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Kondakov, Византийские церкви и памятники Константинополя [The Byzantine Churches and Monuments of Constantinople], III–V. Anfert’eva, ‘Айналов: жизнь, творчество, архив [Ainalov: Life, Works, Archive]’, 271. The reference to Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant voice in the art historical polemics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is not a mere speculation or provocation by contemporary authors. The writings of art historians (both scholarly and private) demonstrate how deeply and openly interested the scholars were in each other’s religious identity and how consideration of different confessions was used as indicators of competence or tendentiousness in opposed schools of research.

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Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867) and Schleiermacher’s Legacy: The Attempted Foundation of a Protestant Theology of Art  

When the German archaeologist Ludwig von Sybel published his monograph Christian Antiquity: Introduction to Early Christian Art in 1906, he opened with this preface: Whether theologians will find anything of interest in this book, they must see for themselves; in any case, objective reviews by theologians of any denomination can count on special thanks.1

Sybel obviously doubted that theologians had an interest in early Christian art and that they could react objectively to the argument about the pagan roots of Christianity that he was going to make.2 Sybel’s assumption appears to be well justified from the vantage point of the early twentieth century, since the vast majority of nineteenth-century theologians, prominently represented by the Protestant church historian Adolf von Harnack, had refrained from using Christian material culture alongside textual sources in their work.3 Predominant skepticism about the epistemic value 1

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“Ob Theologen in dem Buche für sich etwas finden können, müssen sie selbst sehen; jedenfalls haben sachliche Besprechungen von Theologen jeder Konfession auf besonderen Dank zu rechnen” (all translations by the author), in L. von Sybel, Christliche Antike: Einführung in die altchristliche Kunst, 2 vols. (Marburg, 1906) vol. 1, 1. My special thanks go to Stefan Trinks who first introduced me to the Monumentale Theologie, as well as to Martin Ohst, Kevin Hector and Hans-Martin Kirn for their helpful advice on matters theological. I would also like to thank Gunnar Brands, Andrew Irving, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Tomas Lehmann, Marco Meyer, Konstanze Runge, Margaret Scarborough and Cambridge University Press’ anonymous readers whose ideas and feedback were of great help in the completion of this study. The chapter profited immensely from the outings it had and the input it received at the Globalized Classics summer school at Humboldt University Berlin in 2015, the Empires of Faith conference at the Divinity School in Chicago in 2015, the colloquium ‘The Objects of Art+Architecture’ at the University of Groningen and the colloquium on Christianity, Theology and Heritage at the Protestantse Theologische Universiteit in Groningen, both held in 2017. The hesitant reception of Christliche Antike on the part of theologians in the first years after its publication proved that Sybel’s concerns were well justified. Cf. F. W. Deichmann, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie (Darmstadt, 1983) 27. E. J. Clauß-Thomassen, “Protestantische Christlich-Archäologische Forschung an der Wende des 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert: Schultze, Kurth, Lietzmann,” in R. Wisskirchen and M. Schmauder (eds.), Spiegel einer Wissenschaft: zur Geschichte der Christlichen Archäologie vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert dargestellt an Autoren und Büchern (Bonn, 1991) 39; G. Strohmaier-Wiederanders, “Zur Geschichte des Spezialfaches Christliche Archäologie und Kirchliche Kunst,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Reihe 34 (1985) 571.

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of art and archaeology in writing the history of the Church is certainly not unique to nineteenth-century Protestant Germany. As has been argued by Michael Squire and Joseph Leo Koerner among others, Luther’s rejection of the image as “epistemologically empty and void” had significant longterm consequences for humanist scholarship.4 German Protestant aesthetics like those of Kant and Hegel perpetuated the Lutheran dichotomy between a true experience of God that is necessarily spiritual, non-visual and best mediated by words on the one hand, and a visual, art-based experience deemed to offer merely didactic insights into Christian doctrine on the other.5 In his Aesthetics, for instance, Hegel postulates: “. . . the Divine, explicitly regarded as unity and universality, is essentially present only to thinking and, as in itself imageless, is not susceptible of being imaged and shaped by imagination.”6 Protestant skepticism towards the image influenced generations of history-writing that ignored the autonomy of the image, but privileged instead the ideas behind the image, or, preferably, did not touch upon images at all.7 This is particularly true of Protestant church history. It must be acknowledged, though, that while the leading Catholic figures examining early Christian art in the nineteenth century worked first and

4

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M. Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, 2009) 16; J. L. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, 2004) 27–51. For the nuances in Luther’s critique of the image cf. M. Luther, “Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von den Bildern und Sakrament, 1525,” in K. Drescher (ed.), Dr. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe, vol. 18 (Weimar, 1908) 62–84. On the influence of Protestantism on the study of early Christianity see more generally J. Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, 1990). G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1998) 175. Further, M. Squire “Unser Knie benugen wir doch nicht mehr? Hegel, Classical Art and the Reformation of Art History,” in P. Kottman and M. Squire (eds.), The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History (Paderborn, 2018) 125–58. On Winckelmann and the aesthetic tradition see Squire, Image and Text, 41–89. The discipline of Religious Studies has increasingly integrated material culture and art into the study of the history of religion in the last decades. Indicative are the launches of the series Iconography of Religions (ed. Theo van Baaren) in 1970, the yearbook Visible Religion (ed. Hans Kippenberg et al.) in 1982 and finally the journal Material Religion in 2005 (ed. S. Brent Plate, Brigit Meyer, David Morgan and Crispin Paine). A contribution from the field of Catholic theology is the series ikon.Bild+Theologie (ed. Alex Stock and Reinhard Hoeps), since 1999. A careful assessment of the state of the study of visual culture in Religious Studies is offered by Ch. Uehlinger, “Approaches to Visual Culture and Religion: Disciplinary Trajectories, Interdisciplinary Connections, and Some Conditions for Further Progress,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 27/4–5 (2015) 384–422. See also P. J. Bräunlein, “Zurück zu den Sachen! – Religionswissenschaft vor dem Objekt,” in P. Bräunlein (ed.), Religion & Museum. Zur visuellen Repräsentation von Religion/en im öffentlichen Raum (Bielefeld, 2004) 1–54.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

foremost as archaeologists – one might mention Guiseppe Marchi (1795–1860), his pupil Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822–94), EdmondFrédéric Le Blant (1818–97) and the central player of the following generation, Joseph Wilpert (1857–1944) – their Protestant counterparts tended to be professors of theology.8 Friedrich Münter (1761–1830), professor of theology in Copenhagen, bishop of Zealand and indeed primate of the Danish church, Johann Christian Wilhelm Augusti (1772–1841), professor of theology in Breslau and Bonn, and Carl Grüneisen (1802–1878), court chaplain in Stuttgart, all belong to the first generation of Protestant theologians who published on religious art. As early as 1825, Münter wrote a treatise on Christian symbolism.9 In 1831, Augusti used works of art as sources for the history of dogmatic theology in the twelfth and last volume of his Denkwürdigkeiten aus der christlichen Archäologie.10 His “archaeological” work was still primarily concerned with texts, but nonetheless Augusti inspired a series of Protestant church historians in the generations that followed to use material evidence as sources.11 From the 1820s, Grüneisen published on art and took on the editorship, along with the Nazarene artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and the art historian Karl Schnaase, of the popular journal Christliches Kunstblatt für Kirche Schule und Haus. It was, however, only in the second half of the nineteenth century that Protestant church historians developed what might be described as a systematic field of research on early Christian art. Prime members of this group, such as Victor Schultze (1851–1937), professor in Greifswald, Hans Achelis (1865–1937), professor in Leipzig, Bonn and Halle, or Nikolaus Müller (1857–1912), professor in Berlin, all devoted

8

9 10

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Both Guiseppe Marchi and Joseph Wilpert had been ordained Catholic priests, but neither worked as a priest or theologian. For a short overview on Catholic archaeology see R. Wisskirchen, “Das 19. Jahrhundert. Die Entwicklung auf Katholischer Seite,” in Wisskirchen and Schmauder (eds.), Spiegel einer Wissenschaft, 22–4. F. Münter, Sinnbilder und Kunstvorstellungen der alten Christen, 2 vols. (Altona, 1825). E. J. Clauß-Thomassen, “Augusti und Bunsen: Zwei Protestantische Forscher aus der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Wisskirchen and Schmauder (eds.), Spiegel einer Wissenschaft, 25f. For nineteenth-century theologians writing on early Christian art see K. Rosenkranz, Studien, Reden und Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Literatur, vol. 5 (Leipzig, 1848) 130 and especially F. Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie. Eine Geschichte der christlichen Kunstarchäologie und Epigraphik (Gotha, 1867, repr. Mittenwald, 1978) 777–87, 804–10. Henceforth, I will quote from the 1978 edition. The comprehensive overview of the role of art history in Protestant university teaching and writing in the nineteenth century has not yet been written. While few church historians actively published on the subject, it is an open question to what extent theologians, such as Karl von Hase (1800–90), used artworks in their teaching. See M. Herbst, Karl von Hase als Kirchenhistoriker (Tübingen, 2012) 88.

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themselves to the study of Italian catacombs.12 The decision of these theologians to contribute to catacomb studies must be understood in the broader context of Protestant–Catholic animosities. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a particularly aggressive phase of polemics between Protestants and Catholics on the subject of how to interpret archaeological evidence connected to early Christian art and religion.13 An old dispute about the Roman catacombs and their “Catholic” or “proto-Protestant” features (with the significant proviso that the catacombs were to be dated to the first or second centuries, first instigated by Antonio Bosio (1575–1629) at the time of the Counter-Reformation) was still ongoing.14 The contentions reached their summit in 1889 in a vituperative exchange between Joseph Wilpert and Victor Schultze: Wilpert had taken offense at an article by Schultze which claimed the superiority of Protestant research and, in response, summarized his impression of Protestant archaeology in Principienfragen der christlichen Archäologie as follows: for the time being they are not serious academics. It was Schultze’s privilege to have marked the start: driven by preconceived opinions, he was the first to treat the monuments in a somewhat dilettantish manner; he was followed by Hasenclever who tried to substitute his lack of knowledge for phantasy; in Achelis, finally, unscientific research expressed itself most truthfully, it became caricature.15 12

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See for instance V. Schultze, Die Katakomben: die altchristlichen Grabstätten, ihre Geschichte und ihre Monumente (Leipzig, 1882); V. Schultze, Die Katakomben von San Gennaro dei Poveri in Neapel: eine kunsthistorische Studie (Jena, 1877); H. Achelis, Die Katakomben von Neapel (Leipzig, 1936); N. Müller, Die jüdische Katakombe am Monteverde zu Rom: der älteste bisher bekannt gewordene jüdische Friedhof des Abendlandes (Leipzig, 1912). Cf. Deichmann, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie, 24; Introduction by H. Bredekamp, in Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, E 8f. For Catholic interpretations of the catacombs see W. H. C. Frend, The Archaeology of Early Christianity: A History (London, 1996) 11–21, 65–90. An exemplary controversy is the one between Roller and Marucchi. On the basis of their individual interpretations of the visual and material culture of the catacombs, the Protestant Roller and the Catholic Marucchi develop diverging views on the early history of the Eucharist, prayers for the dead, the cult of saints and of Mary, as well as the authority of the Church and the apostolic See. See T. Roller, Les catacombes de Rome. Histoire de l’art et des croyances religieuses pendant les premiers siècles du Christianisme (Paris, 1881) and O. Marucchi, The Evidence of the Catacombs for the Doctrines and Organization of the Primitive Church (London, 1929). “Bei allen individuellen Verschiedenheiten stimmen sie in zwei Punkten miteinander überein: es fehlt ihnen fürs erste der wissenschaftliche Ernst. Schultze blieb es vorbehalten, nach dieser Richtung hin die Bahn gebrochen zu haben: er war der erste, der, von vorgefassten Meinungen geleitet, die Monumente einer ans Dilettantenhafte streifenden Behandlung unterwarf; ihm folgte Hasenclever, der den Mangel an positiven Kenntnissen der christlichen Archäologie durch Phantasie zu ersetzen sucht; in Achelis endlich fand die unwissenschaftliche Forschung ihren vollsten und getreuesten Ausdruck, sie wurde zur Carricatur,” in J. Wilpert, Principienfragen der

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

Besides the efforts of these contested few, Christian archaeology was a widely marginalized field of research in Protestant theology faculties throughout the nineteenth century.16 Also beyond the theology faculties, using material sources was not always considered methodologically advisable or necessary in the humanities.17 In Protestant church history, however, resistance to the study of Christian art appears to have been more fundamental as material culture was difficult to bring into line with ideally aniconic Protestant self-conceptions about Christian origins. In the words of Adolf von Harnack, who became professor of church history in Berlin in 1888: “[a] purely aesthetic culture is not a Protestant culture; very soon it turns out to be not a culture at all, because it lacks the sternness of the realization of truth and the strength of the moral will.”18 This chapter is about a forgotten alternative and little-known aspect of the story of academic Protestantism, which, if it had been pursued further, might have led to a more object-based approach in theology. The church historian Ferdinand Piper (1811–89), associate professor of church history at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, now Humboldt University, from 1840 until his death in 1889, dedicated a large part of his career to the history of art. In particular, Piper developed a new theological discipline exclusively concerned with Christian art and archaeology.19 Piper first outlined his proposal for the scope and function of “monumental theology,” as he called it, in a Protestant lexicon in 1862.20 In 1867, Piper republished a

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christlichen Archäologie, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der ‘Forschungen’ von Schultze, Hasenclever und Achelis (Freiburg, 1889) 100. In his reply, Schultze accused Wilpert of undermining the freedom of research. See V. Schultze, Die altchristlichen Bildwerke und die wissenschaftliche Forschung: eine protestantische Antwort auf römische Angriffe (Erlangen and Leipzig, 1889) 6f. Clauß-Thomassen, “Protestantische christlich-archäologische Forschung an der Wende des 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert,” 39f. At Friedrich Wilhelm University, only a few scholars like Johann Gustav Droysen and Eduard Gerhard defended the value of material studies for history and philology. See S. Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding: heiliger Ort, Wunderkammer, Museum (Berlin, 2011) 398, 403. “Eine rein ästhetische Kultur ist keine protestantische Kultur; aber sehr schnell wird sich erweisen, daß sie überhaupt keine Kultur ist, weil ihr der Ernst der Wahrheitserkenntnis und die Kraft des sittlichen Willens fehlt,” in A. von Harnack, ‘Protestantische Kultur (1912)’, in K. Nowak (ed.), Adolf von Harnack als Zeitgenosse: der Theologe und Historiker (Berlin, 1996) 310. On Piper as a scholar see the introduction of H. Bredekamp in Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie; A. Stock, Bilderfragen. Theologische Gesichtspunkte (Paderborn, 2004) 23–31; Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding, 389–451; G. Strohmaier-Wiederanders, “Ferdinand Karl Wilhelm Piper,” in S. Heid and M. Dennert (eds.), Personenlexikon zur Christlichen Archäologie: Forscher und Persönlichkeiten vom 16. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Regensburg, 2012) 1020–3; www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz95996.html, accessed April 24, 2018. F. Piper, “Theologie, Monumentale,” in J. J. Herzog (ed.), Real-Encyclopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (Gotha, 1862) 752–807. Piper understands the term “monumental” in the

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slightly altered version as Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie.21 In this volume he also included an additional 800-page long overview of Christian texts on art ranging from the New Testament to those written by his contemporaries. Monumental theology never became a popular field of research, but its existence testifies to an image-friendly route that Protestant academia was prepared to accommodate in the second half of the nineteenth century. When the long history of the Protestant critique of the image is told, this aspect of the story should not be forgotten. In this chapter, I will argue that monumental theology is not so much a product of the Catholic–Protestant dispute about Christian origins as it is a practical application of nineteenth-century Protestant theology. This chapter proposes that at the core of Piper’s convictions stands his interpretation of the concept of Anschauung, commonly but perhaps misleadingly translated as intuition, developed by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) in the first edition of On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers in 1799.22 In defense of his – to contemporary eyes – idiosyncratic project of writing Introduction to Monumental Theology, Piper argued that art helps to awaken Anschauung, which lies at the heart of religion.23 The way that Piper understands this concept is inspired by the understanding of Anschauung offered by the early Schleiermacher. This is a crucial point, because it shows that in this instance, Protestant theological thinking had a major influence on the increasing valorization of art and material culture in the nineteenth-century humanities. More programmatically than others, Piper defended the epistemic value of material culture for the understanding of the history of Christianity. Schleiermacherian thought, adapted and reinterpreted by Piper, was the ultimate justification for Monumental Theology and thus lies at the root of a Protestant material turn in the nineteenth century. I shall first introduce the Schleiermacherian concept of Anschauung, then describe Piper’s project of monumental theology in some depth, and finally talk about Piper’s justification for his project and show where he took inspiration from Schleiermacher.

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sense of “material.” “Monumental” is the adjectival form of the term “monument” which refers to material as opposed to written sources. Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie (1867, reprinted 1978). I follow this translation: F. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, tr. R. Crouter, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1996). See esp. speech 2, “On the essence of religion,” 22–74. In square brackets I give the pagination of the original version of F. Schleiermacher, Reden über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Berlin, 1799). Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 44.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

1.

Schleiermacher’s Concept of Anschauung

Schleiermacher’s first publication, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, is widely acknowledged as representative of a paradigm shift in Protestant theology, which began to make individual religious experience the core of theological concerns during the Romantic period.24 In a radical gesture in On Religion, Schleiermacher calls the essence of religion “Anschauung und Gefühl” (intuition and feeling). “Anschauung,” in its most basic sense, refers to an idea in the subject’s mind that depends on the presence of an object.25 An “Anschauung” is acquired through contemplation of an object; it needs an external referent (anschauen means “to look at”). The commonly used English translation “intuition,” misleadingly, stresses the independent and immediate nature of an idea, and the introspective quality of the process of idea-building, rather than the quality of a subject beholding something. I use the original German word here to remind us that the idea of sustained observation, and indeed perception of the outer world, is an integral constituent of the term. In the first edition of On Religion, Schleiermacher privileges Anschauung over feeling when he declares, in the second chapter “On the essence of religion,” that it is the “highest and most universal formula of religion.”26 To get a better sense of this equation of Anschauung and religion, we need to look into Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion. Schleiermacher postulates: I entreat you to become familiar with this concept: Anschauung of the universe.27 It is the hinge of my whole speech; it is the highest and most

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Despite the influential role that Schleiermacher’s idea of “Kunstreligion” (also developed in the first edition of On Religion) played in German Romanticism, Schleiermacher has not been addressed in depth in the recent contributions to Protestant aesthetics around 1800. See Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 27–51; Squire, Image and Text, 15–89 (who both fail to discuss him). For “Kunstreligion” as a concept in Romantic art and aesthetics see G. Scholtz, “Schleiermacher und die Kunstreligion,” in U. Barth and C.-D. Osthövener (eds.), 200 Jahre ‘Reden über die Religion’ (Berlin, 2000) 515–33, esp. 526–33. On Schleiermacher’s aesthetics see T. Lehnerer, Die Kunsttheorie Friedrich Schleiermachers, Deutscher Idealismus. Philosophie und Wirkungsgeschichte in Quellen und Studien (Stuttgart, 1987). For Schleiermacher most recently, see M. Ohst (ed.), Schleiermacher Handbuch (Tübingen, 2017). T. Vial, “Anschauung and Intuition, Again,” in B. W. Sockness and W. Gräb (eds.), Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology: A Transatlantic Dialogue (Berlin, 2010) 39–50, 44. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 24 [54–6]. I will replace the standard English translation “intuition” with the original German term “Anschauung” throughout this chapter, because the term “intuition” emphasizes the introspective quality of the word whereas the aspect of “looking” is neglected.

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universal formula of religion on the basis of which you should be able to find every place in religion, from which you may determine its essence and its limits. All [Anschauung] proceeds from an influence of the intuited on the one who intuits, from an original and independent action of the former, which is then grasped, apprehended, and conceived by the latter according to one’s own nature. . . . The same is true of religion. The universe exists in uninterrupted activity and reveals itself to us every moment. Every form that it brings forth, every being to which it gives separate existence according to the fullness of life, every occurrence that spills forth from its rich, ever-fruitful womb, is an action of the same upon us. Thus to accept everything individual as a part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite is religion.28

For Schleiermacher, everything individual in the world is a “representation of the infinite.” Every individual form, any object, living being or action, is representative of the entirety which he calls alternatively universe or infinite. Religion, in turn, is a specific approach that humans have to the universe that surrounds them. Religion is to accept that all single entities belong to the whole and are representative of it. This moment of acceptance, Schleiermacher goes on, is formed by two processes: Anschauung and feeling. They are inseparable and occur contemporaneously: That first mysterious moment that occurs in every sensory perception, before Anschauung and feeling have separated, where sense and its objects have, as it were, flowed into one another and become one, before both turn back to their original position – I know how indescribable it is and how quickly it passes away. But I wish you were able to hold on to it and also to recognize it again in the higher and divine religious activity of the mind.29

Here, Schleiermacher describes a sensual encounter between the human contemplator and the contemplated infinite. In every sensory perception, the combination of Anschauung and feeling leads to a sensation of oneness with the universe. But the two play separate roles: Anschauung is the product of our physical interaction with the external world. Anschauung “is and always remains something individual, set apart, the immediate perception, nothing more.”30 It is the reaction to a mechanical or chemical stimulus:

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Schleiermacher, On Religion, 24–5 [56–7]. Ibid., 31–2 [72]. Ibid., 26 [58].

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

All Anschauung proceeds from an influence of the intuited on the one who intuits, from an original and independent action of the former, which is then grasped, apprehended, and conceived by the latter according to one’s own nature. If the emanations of light – which happen completely without our efforts – did not affect your sense, if the smallest parts of the body, the tips of your fingers, were not mechanically or chemically affected, if the pressure of weight did not reveal to you an opposition and a limit to your power, you would intuit nothing and perceive nothing, and what you thus intuit and perceive is not the nature of things, but their action upon you.31

According to Schleiermacher, Anschauung is not rational.32 We do not perceive the nature of things, but only their action upon us. Anschauung is not a matter of understanding our oneness with the universe. It is a matter of perceiving it. Schleiermacher goes on in his rationalist critique when he says that our assumed knowledge about the nature of things is not religion, it is “empty mythology.”33 This reaction to the outer world produces a change in our inner consciousness which Schleiermacher calls feeling: “Every Anschauung is, by its very nature, connected with a feeling. Your senses mediate the connection between the object and yourselves; the same influence of the object, which reveals its existence to you, must stimulate them in various ways and produce a change in your inner consciousness.”34 If Anschauung is the perception of an experience, unique to every individual, feeling is the transformation in the mind that follows from it. Scholars of Schleiermacher’s work tend to concentrate on this second half, feeling, whereas the key place of sensory perception as a basis for religion has been less frequently discussed. This follows the fact that Schleiermacher himself downplayed the significance of Anschauung in his later work in favor of feeling as the starting point for religion. In 1806, Schleiermacher revised the second edition of On Religion thoroughly. In the new edition, the perception of the universe’s effects on us loses its key role in forming religion,

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Ibid., 25 [55–6]. Scholarship debates how Anschauung can be a passive, non-rational process, given that it results in a specific interpretation of a particular as an expression of the infinite. Cf. W. Proudfoot, “Intuition and Fantasy in ‘On Religion’,” in D. Korsch and A. L. Griffioen (eds.), Interpreting Religion: The Significance of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion for Religious Studies and Theology (Tübingen, 2011) 87–98. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 25 [56]. Ibid., 29 [66–7].

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while feeling these effects becomes pivotal instead.35 Subsequent generations of scholars reinterpreted Schleiermacher’s anti-rationalist critique, putting emotions at the heart of religion. Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade are to be mentioned here specifically, and it is through their lens that Schleiermacher is most often interpreted today.36 But the later phenomenological take on the primacy of the emotional is less concerned with sensual experience as the point of origin of religious feeling – the very idea which stood at the beginning of Schleiermacher’s thought.37 To conclude, Schleiermacher’s concept of Anschauung in the 1799 edition of On Religion is in radical opposition to the established view of the invisible transcendence of the divine in German aesthetics. Where, for Hegel or Kant, the divine is essentially present only in thought, for Schleiermacher, sensory perception is the precondition for the experience of the divine. This is important to keep in mind when assessing Ferdinand Piper’s motivations for writing Monumental Theology.

2.

Ferdinand Piper and the Introduction to Monumental Theology

Schleiermacher’s On Religion strongly influenced the nineteenth-century debate on the nature of religion and found much resonance, both positive and negative, in the Christian revival movement in Berlin.38 In 1812, the new Protestant theology faculty of Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin opened and Schleiermacher became its first head. Among his appointments to professorial posts was the church historian August Neander (professor 1813–50), later Piper’s teacher. Under the influence of Schleiermacher’s Speeches to the Cultured Despisers, Neander converted in 1806 from Judaism to Christianity.39 He went on to become one of the 35

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A summary is provided in N. Peter, F. Bestebreurtje and A. Büsching (eds.) Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. 1799/1806/ 1821 Studienausgabe (Zurich, 2012) XXI. Vial, “Anschauung and Intuition, Again,” esp. 40. Compare for instance Otto’s negation of sense experience as formative for the consciousness of the numinous. R. Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, 3rd edn. (Breslau, 1919) 123–8, esp. 125. Erich Beyreuther, Die Erweckungsbewegung (Göttingen, 1977) 33. H.-D. Döpmann, “Die Geschichte des Berliner Lehrstuhls für Kirchengeschichte,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Reihe 34 (1985) 544–53, at 545.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

leading figures of the revivalism of Berlin.40 The international series of Protestant Christian revivals had arrived in Germany from North America in the nineteenth century, when Germany was witnessing a severe decline in religiosity.41 In the Prussian capital, the movement had significant ecclesio-political relevance. The Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1795–1861) had himself been “awakened” and supported the movement from the time of his coronation in 1840 until the end of his life.42 The movement emphasized the emotional roots of religiosity and was a conservative, anti-liberal attack on the rationalism of modern theology, on Hegel’s concept of reason and on the overestimation of rationality more generally. Representative of this last trait is Neander’s so-called Pektoraltheologie (theology of the heart), which he circumscribed with the phrase “pectus est quod facit theologum” (“The heart makes the theologian”). In this atmosphere Ferdinand Piper took up his studies of theology and philology in Berlin around 1829 and became Neander’s student, assistant and friend. After a period of study in Göttingen, Piper became associate professor in Berlin in 1840. From 1845, he established art historical lectures at the theology faculty. In 1849 he founded, with the support of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the first Christian-archaeological institute as well as the first university collection of early Christian art, the Christliches Museum.43 Its establishment predates the 1854 inauguration of the Vatican Museo Pio Cristiano under the auspices of Marchi and de Rossi.44 Both 40

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44

Beyreuther, Die Erweckungsbewegung, 33f. Cf. also H. Bredekamp in Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, E 7. For a short overview of Berlin’s Christian revival see G. A. Benrath, “Die Erweckung innerhalb der deutschen Landeskirchen 1815–1888,” in U. Gäbler (ed.), Der Pietismus im neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2000) 150–271, at 159–68. The Christian revival in the wider context of nineteenth-century German Protestant piety is discussed in L. Hölscher, Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit in Deutschland (Munich, 2005) 347–51. For the state of the German Church in the nineteenth century see for instance K. Kupisch, Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1975) 56–92. Benrath, “Die Erweckung innerhalb der deutschen Landeskirchen 1815–1888,” 33. On the Christliches Museum recently: Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding, 402–51. For the Christian-archaeological institute see also G. Strohmaier-Wiederanders, “Geschichte des Faches und des Lehrstuhls ‘Christliche Archäologie und kirchliche Kunst’ (Christliche Archäologie, Denkmalkunde und Kulturgeschichte) an der Theologischen Fakultät der HumboldtUniversität,” in G. Strohmaier-Wiederanders (ed.), Theologie und Kultur: Geschichten einer Wechselbeziehung (Halle 1999) 9. Piper made a formal request to the ministry of education and religion for the establishment of the Christliches Museum on December 31, 1848 – the year of the March Revolution. Cf. F. Piper, Das Christliche Museum der Universität zu Berlin und die Errichtung christlicher Volksmuseen (Berlin, 1856); F. Piper, Das Christliche Museum der Universität zu Berlin, 1849–1884 (Berlin, 1885) 5. Piper provides a list of the early Christian collections that exist in 1856: the Museum Sacrum or Museum Christianum, the first public collection of its kind in the Vatican (opened in 1756); the

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foundations clearly go hand in hand with Piper’s broader vision of establishing monumental theology as a field of research, although the theoretical foundations of his theology were only published later, in the 1860s. In Introduction to Monumental Theology (1867) Piper announced his aim of introducing a new branch of theological studies exclusively concerned with Christian monuments. His definition of a Christian monument is very broad: the category encompasses works of art and inscriptions, epigraphy and numismatics, as well as “corporeal remains of antiquity” with Christian origins or other items treated as objects of Christian interpretation.45 By including this final clause Piper’s approach manages to comprise syncretistic monuments and pagan monuments like holy stones that have been influenced by Christian ideas.46 Although Piper’s own focus is clearly on late antique material culture, he effectively argues against what he considers an artificial and arbitrary limit to the period of investigation often imposed by his colleagues working on Christian art, a date usually given as falling sometime in late antiquity. Piper exposes this fixed arrangement of historical time as fundamentally determined by text-based categories. Even though there is an end to the Patristic period, the production of works of art continued after that time, and thus the works of later and even recent periods also demand the attention of researchers.47 In Piper’s view, therefore, monumental theology should embrace Christian monuments of all periods. What did monumental theology specifically involve? When writing the systematic part of Monumental Theology, Piper was inspired by the contemporary discussion of German classical archaeologists about the scope and subdivisions of their discipline;48 art history at the time, in contrast, did not promote a comparably systematic discourse.49 The aim of archaeology’s, and thus also Piper’s, systematization is to provide an authoritative framework of disciplinary scopes and goals that apply to both research and

45 46 47 48 49

Museo Pio Cristiano in the Vatican (opened in 1854); the collections in Marseille, Arles, Aix and Narbonne, and the early Christian collection of the Musée Cluny in Paris (opened in 1844). See Piper, Das Christliche Museum der Universität zu Berlin und die Errichtung christlicher Volksmuseen, 2–3. On an earlier occasion, he mentions the Christian Museum of Copenhagen (opened in 1846). See Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding, 399. Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, III. Ibid., 7f. Ibid., 51f. Ibid., 56–60. M. Rassem, “Einleitung: Wissenschaftsgeschichte und -systematik,” in H. Bauer (ed.), Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1963) 1–17, at 14f.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

teaching.50 His division is threefold and distinguishes between a Kunstlehre of Christian art (A), an art history that includes the study of monuments (B), and, lastly, a division on Christian symbolism (C) (Figure 7.1a and b).51 Kunstlehre (A) comprises the hermeneutics of art, i.e. the analysis of artistic composition, technique and ideas. Since any analysis of a work of art is based on an analysis of the circumstances under which it was made, Kunstlehre is also concerned with what we would now call the social history of art.52 Piper makes allowances for the relation of the Church to art and to the social history of artists. In his second category, art history (B), Piper combines the study of the development of art production – the differentiation of epochs, styles and genres – that archaeologists then called art history, with the study of monuments, the Denkmälerkunde.53 Furthermore, for Piper art history should integrate the study of topography with the creation of inventories of both monuments and art collections and their respective conditions.54 The third subsection on symbolism (C) is the most individualized of Piper’s systematizations. In German classical archaeology, Christian symbolism or mythology – a subdiscipline reducible to iconography – would have been treated within one of the other subcategories.55 Piper, however, creates subdisciplines within the division on Christian symbolism. He sees four routes where the study of iconography could be applied: in church history, in dogmatic theology and moral theology, in exegesis, and even in practical theology which is concerned with the education of priests.56 In spite of its subject, Piper never considered monumental theology an art historical discipline. In the 1860s, the new discipline of art history had just begun to turn towards a positivism that favored formalist approaches and increasing specializations.57 Monumental theology, to the contrary, was concerned on a global level with the historical and religious significance of art. The principal aim was not so much to understand art, as to

50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57

Cf. for instance Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 65. Ibid., 60–9. Ibid., 64. Classical archaeology would have preferred to synthesize the insights won from Denkmälerkunde in the more generalized field of art history as an independent category, but Piper does not seem to have been willing to split the study of objects from the study of history. See Rassem, “Einleitung: Wissenschaftsgeschichte und -systematik,” 13. Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 65. Rassem, “Einleitung: Wissenschaftsgeschichte und -systematik,” 14. Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 67. H. Bredekamp in Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, E23f. Cf. H. Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin (Frankfurt, 1979).

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Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

Figure 7.1 a and b Ferdinand Piper, List of topics to be covered by monumental theology, taken from Ferdinand Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie. Eine Geschichte der christlichen Kunstarchäologie und Epigraphik. Mittenwald, 1978 after original edition Gotha, 1867, pp. 55–6.

explore the history of Christian thought as it is visually expressed in art. To that end, Piper considered iconographical studies to be much more useful than stylistic ones, in contrast to contemporary art historians.58 He leaves no doubt that the impetus of his work was theological: First, it is not previous knowledge, or indeed the dread of it that will determine the character of a discipline, but the character of an object and 58

Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 36f., 66. Cf. also H. Bredekamp in ibid., E14.

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the purpose for which it is tackled: should both be churchly, then the discipline must be a theological one. Secondly, the subject in question belongs to the Church, since only those works of art are dealt with that derive from it: those cannot be fully understood beyond the realm of the Church, but only through a comprehensive study with all other theological means of evidence; and that is why the task is fundamentally and exclusively theological.59

The most substantial part of Monumental Theology consists of a collection of sources that clearly bear witness to the interest of Christian theologians in art from the Church fathers to Piper’s contemporaries.60 Piper might have considered the collection itself to be the strongest argument for a monumental theology: the authority of the Church fathers in this matter was argument enough. Piper’s concept of history as a process of linear progress certainly contributes to the strength of his argument.61 Topography of art, artistic critique and iconography are, according to Piper, already rooted in the writings of the Church Fathers. Augustine, for instance, was the first to shape art history critically by focusing on cultural history and the cultural background of objects of art. At another point in his work Piper writes of the “archaeological method[s]” of the Church fathers.62 Their achievements, he argues, accumulated, gaining complexity over the centuries, to feed finally into contemporary Christian archaeology. The breadth and scope of Monumental Theology shows that Piper was indeed calling for an independent branch of art historical and archaeological research within theology, which, when taken seriously, would have fundamentally altered the character of theological education and of theology itself. The revolutionary change from contemporary Protestant scholarship that Monumental Theology proposed was to accept material culture as an autonomous source for theology beyond its value as evidence for external facts:

59

60 61 62

“Erstens bedingen nicht die erforderlichen Vorkenntnisse oder die Scheu vor denselben den Charakter einer Disciplin, sondern die Stellung des Objects und der Zweck, zu welchem es behandelt wird; ist nun beides kirchlich, so ist die Disciplin eine theologische. Zweitens liegt eben das in Rede stehende Objekt ganz innerhalb der Kirche, da es um die Kunstwerke sich handelt, sofern sie auf kirchlichem Boden erwachsen sind: solche können ihr volles Verständnis nicht jenseits derselben isoliert, sondern nur durch Zusammenfassung mit allen übrigen kirchlichen Erkenntnisquellen erlangen; und darum ist es wesentlich und ausschließlich eine theologische Aufgabe,” in ibid., 36. Ibid., 70–908. H. Bredekamp in ibid., E 15–16. H. Bredekamp in ibid., E 15f–16.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

the Church needs to do justice to this evidence [works of art] not only occasionally, but comprehensively. First, it needs to give it the same importance as it gives written sources, which, in some respects, will even be replaced by material ones, since monuments exist from certain periods and areas where written works are lacking. Moreover, their specific value should be acknowledged: monuments should not only serve as evidence for external facts . . . but religious art itself should be conceived as a fact which is to be recognized in its historical context.63

3.

Devout Anschauung as the Basis for Monumental Theology

What was the reasoning behind Piper’s decision to establish singlehandedly a discipline dedicated to art and material culture within theology? In Monumental Theology he gives a twofold explanation; both arguments start from a concept of religiosity that emphasizes the prerational and the emotional, indebted to Neander and the revival movement.64 On the one hand, Piper posits that the emotive nature of art allows it, by contrast with most forms of writing, more easily to reach an entire congregation. In turn, the congregation has a greater influence on artistic production than it does on scholarship.65 Since Protestant church history has the duty to study the Church, and since the Christian community epitomizes the Church according to a Protestant understanding of the Church, he continues, Protestant church history needs to study sources which concern the congregation, hence it needs to study Christian art in particular.66 Second, Piper argues that Anschauung, which is at the heart of religion, is evoked by both art and by speech, and that therefore both must be studied.67 Piper’s further argumentation clearly reminds us of 63

64 65 66 67

“Wenn doch die Kirche die Zeugnisse einer so vielhundertjährigen Verbindung trotz so vieler Zerstörungen in unermesslicher Fülle überliefert; so hat die Geschichte der Kirche diese Zeugnisse nicht bloss gelegentlich zu berücksichtigen, sondern in ihr volles Recht einzusetzen. Erstens in die gleiche Geltung mit den geschriebenen Quellen, welche in mancher Hinsicht sogar von ihnen ersetzt werden, da aus gewissen Zeitaltern und Gegenden Kunstdenkmäler sich finden, wo an jenen großer Mangel ist. Sodann aber in ihre eigenthümlichen Geltung: dass man den Denkmälern nicht bloss Zeugnis abfordert für fremde Thatsachen . . . sondern die religiöse Kunst selbst als eine Thatsache betrachtet, welche in ihrem eigenen Zusammenhang kirchengeschichtlich zu würdigen ist,” in ibid., 31. Ibid., 32–5, 43–5. Ibid., 34–5. Ibid., 34–5. Ibid., 33–4.

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Schleiermacher’s initial concept of Anschauung of 1799, and while he deviates from Schleiermacher significantly, there is little doubt that Schleiermacher’s perception-based understanding of Anschauung was an important influence for Piper. In Mythology of Christian Art, Piper’s first large monograph on the pagan roots of early Christian art, he calls Schleiermacher “a new, great Doctor of the Church who is rightfully compared with Origen” – a laudatory verdict on a contemporary theologian unmatched in the rest of his work.68 Defending the need for a renewal of interest in Christian art, Piper makes an explicit connection between the term Anschauung and Schleiermacher: “it is the most beautiful duty of the reviving Christian art to nourish the love that wants Anschauung [anschauenwollende Liebe] (to quote Schleiermacher).”69 In a passage that argues that art and speech are not commensurate, Piper’s use of the term Anschauung shows significant parallels with Schleiermacher:

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F. Piper, Mythologie der christlichen Kunst von der ältesten Zeit bis in’s sechzehnte Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Weimar, 1847) XVIII. Piper’s anachronistically positive view of pre-Christian antiquity extends to a very positive stance on the controversial figure of Origen. Piper’s teacher Neander was more skeptical about Origen but also compares him with Schleiermacher. Both feature in his work as spiritual bridge-builders with theological shortcomings. For Origen see A. Neander, Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1828) 778–813. For Origen and Schleiermacher, see A. Neander, “Das verflossene halbe Jahrhundert in seinem Verhältniß zur Gegenwart,” in J. L. Jacobi (ed.), August Neander. Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen (Berlin, 1851) 215–68, 258. I owe this point to Martin Ohst. The full quote is “Und wenn der Anblick solcher Sinnbilder dem christlichen Volk lange entzogen war (wie es in unserer Kirche geschehen ist), so regt sich ein Hunger darnach: dann ist es die schönste Aufgabe der sich erneuernden christlichen Kunst, der ‘anschauenwollenden Liebe’ (um mit Schleiermacher zu reden) Nahrung zuzuführen.” In Piper, Mythologie der christlichen Kunst, XXV–XXVI. Piper quotes here a passage from the revised second edition of The Christian Faith (1830/31) in which Schleiermacher posits that faith is not based on reason, but on love that wants Anschauung: “Daher gehört zu dieser Übervernünftigkeit auch, dass eine wahre Aneignung der christlichen Sätze nicht auf wissenschaftlich Weise erfolgen kann, also ebenfalls außer der Vernunft liegt; sondern sie erfolgt nur, sofern jeder selbst hat wollen die Erfahrung machen, wie ja alles einzelne und eigentümliche nur kann durch die anschauuenwollende Liebe aufgefasst werden.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt, 2nd edn. (1830/ 31), § 13, suppl., in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1, vol. 13, 1 (Berlin and New York, 2003) 113–14. It appears that in 1830/31 Schleiermacher alludes to the term Anschauung as he employed it in On Religion in 1799. In the corresponding passage of the first edition of The Christian Faith (1821/22) Schleiermacher had made no use of the term: “Es liegt hierin schon, dass auch die wahre Aneignung der christlichen Sätze nicht auf eine wissenschaftliche Weise durch Unterricht und Demonstration erfolgt, und also ebenfalls außer der Vernunft liegt, aber nur eben so wie auch nichts einzelnes und eigenthümliches mit der Vernunft begriffen, sondern nur durch die Liebe aufgefasst werden kann.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt (1821/22), § 20, 2, in Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1, vol. 7, 1 (1980) 80.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

so art has a mode of expression that thoroughly differs from speech: Art, too, addresses itself to the whole of the human being. It does so, though, not by the capacity of concepts, but by the higher capacity of Anschauung, of which physical vision is but the medium. The difference is this: While thinking disintegrates its object so that realization, tied to a sequence of moments, is fluid, the work of art lets the spectator realize the whole in its spatial totality, both undivided and in all its moments at once.70

Piper describes Anschauung as a non-rational process that is superior to thinking. This process is reliant on, but not reducible to, sense perception, in this instance depending on viewing. It leads to a holistic realization of an object. This passage does not make any claims about Anschauung’s significance for religion, but it demonstrates that Piper, like Schleiermacher, conceived of Anschauung as non-analytical, sense-based and concerned with the experience of something as “whole.” Piper, however, develops his position about the relevance of art for theology and the role of Anschauung most clearly in another passage, in an argument about a text by the Protestant Karl Rosenkranz (1805–79), a philosopher and doctor of theology who had studied with Hegel. Rosenkranz’ proposal for a theology of art predates Monumental Theology by roughly twenty years.71 The short Entwurf einer Theologie der Kunst, written in 1844, can hardly be said to map out a discipline, but it did provide Piper with a valuable stimulus.72 Rosenkranz sees the discipline as becoming a fundamentally exegetical one, comparable to textual exegesis in its scope and aims.73 The main concern of his text, however, is to draw a model of the course of development of religions. Rosenkranz defines three consecutive stages that religiosity necessarily undergoes in any religion: feeling, imagining and thinking.74 70

71 72

73 74

“. . . so hat die Kunst eine von der Rede durchaus verschiedene Ausdrucksweise: sie wendet sich zwar auch an den ganzen Menschen, aber nicht durch das Vermögen der Begriffe, sondern durch das höhere der Anschauung, wofür das leibliche Sehen nur das Medium ist. Der Unterschied liegt darin, dass während im Denken der Gegenstand zersetzt wird, also die Erkenntniss, an eine Folge von Momenten gebunden, eine fliessende ist; das Kunstwerk in der räumlichen Totalität das Ganze, sowohl ungetheilt als in allen seinen Momenten auf einmal, erkennen lässt,” in Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 33. Rosenkranz, Studien, Reden und Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Literatur, vol. 5. The same can be said for two further scholarly contributions that evoke the idea of a theology of art. The earliest modern reference is made by the abbot J. M. de La Canorgue, La théologie des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et dessinateurs (Paris, 1765). See also the prologue of the Protestant philologist and archaeologist K. O. Müller, Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, 2nd edn. (Breslau, 1835). Cf. Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 43–5. Rosenkranz, Studien, Reden und Abhandlungen zur Philosophie und Literatur, vol. 5, 129. Ibid., 137.

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Although in Rosenkranz’ understanding, as in Piper’s conception, religiosity begins with feeling, and although each stage of emotion exists in its own right, for Rosenkranz religious evolution ends in “thinking,” or in reason and rationality.75 It is telling that Rosenkranz equalizes the second stage of imagining with an artistic approach to God as well as with Catholicism,76 whereas “thinking” stands for a reasonable and hence text-based and ultimately Protestant final stage of development.77 The theology of Christian art for him would therefore constitute an object of study in the second phase, or, as it were, a study of the Catholic side of Christianity, which Protestantism declares as having been overcome and thus keeps at arm’s length. In response to Rosenkranz, Piper denies the usefulness of a model that differentiates between thinking/text and feeling/art: What goes unrecognized here is that religion, even taken subjectively, is – before all feeling and thinking – a unified entity; a fact that remains. That all religious thought is but a step towards the state of devotion and [Anschauung], which art, just like speech, serves to awaken. . . . So, while the spirit (according to Rosenkranz p. 151) is supposed to recognize the impossibility for the hereafter to exist as its truth within those forms taken entirely from this world, the spirit rather recognizes that the forms of this world receive immortal meaning through the revelation of the divine having descended into visibility and corporeity, glorifying them by the same token.78

Piper clearly values Anschauung as a religious state that is superior to religious thought, in line with Schleiermacher. Piper’s vision of the insight to which Anschauung leads, however, is distinct from Schleiermacher’s, and quite remarkable in itself. For Schleiermacher, Anschauung leads to the acceptance that everything in the world is representative of the universe. For Piper, Anschauung leads to the recognition that everything in the 75 76 77 78

Ibid., 149. Ibid., 137–49. Ibid., 149–58. “Dabei ist verkannt, dass die Religion, auch subjectiv genommen, vor allem Fühlen und Denken ein Sein, eine Thatsache ist, welche bleibt, und dass das religiöse Denken selbst nur Stufe ist für den Zustand der Andacht und Anschauung, welcher die Kunst gleichwie die Rede zum Ausdruck wie zur Erweckung dient. . . . Also während der Geist (nach Rosenkranz S. 151) die Unmöglichkeit erkennen soll, dass das Jenseits in diesen den Bestandtheilen nach ganz vom Diesseits entnommene Formen als seine Wahrheit existieren könne; erkennt er vielmehr, dass die Formen des Diesseits unvergängliche Bedeutung erhalten durch die Offenbarung des Göttlichen, welches in die Sichtbarkeit und Leiblichkeit sich herabgelassen und wiederum diese verklärt hat,” in Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 44.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

world is somehow imbued with the divine, which itself descended in corporeal and visible form (an allusion to the corporeality of Christ’s Incarnation). For the study of art and material culture this means that if the divine is manifest in the physical world, and we can experience the divine through the medium of vision, then the study of the divine has to focus on the corporeal and visual. It follows that monumental theology cannot be excluded from the canon of theological studies. Despite the fact that Piper does not explicitly define the term Anschauung in his work, some key elements can be established. Piper takes it to mean the highest religious state, which is based on sense perception instead of reasoning, a state that can be triggered by art. It will take further research to determine the full extent of Piper’s sources for his concept of religion, but it is clear that the outline of Piper’s Anschauung in 1867 corresponds to a remarkable degree with Schleiermacher’s use of the term in 1799. Piper’s familiarity with the first edition of On Religion is perhaps less astonishing than might first appear, given the more than 800 pages of Introduction to Monumental Theology dedicated to theologians who wrote on art: Piper was well versed in his subject. Moreover, Piper probably saw himself implementing a field of research at the theology faculty of Berlin that he knew had already concerned Schleiermacher at the time of the faculty’s founding. In his own writings, Schleiermacher had emphasized the value of art for religion and even argued in On Religion that the divine is best revealed through the viewing of art: Indeed, if it is true that there are quick conversions, occasions by which, for someone who thought of nothing less than rising above the finite, the sense of the universe opens up, in a moment as if through an immediate inner illumination, and surprises a person with its splendor, then I believe that more than anything else the sight of great and sublime works of art can achieve this miracle.79

In his memorandum on the inauguration of the theology faculty in Berlin in 1810, Schleiermacher envisioned “Christian antiquities” as one of the subjects to be taught.80 At the opening of the faculty in 1812, in addition to the branches that dealt with the Old Testament, the New Testament, practical theology and Church history, the institute stipulated a Christian

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Schleiermacher, On Religion, 68 [167]. A. Tacke, “Nikolaus Müller: christlicher Archäologe, Melanchton- und Reformationszeitforscher,” Jahrbuch für Berlin-Brandenburgische Kirchengeschichte 61 (1997) 8–37, at 16.

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archaeological collection and an epigraphical one.81 It appears that Piper was effectively the first to take charge of the material branch of the faculty that Schleiermacher had advocated from the start.

4.

Setting Monumental Theology to Work: Protestant Problems

Against the prevailing idea that Protestant aesthetics was unable to think of images as meaningful, Monumental Theology is a testimony to a branch of Protestant theology that fully recognized the epistemological value of the corporeal and visual – at least in theory. Piper’s ideas for the practical application of the theoretical framework reveal a lesser degree of certainty about the object’s capacity for expression than his writings suggest. The discipline of monumental theology is concerned with the discussion of the theological import of an object and not with its material and stylistic qualities.82 The opposition of “idea” (theology) and “form” (art history) is a constant trait of Monumental Theology. It [monumental theology] is, however, by no means synonymous with art history in the way the latter is normally pursued, since it is primarily attentive to the development of the form alongside the artistic technique, to lines and coloring, to drapery and bone structure, large and small limbs, slit eyes etc.: all this is quite important, but it does not exhaust the Church’s interest, moreover, it is scarcely sufficient to answer the theological question, which is concerned with the idea of the work of art.83

Although he incorporated the form-based Kunstlehre in his sketch for the program of study, Piper’s own approach to art is predominantly iconographical and he often neglects the visual qualities of an object. In one instance he circumscribes art even as a “Bilderschrift,” a “script of images,” thereby reducing it to a text.84 He thus fails to take into account the object 81 82 83

84

Ibid., 16. Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, IV. “Diese ist aber keineswegs gleichbedeutend mit Kunstgeschichte, wie dieselbe gewöhnlich behandelt wird, die hauptsächlich auf die Entwicklung der Form nebst der künstlerischen Technik sieht, auf Linienführung und Farbengebung, auf Faltenwurf und Knochenbau, grosse oder kleine Extremitäten, geschlitzte Augen u.s.w.: alles das ist recht wichtig, aber erschöpft nicht das kirchliche Interesse, reicht noch kaum an die theologische Frage, welche an die Idee des Kunstwerks sich wendet,” in ibid., 36f. Cf. also H. Bredekamp in ibid., E14. Piper, Das Christliche Museum der Universität zu Berlin und die Errichtung christlicher Volksmuseen, 4. As late as 1983, F. W. Deichmann was still criticizing the practice of “reading” art in the discipline of Christian archaeology: see Deichmann, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie, 3.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

in its entirety, but privileges content over form and analysis over description. Piper’s emphasis on “disintegrating” iconographic analysis moves the discipline away from his initial understanding of Anschauung, giving up the holistic approach that Piper had emphasized as characteristic of our relation to the visual. Ultimately, Monumental Theology inherited a certain reserve against the visual from Protestant aesthetics. It may be added here that it was only in 1901 that Alois Riegl insisted on the idea that stylistic features can express world-views, culminating in the much-discussed concept of Kunstwollen, which might have allowed form and style to become more significant aspects of the project of monumental theology.85 To conclude, let us look briefly at the fate of the discipline of monumental theology within the two poles of Protestant and Catholic art history. Monumental Theology was largely ignored by Piper’s contemporaries in theology and art history; since it has been noticed only infrequently.86 It is noteworthy, though, that the few positive reviews in Piper’s own time came from Protestant and Catholic theologians alike.87 Piper’s remarkable lack of dogmatism in confessional questions and his good relations with Catholic scholars like Wilpert certainly added to the book’s appeal regardless of its author’s denomination.88 More importantly, Monumental Theology was addressed to theologians of both confessions, for whom: especially the monumental studies . . . form a common field of work out of which mutual aid has developed; although it has not lacked occasions for polemics either. At all times, however, those who possess a good faith and a pure love of scholarship have been prepared to learn from their adversaries.89 85 86

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See Chapter 5 by Jaś Elsner in this volume. The first to reconsider Piper’s achievements in the twentieth century was the cultural sociologist M. Rassem in “Einleitung: Wissenschaftsgeschichte und -systematik,” followed by H. Bredekamp in his introduction to Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie. More recently Stock, Bilderfragen. Theologische Gesichtspunkte, 23–31, Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding, and B. Thomassen, ‘Monumentale Theologie: ein Hinweis auf den Ansatz Ferdinand Pipers (1811–1889)’, in Wisskirchen and Schmauder (eds.), Spiegel einer Wissenschaft, 30–8. See, for instance, J. Friedrich, Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands, vol. 1: Die Römerzeit (Bamberg, 1867) 383 as well as V. Schultze, Archäologie der altchristlichen Kunst (Munich, 1895) 6f. For instance, Piper seems to have been the first to describe early Christian art as a largely postConstantinian phenomenon at a time when Protestant and Catholic scholars widely agreed on a dating of most catacombs in the first century. This assumption was a central precondition for polemics, because it allowed for conclusions about the – either Catholic or Protestant – character of religiosity of the earliest Christians. See Deichmann, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie, 19, 24–5. See Piper’s comment in Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 71. On Piper’s relation to Catholic scholars see H. Bredekamp in ibid., E 8f. “. . . insbesondere das monumentale Gebiet . . . ein gemeinsames großes Arbeitsfeld, auf welchem gegenseitige Förderung erwachsen ist; wiewohl es an Gelegenheit zur Polemik auch

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E. Dnkm. d. protestant. K. a.d.16. Jahrh. a.d.19.Jahrh. christl. K. Jahrh.

D. Dnkm. der chr. K. in Italien a.d.16.Jh.

C. Inschriften a. d. christl. Alterthum.

F. A. Christliche Grab-Denkmäler aus den ersten Jahrhunderten.

B. Vorstufe d. Christenth. Ueberg. z. Monotheismus.

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A. Christliche Architectur and kirchliches Geräth.

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B. Denkm. der christl. Kunst bis in’s 14. Jahrh.

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Plan des christlichen Museums der Universität zu Berlin. Figure 7.2 Ferdinand Piper, plan of the Christliches Museum in the state of 1856, second floor of the right wing of the main university building at Unter den Linden 6, Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin. Taken from Ferdinand Piper, Das Christliche Museum der Universität zu Berlin und die Errichtung christlicher Volksmuseen. Berlin, 1856.

The Christliches Museum as a working institution is last attested in 1920 and almost all of the remaining collection was destroyed by 1945.90 An 1856 plan of the museum display, mainly used as a teaching collection for the faculty, suggests that even Piper’s openness towards Catholics had its limits (Figure 7.2). While Piper exhibited both Protestant and Catholic art of the sixteenth century, the contemporary Christian art on display was made exclusively by Protestants. The limited records of the medieval display suggest, moreover, that among a wide range of subject matter representations of Christian saints were missing.91

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nicht gefehlt hat. Zu aller Zeit aber sind diejenigen, die einen guten Glauben und die reine Liebe zur Wissenschaft haben, bereit gewesen, auch von den Gegnern zu lernen,” in Piper, Einleitung in die monumentale Theologie, 681. For the history of the collection see Strohmaier-Wiederanders, “Geschichte des Faches und des Lehrstuhls ‘Christliche Archäologie und kirchliche Kunst’,” 10–12; Tacke, “Nikolaus Müller: christlicher Archäologe, Melanchton- und Reformationszeitforscher,” 16–20. See also G. Stuhlfauth, “Das Christliche Museum an der Universität Berlin,” Religiöse Kunst: Monatsschrift des Vereins für religiöse Kunst in der evangelischen Kirche 17 (1920) 33–8, at 37. Piper, Das Christliche Museum der Universität zu Berlin und die Errichtung christlicher Volksmuseen, 10.

Ferdinand Piper’s Monumentale Theologie (1867)

The only enduring legacy of the discipline of monumental theology is that it helped institutionalize early Christian archaeology in the German educational landscape. Piper inspired the establishment of two German research centers and collections at the Protestant theological faculties of Erlangen in 1878 and Greifswald in 1884.92 In 1914, Victor Schultze, the best-known Protestant theologian and art historian of the next generation, managed to establish the field of early Christian art studies nationwide. The subject of Christian art and archaeology was included in all Prussian Protestant theological faculties before it became a subject at the philosophical faculties.93 The theological faculties of Marburg and Erlangen still teach Christian archaeology to this day. The professorial chair for Christian archaeology at the Humboldt University that Piper was the first to hold, though, was – after continuous appointments for 158 years – closed in April 2007.94 The academic disciplines of Protestant theology and art history have never been fully reconciled. 92

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The institute at Erlangen was founded by Piper’s student Albert Hauck; the institute at Greifswald was founded by Victor Schultze. See Clauß-Thomassen, “Protestantische christlicharchäologische Forschung an der Wende des 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert,” 43. Ibid., 44. A copy of the report that guided the governmental decision is published in V. Schultze, “Die evangelisch-theologisschen Fakultäten in Preußen und die christliche Kunst,” Christliches Kunstblatt für Kirche, Schule und Haus 55 (1913) 61–4. www.antikes-christentum.de/de/profil/geschichte-des-lehrstuhls/, accessed December 14, 2018.

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After Imperialism: Orientalism and its Resistances

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The Road from Decadence: Agendas and Personal Histories in the Study of Early Islamic Art  

Recent years have witnessed new models for studying the formation of early Islamic art. As the Islamic art historian Finbarr Barry Flood has noted: Historically, there has been a tendency to present the early Muslims as culturally passive, overwhelmed by the sophistication of the culture they inherited.1

Discussions of Islamic art used to see it as developing from the passive adoption of Roman and Sasanian features.2 This was especially the case in scholarship on the so-called Umayyad desert-castles in the early twentieth century.3 As a result, this period of Islamic art was perceived as an eclectic mixture of Eastern and Western motifs with little symbolic content.4

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F. B. Flood, ‘Light in Stone: The Commemoration of the Prophet in Umayyad Architecture’, in J. Johns (ed.), Bayt al-Maqdis: Jerusalem and Early Islam (Oxford, 1999) 311. A striking example is Franz Wickhoff’s (1853–1909) essay on the wall paintings of Qusayr _ ‘Amra, where he described the paintings as ‘derivative art’ (A. Musil, Kusejr ‘Amra (Vienna, 1907) 203). See also E. Herzfeld, ‘Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst und das Mshatta-Problem’, Der Islam 1 (1910) 27–63, 105–44; F. Saxl, ‘The Zodiac of Qusayr ‘Amra’, in K. A. C. Creswell, Early Muslim Architecture, vol. 1 (Oxford 1932) 424–31; V. Strika, ‘La formazione dell iconografia del califfo nell’arte ommiade’, Annali del Istituto Orientale di Napoli 14 (1964) 727–47. For the Umayyad palaces and settlements, see E. Herzfeld, ‘Mshattā, Hīra und Bādiya: die Mittelländer des Islam und ihre Baukunst’, Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen 42 (1921) 104–46; O. Grabar, ‘Ceremonial and Art at the Umayyad Court’ (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1955) 283–309; O. Grabar, La formation de l’art islamique, tr. Y. Thoraval (Paris, 2000) 132–69; O. Grabar, ‘Umayyad Palaces Reconsidered’, Ars Orientalis 23 (1993) 93–108; R. Hamilton, Khirbat al-Mafjar: An Arabian Mansion in the Jordan Valley (Oxford, 1959); D. Schlumberger, Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi (Paris, 1986); R. Hillenbrand, ‘La Dolce Vita in Early Islamic Syria: The Evidence of Later Umayyad Palaces’, Art History 5 (1982) 1–35; G. Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria (Berkeley, 2004) 31–57; D. Genequand, ‘Formation et devenir du paysage architectural omeyyade: l’apport de l’archéologie’, in A. Borrut and P. M. Cobb (eds.), Umayyad Legacies: Medieval Memories from Syria to Spain (Leiden, 2010) 417–73; D. Genequand, Les établissements des élites omeyyades en Palmyrène et au Proche Orient (Beyrouth, 2012); K. Bartl and A. Moaz (eds.), Residences, Castles, Settlements: Transformation Processes From Late Antiquity to Early Islam in Bilad al-Sham (Rahden, 2008). See Hamilton, Khirbat al-Mafjar, 236, n. 3.

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Recent writing on early Islamic art has made efforts to rethink or to bypass the traditional categories of Orientalism and art history. They have offered historically based accounts of the image, embraced new terms like ‘visual culture’, borrowed methods from the social sciences, traded ‘images’ and ‘forms’ for ‘viewing experiences’ and the question of influence for ‘cultural translation’. Indeed, a new generation of scholars has sought to provide models that distance themselves from ‘the old question’ of origins, copying and influence5 by conceptualizing the genesis of Islamic art in terms of cultural translation,6 dialogic dimension7 or cross-pollination.8 Rather than assuming a temporal boundary between Christian late antiquity and Islam, more recent work has seen a dynamic continuity between them.9 This has stressed the importance of classical heritage,10 Byzantine traditions,11 and other influences such as 5

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Alois Riegl considered the Umayyad paintings as evidence of their missing Hellenistic or Roman archetypes, as well as his Romano-centric framework (see Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra, 24). For a recent discussion on the influence of the East and West discourse on the study of Islamic wall painting, see E. R. Hoffman, ‘Between East and West: The Wall Paintings of Samarra and the Construction of Abbasid Princely Culture’, Muqarnas 25 (2008) 107–32. For a deconstruction of the Eurocentric view that has shaped the study of Islamic art, see for instance G. Necipoğlu, The Topkapi Scroll-Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa Monica, 1995) 61–71; N. Rabbat, ‘The Dialogic Dimension of Umayyad Art’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (2003) 79–81. For a critical historiography of late antique art, see A. J. Wharton, Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge, 1995) 15–23; J. Elsner, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901’, Art History 25 (2002) 358–79. F. B. Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Making of Umayyad Visual Culture (Leiden, 2000) 11. Rabbat, ‘The Dialogic Dimension of Umayyad Art’, 81. G. Fowden, ‘Greek Myth and Arabic Poetry at Qusayr ‘Amra’, in A. Akasoy, J. E. Montgomery and P. E. Pormann (eds.), Islamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East (Exeter, 2007) 38–9. Most notably, Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra; G. Fowden, ‘Late-Antique Art in Syria and Its Umayyad Evolution’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 17 (2004) 282–304. For a stress on the Hellenistic heritage in Qusayr ‘Amra see J. M. Blazquez, ‘Las pinturas _ helenísticas de Qusayr ‘Amra (Jordania) y sus fuentes’, Archivo español de arqueología 54 (1981) 157–202; J. M. Blazquez, ‘Las pinturas helenísticas de Qusayr ‘Amra (II)’, Archivo español de arqueología 56 (1983) 169–212; L. Winkler-Horaček, ‘Dionysos in Qusayr ‘Amra: ein hellenistisches Bildmotiv im Frühislam’, Damaszener Mitteilungen 10 (1998) 261–90. For a convincing argument in favour of a Coptic contribution to Umayyad paintings, see M. van Lohuizen-Mulder, ‘Frescoes in the Muslim Residence and Bathhouse Qusayr ‘Amra’, BABesch 73 (1998) 125–51. O. Grabar, ‘Islamic Art and Byzantium’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964) 64–88; C. Foss, Arab-Byzantine Coins: An Introduction with a Catalogue of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (Washington, DC, 2008); E. R. Hoffman (ed.), Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World (Oxford, 2007). For a model of investigating the antique heritage in Islamic art, see O. Grabar, ‘Survivances classiques dans l’art de l’Islam’, Annales archéologiques arabes syriennes 21 (1971) 371–80.

The Study of Early Islamic Art

Sasanian.12 Yet, unlike archaeological studies,13 art history has not considered the implication of the continuity of local populations on artistic production. Neither the local contexts of production of early Islamic art, nor the role of the craftsmen in the shaping of early Islamic art have been addressed. The importance of the material remains of late antique and Christian Egypt, or of Syria-Palestine, is not widely appreciated in the study of early Islamic art either.14 Moreover, according to most foundational narratives, the emergence of early Islamic art occurred only via the translation of Mediterranean and Persian cultures during the first centuries of Islamic expansion.15 Another problem often invoked in the discussion of early Islamic art is the relationship between the mosque and palaces. Umayyad palaces are decorated with figurative programs. Qusayr ‘Amra’s paintings – showing _ representations of profane subjects associated with Near Eastern kingship as well as a religious imagery with biblical and Quranic resonances, such as Adam and Eve and the cycle of Jonah – are usually perceived as startling exceptions to an Islamic tradition that has so often been deemed aniconic. The aniconic mosque has been taken as the normative model for early Islamic art with the result that the palaces – instead of being used to challenge and complicate the normative – are read as deviant, decadent and anthropomorphic.

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R. Ettinghausen, From Byzantium to Sasanian Iran and the Islamic World: Three Modes of Artistic Influence (Leiden, 1972) 1–10; M. Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (Berkeley, 2009) 188–227. A. Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria (London, 2007); A. Shboul and A. Walmsley, ‘Identity and Self-Image in Syria-Palestine in the Transition from Byzantine to Early Islamic Rule: Arab Christians and Muslims’, Mediterranean Archaeology 11 (1998) 255–87; M. Milwright, ‘Archaeology and Material Culture’, in Ch. Robinson (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol.1 (Cambridge, 2010) 664–94; M. Milwright, An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology (Edinburgh, 2010) 59–96. With the exception of J. MacKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 300 BC–AD 700 (New Haven, 2007) 351–75. Important exceptions do exist; while I might quibble with his interpretations, Garth Fowden has made a landmark contribution, convincingly reassessing the evidence from Qusayr ‘Amra _ both from a late antique and an early Islamic perspective. See especially Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra; Fowden, ‘Late-Antique Art in Syria and Its Umayyad Evolution’. The discussion over the late antique sources of Umayyad art is part of Fowden’s broader enterprise of recontextualizing late antiquity and early Islam. See G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993) 138–68; G. Fowden, ‘Contextualizing Late Antiquity: The First Millenium’, in J. P. Arnason and K. A. Raaflaub (eds.), The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Chichester, 2011) 148–76; G. Fowden, Before and after Muhammad (Princeton, 2014).

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Developments in the Humanities and the field of Islamic art have led Islamic art historians to focus on the Muslims’ reception of ancient forms, and on the meaning and role which Umayyad patrons intended for their art and architecture in expressing their ideological claims.16 In his foundational study The Formation of Islamic Art, Oleg Grabar argued for the importance of questioning why certain visual forms were chosen, and whether they amount to ‘a new aesthetic and material vision’.17 By concentrating on the beholder or the patron’s mentality as the true engine of change and meaning, Grabar aimed to establish that a Muslim onlooker might have beheld images in a new and distinctive way. Thus, he replaced the traditional assumption of passive reception by a new model of selective appropriation and creative reception. The need for a contextualized interpretation, and the emphasis on the ‘mind of the beholder’, has tended to lead to a focus on interpretation and meaning and has promoted interdisciplinary approaches in which written sources play a central role.18 In this chapter, I will focus on three models in the study of early Islamic art: those of Ernst Herzfeld and Louis Massignon, and later responses to these, especially that of Grabar. The first, formulated by Herzfeld (1879–1948), was concerned with late Roman and Sasanian visual sources for early Islamic art and with the question of what makes it distinctive from its predecessors.19 This account, mainly based on formal and iconographical analysis, considers early Islamic art to be a mutation created by the confluence of Sasanian and early Byzantine traditions, with an amorphous form of Arabic taste. Herzfeld saw this as a mark of a new

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Concerning the ideological discourse in the decor of Qusayr ‘Amra, see O. Grabar, ‘The _ Painting of the Six Kings at Qusayr ‘Amra’, Ars Orientalis 1 (1954) 185–7; Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra, 142–63, 175–91, 197–214, 291–316. More generally, on the ideological aspect of Umayyad art see among others, Grabar, La formation de l’art islamique, 1–72; O. Grabar, ‘The Umayyad Dome of the Rock’, Ars Orientalis 3 (1959) 33–62; Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus; N. Rabbat, ‘The Meaning of the Umayyad Dome of the Rock’, Muqarnas 6 (1990) 12–21; N. Rabbat, ‘The Dome of the Rock Revisited: Some Remarks on al-Wasiti’s Accounts’, Muqarnas 10 (1993) 67–75; S. Heidemann, ‘The Evolving Representation of the Early Islamic Empire and Its Religion on Coin Imagery’, in A. Neuwirth, N. Sinai and M. Marx (eds.), The Quran in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Quranic Milieu (Leiden, 2010) 149–95. Grabar, La formation de l’art islamique, 16. This shift in scholarship is not confined to the study of Islamic art. See, for instance H. Kessler, ‘On the State of Medieval Art History’, Art Bulletin 70/2 (1988) 166–7. For a critique of the Panoskian scheme, see R. Klein, La forme et l’intelligible (Paris, 1970); Ph. Bruneau, ‘De l’image’, Revue d’archéologie moderne et d’archéologie générale 4 (1966) 249–95. For the biography of Herzfeld and his scholarship see A. C. Gunter and S. Hauser (eds.), Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies (Leiden, 2005).

The Study of Early Islamic Art

identity.20 Massignon’s (1883–1962) response to Herzfeld’s formalism was to reject the idea of external influence and to provide instead an overarching – both essentialist and elusive – religious explanation for Islamic art. Massignon’s viewpoint was responsible for much of the theory developed later about the ‘spirit of Islamic art’ in both European and Muslim scholarship.21 This scholarly treatment of Islamic art as ‘Islamic’ may parallel the interpretation of early Christian art as a ‘new spiritual art’.22 Grabar’s response, his dissertation on early Islamic art, dismissed faith-based models and constructed an Umayyad visual culture as the pictorial chronicle of palatial life and the epitome of sensual pleasure. In this chapter, I attempt to connect scholars’ intellectual models with their personal lives and implicit agendas. As pointed by Jaś Elsner, in the last century, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) wrote ‘about the contemporaneity of all history – even the history of the distant past – and the way that no history . . . can be compelling unless it engages one’s own “spiritual needs . . . the most personal and contemporary of histories”, unless “it rouses, attracts or torments me like the image of my competitor, or of the woman I love or the dear child for whose safety I tremble”’.23 For Herzfeld and Massignon, I argue that their work was deeply related to contemporary history. Herzfeld was an assimilated Jew living in Germany in the complex era of anti-Semitism and a shift from the recent empire to the rise of the Third Reich. Massignon was a French

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Herzfeld, ‘Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst und das Mshatta-Problem’. Trans as ‘The Genesis of Islamic Art and the Problem of Mshatta’, in J. Bloom (ed.), Early Islamic Art and Architecture (Aldershot, 2002) 7–86. See also T. Leisten, ‘Mshatta, Samarra and al-Hira: Ernst Herzfeld’s Theories Concerning the Development of the Hira-Style Revisited’, in Gunter and Hauser (eds.), Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 372–6. For the Europeans, see E. Kühnel, Die Arabeske: Sinn und Wandlung eines Ornaments (Wiesbaden, 1949); R. Ettinghausen, ‘The Character of Islamic Art’, in N. A. Faris (ed.), The Arab Heritage (Princeton, 1944) 251–67; R. Ettinghausen, ‘Interaction and Integration in Islamic Art’, in G. E. von Grunebaum (ed.), Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization (Chicago, 1955) 107–37. K. Weitzmann, Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century (New York, 1979). See also Jaś Elsner’s discussion of André Grabar’s faith-based model in Chapter 5 in this volume. J. Elsner, ‘Myth and Chronicle: A Response to the Value of Art’, Arethusa 43 (2010) 289–307, esp. 291. The quotes are from Croce’s ‘History, Chronicle and Pseudo-History’ (1937) tr. C. Sprigge in B. Croce, Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays (London, 1966), 497–508, esp. 498–9. It is worth noting that like much of Greek art history, the history of early Islamic art is characterized by an ‘evidential problem’, to rephrase Elsner. This is actually the precise opposite of that in the history of Greek art: for early Islam, we have at our disposal copious archaeological material, but no external evidence on which to ground our interpretations.

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Catholic struggling with guilt about his own tortured homosexuality. Grabar was a double exile: the child of a Russian Orthodox refugee from the Revolution brought up in France, who conducted his scholarly career as a European émigré in the United States. A focus on personal lives and scholars’ secrets is historiographically important for three reasons.24 First, they often function biographically as crisis-events within which the scholar feels called to a particular path of study. Such experiences function as creative, problem-solving events that serve to help the individual resolve some intellectual, moral or religious dilemma; thus, in many ways, they determine what comes afterwards, including the subsequent flow of scholarship.25 Massignon’s conversion after ‘the Visitation of the Stranger’ is one example of these visionary events. Second, they inform the hermeneutical choices of historians: which texts are studied, which theoretical tools are used, and which interpretations are finally reached. All of these are profoundly influenced by the scholar’s experience and personal life.26 Third, the choice to examine a particular scholar’s personal life depends on how significant and influential that scholar has been in the study of Islam or Islamic arts. Although formed in totally different contexts, the three models discussed here – and their authors – had an immense influence on the field of early Islamic art and were responsible for significant methodological shifts that respond to each other.

1.

1910: Ernst Herzfeld and the Jewish Discovery of Islamic Art

There is a now-familiar story about the genesis of early Islamic art: it emerged as a synthesis of the pre-Islamic visual sources of the conquered territories, with Graeco-Roman artistic traditions on the one hand, and ‘oriental’ – and especially Sasanian – traditions on the other. The art of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) is perceived as combining these inheritances. The second Islamic dynasty, the Abbasids (750–900) moved the Islamic 24

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For a subtle discussion of the relationships between the scholars’ personal lives, their work and the political contexts in which they write, see J. Elsner, ‘A Golden Age of Gothic’, in Z. Opacic and A. Timmermann (eds.), Architecture, Liturgy and Identity: Liber Amicorum Paul Crossley (Turnhout, 2011) 7–15. J. R. Horne, The Moral Mystic (Waterloo, ON, 1983). For a stimulating discussion about the secrets of scholars, see J. Kipral, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (Chicago, 2001), ix–xviii.

The Study of Early Islamic Art

capital from Damascus in Syria to the Mesopotamian centre of Baghdad, their traditional seat. It has been claimed that this marked a rupture with the Western-dominated Graeco-Roman visual tradition of the Umayyads and formulated a visual identity oriented toward the East and the Sasanian legacy.27 These ideas were first formulated by Herzfeld in his foundational article on the Umayyad palace of Mshatta, and the genesis of Islamic art.28 The East–West debate took a particular turn when the Mshatta façade was installed in the late antique gallery of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin in 1904.29 The façade became the focus of much controversy, with proposed origins ranging from second-century Roman, third-century Parthian, and fifth–sixth century Byzantine or Ghassanid, to eighth-century Umayyad. Herzfeld was the first to argue for the Umayyad dating, as well as for the juxtaposition of East and West in the formation of a new Islamic style. With his excavation at Samarra, begun in 1911, followed by his work on pre-Islamic Iran, Herzfeld’s own scholarly focus moved eastward (Figure 8.1).30 In spite of this, it must be emphasized that Herzfeld never advocated exclusively Eastern sources, nor did he dismiss the notion of a Mediterranean Graeco-Roman heritage for Samarra. He linked the art of Samarra to Mshatta, which he claimed stemmed from a synthesis of preIslamic Graeco-Roman and Eastern-Sasanian sources (Figure 8.2). In this way, Herzfeld reconciled East and West through an elaborate theory that posited the mediation of a Roman model through a sixth-century Mesopotamian style, such as that found at the Syrian Christian centre of Hira.31 Ironically, well after the storm of early and mid-twentieth century political and ideological agendas – outlined below – abated, the scholarship of early Islamic art has continued to be framed by the East-or-West discourse of origins. This discourse has survived without the accompanying political emphases, but rather as a method to identify the constituent

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For this narrative, see R. Hillenbrand, Islamic Art and Architecture (London, 1999); B. Brend, Islamic Art (London, 1991) 20–32. Herzfeld, ‘Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst und das Mshatta-Problem’, 27–63; Leisten, ‘Mshatta, Samarra and al-Hira’. For a recent ‘biography’ of the Mshatta façade in Berlin, see E. M. Troelenberg, Mschatta in Berlin: Grundsteine islamischer Kunst (Berlin, 2014). J. Jenkins, ‘Excavating Zarathustra: Ernst Herzfeld’s Archeological History of Iran’, Iranian Studies 45/1 (2012) 1–27. Herzfeld, ‘Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst und das Mshatta-Problem’, 32 and 47; Leisten, ‘Mshatta, Samarra and al-Hira’, 374–6.

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Figure 8.1 Ernst Herzfeld (left) and colleagues at Persepolis (Iran), northern portico of the building known as the Harem of Xerxes. Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Series 2.2, Box 8, Folder 2. Metropolitan Museum of Art (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943), New York. No known restriction on use

elements of Islamic art and to mark the differences between Umayyad and Abbasid art.32 If Herzfeld developed a synthetic model for the genesis of early Islamic art, in his argument Sasanian and Iranian traditions were regarded nonetheless as crucial for its development. Herzfeld’s emphasis on the ‘Eastern’ component must also be read in light of the aura of Persia in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For many scholars

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Hoffman, ‘Between East and West’, 109–17.

The Study of Early Islamic Art

Figure 8.2 Mshatta façade, 743–4, detail showing simurgh. Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, Germany. Photograph © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Persia could be seen as the Eastern edge of Europe.33 This is particularly clear in Marcel Dieulafoy’s (1844–1920) L’art antique de Perse, the earliest survey of ancient Persian art.34 In Art in Spain and Portugal (1913), Dieulafoy suggested that most of the arts of medieval Iberia were derived from Islamic, and ultimately Sasanian Persia: It may be strange that the art history of Spain and Portugal should begin on Iranian ground, at the same time of the Sassanids, and that the study of the primitive mosques should serve as a preface to that of the western churches. I hope however to show that Persia was not only the source of inspiration of Muslim architecture and of the so-called Mudejar architecture of Spain, but that she played an important and well-defined part in the elaboration of those religious themes which found their way into the Asturias, Castille and Catalonia after the exclusion of the invaders.35 33

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On the sympathetic nature of ancient Persians, see S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009) 279. 1884–9. M. Dieulafoy, Art in Spain and Portugal (London, 1913) 1. Quoted in E. M. Troelenberg, ‘“The Most Important Branch of Muhammedan Art”: Munich 1910 and the Early 20th Century Image of Persian Art’, in Y. Kadoi and I. Szántó (eds.), The Shaping of Persian Art: Collections and Interpretations of the Art of Islamic Iran and Central Asia (Newcastle, 2014) 237–52.

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The positive view of Persian art, especially pre-Islamic Sasanian art, was reflected not only in studies on Islamic art but also in major exhibitions. In 1910, Munich was home to the largest exhibition of Islamic art ever held. Curated by Friedrich Sarre (1865–1945), the exhibition clearly makes the statement that Persian art and culture was the origin of artistic developments in both the eastern and western Islamic world.36

Reconsidering the ‘Eastern-Sasanian Element’ in Early Islamic Art Before turning to the problem of the ideological nature of Herzfeld’s narrative, a reconsideration of the visual and archaeological evidence of the Sasanian-Eastern element in early Islamic art is necessary. It is especially important because there has never been a systematic study made of the specific links between the themes, styles, motives and symbolic significance of Sasanian art and their supposed parallels in Umayyad and Abbasid art.37 While scholars have struggled to distinguish specific Sasanian and Byzantine models for the themes and styles of the Umayyad monuments, the combination of both traditions has been systematically interpreted as the main characteristic of Umayyad art and as a representation of the inclusive and triumphalist nature of the first Islamic empire.38 While the influence of Sasanian modes on early Islamic visual culture cannot be denied in several classes of evidence, especially coins and stucco work, a closer look at the visual evidence shows that the continuity of Sasanian styles and forms in iconography and architecture is far from evident.

Palatial Architecture The ruins of palatial buildings in Iran and Iraq have been linked with the Sasanian dynasty since the nineteenth century, but the concept of a 36

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Several important aspects of the particular role of Persia in Munich 1910, especially nationalist and racist issues, have been recently discussed: L. Korn, ‘From the “Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst” to the “Survey of Persian Art”: The Munich Exhibition and Its Aftermath’, in A. Shalem and A. Lermer (eds.), After One Hundred Years: The 1910 Exhibition ‘Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst’ Reconsidered (Leiden, 2010) 317–31; Troelenberg, ‘“The Most Important Branch of Muhammedan Art”’, 241. M. R. Ayalon, ‘Further Considerations Pertaining to Umayyad Art’, Israel Exploration Journal 23/2 (1973) 92–100. For a recent affirmation of Herzfeld’s model, see K. Meinecke, ‘The Encyclopedic Illustration of a New Empire: Graeco, Roman, Byzantine and Sasanian Models on the Façade of Qasr alMshatta’, in S. Birk, T. M. Kristensen and B. Poulsen (eds.), Using Images in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2014) 283–300.

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Sasanian palace architecture goes back only six decades to Oscar Reuther’s study in the Survey of Persian Art.39 As demonstrated by Lionel Bier, despite excavations and surveys undertaken since then, most of our impressions about Sasanian palaces still derive from the drawings with which he illustrated his essay. Reuther’s first-hand experience of the monuments was limited to Ctesiphon; for the others, he used the accounts of Flandin and Coste, de Morgan or Gertrude Bell, who in turn had based their knowledge on the works of Arab and Persian authors writing centuries after the fall of the Sasanian empire.40 Perhaps the best example of how architectural drawings can cloud rather than clarify any issues is the so-called Imaret-i Khusraw, the palace of Khusraw II at Qasr-i Shirin. This building was in a ruined state long before de Morgan came through on his mission scientifique in the 1890s. De Morgan did manage to extract a plan which showed a series of houses around an open court and an elaborate gate complex preceded by colonnades. A few years later Gertrude Bell visited the site and produced another plan but instead of rows of paired columns, she shows a simple iwan hall (or rectangular hall, partly vaulted and partly open to the air).41 Reuther explained that he took the liberty of making his own variation based on the columned buildings at Damghan and Kish that had just then come to light, and in his version the palace acquired a dome. This means that before we use this drawing to discuss the nature of Sasanian gate complexes – that is, the typical arrangement of domed hall fronted by an iwan – we should dwell for a moment on its pedigree. Bell, for instance, informs us that in producing the survey she was sometimes obliged to make analogies with the better-preserved early Islamic (Abbasid) palace at Ukhaydir in Iraq to fill in the missing parts, of which there are many. I suspect this is why Khusraw’s building looks very Abbasid. Put less delicately, it seems to me a good example of how Sasanian architecture can be, and has been, invented via analogies drawn with early Islam; this means that its role in the origins of Islamic art has been created, to a large extent, by scholars.

39 40

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A. U. Pope with P. Ackerman (eds.), A Survey of Persian Art, vol. 1 (London, 1938–9) 493–578. For a detailed reappraisal of Reuther’s drawings and their impact on recent scholarship, see L. Bier, ‘The Sasanian Palaces and Their Influences in Early Islam’, Ars Orientalis 23 (1993) 57–66. G. Bell, Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir: A Study in Early Mohammadan Architecture (Oxford, 1914) 44–51, plates 53, 54.

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The Samarra Paintings The famous ninth-century Abbasid wall paintings from Samarra have been used to carry forward the powerful narrative of the East-West discourse. While certain affinities with Graeco-Roman art have been noted, the style of most of the paintings has been associated with an Eastern orientation. This tendency towards the East has been viewed as a defining characteristic of the new, authentically Islamic style, labelled the Samarran style, which in turn has been claimed as the foundation for the development of later monumental painting in Fatimid Egypt and Norman Sicily. Eva Hoffman, however, has re-examined a key piece of evidence often used to define and corroborate the Samarran style as ‘Eastern’: the coloured drawings of the Samarra wall paintings made by Herzfeld. Two main points can be taken from Hoffman’s essay. First, she has shown that liberties were taken to render the paintings’ style more linear. Based entirely on Herzfeld’s reconstruction drawing, one Samarra painting, the so-called Huntress, has been described as follows: The main figure has often been compared with the huntress Diana, but the face has distinctly oriental cast, with its long hooked nose and fleshy cheeks, as has the bunch of black hair at the back and the slender curl on the temple. She seems animated, as do her prey and the dog, but the movement is both petrified and exaggerated, an effect further enhanced by the expressionless gazes of both huntress and prey. The decorative spots on the animal and the patterned fall of the huntress’s garment contribute to the unrealistic quality of this work.42

The figures of the Samarra dancers as mediated by Herzfeld’s drawing have been described as timeless, static, symbolic works whose volume replaces the flesh and naturalism of their Umayyad counterparts at Qusayr ‘Amra. _ They have also been interpreted as a manifestation of both the more formal mood of the Abbasid court and of its Eastern heritage, expressing a linearity, symmetry, physiognomy and iconography rooted in the Sasanian royal arts (Figure 8.3).43 A second, and equally important point raised by Hoffman is that Herzfeld’s drawings were by no means arbitrary reconstructions. In order to fill in missing areas of the design, he made use of surviving details in neighbouring paintings and also looked to the themes of dancers,

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R. Ettinghausen and O. Grabar, with M. Jenkins-Madina, Islamic Art and Architecture, 650–1250 (New Haven, 2001), 59. R. Ettinghausen, Arab Painting (Geneva, 1977), 42–4; Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra, 306.

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Figure 8.3 Watercolour depiction of a wall painting with two dancers reconstructed by Herzfeld from fragments found in the main caliphal palace in Samarra (Dar al-Khilafa). Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Series 3.1 (Drawings, Watercolors and Prints: Excavation of Samarra). Metropolitan Museum of Art (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943), New York. No known restriction on use. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

musicians and attendants from known precedents in Umayyad and preIslamic court art. For the reconstructed drawings of human figures within the acanthus scroll and the Samarra dancers, Herzfeld clearly had in mind similar subjects of dancers and attendants found on luxury Sasanian silvergilt objects. From minimal surviving remnants of a figure within the acanthus scroll, for example, he developed the motif into a fully animated female figure holding a scarf over her head. Even where the Samarra paintings survived more fully, there are noticeable discrepancies of style between the drawings and the paintings visible in the photographs. Herzfeld filled in missing sections of garments and elaborated on the poses of

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the Samarra dancers to suggest the figures in motion, dancing and pouring liquid into bowls, again reminiscent of Sasanian metalwork. In the photograph, however, the nature of their activities is far from certain, and it is unclear what objects they hold. Moreover, the physiognomy of the figures in the wall paintings has been described as Eastern, but the linearity and elongation are further exaggerated in the drawing resulting in an even more ‘Eastern appearance’. Similarly, some figures have been schematized: comparisons between the photographs and the drawings of an enigmatic group of painted portraits on ceramic bottles found under the pavement of a room adjacent to the harem shows that in the drawings the figural forms are more rigid and flattened.44 Recent studies have shown that there was more interplay between East and West than is usually acknowledged.45 Hoffman’s analysis suggests that it is no longer possible to define the Samarra paintings in terms of an exclusively ‘Eastern’ orientation. It is clear that these realms can no longer be discussed in monolithic terms, nor can they be considered separate from each other. Herzfeld’s impulse to connect the Samarra paintings to local pre-Islamic Sasanian art was well founded. It is, however, the popular conception of Sasanian art as exclusively ‘Eastern’ and ‘royal in content’ that must be questioned. What the previous points also suggest is that a closer look at some of the key archaeological and visual evidence for the argument in favour of a ‘Sasanian element’ in early Islamic art shows that Sasanian influence is still a moot question. In many respects, Sasanian influence seems to have been overestimated, especially in Herzfeld’s work.

Between Assimilation and Resistance: Thoughts on the Jewish Discovery of Islamic Art Herzfeld’s overestimation of the ‘Eastern-Sasanian element’ must be seen in light of the work of the Austrian scholar Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941). In Orient oder Rom, Strzygowski challenged the notion of classical GraecoRoman culture as the basis for all important stages of cultural history and argued instead that scholars should look further to the East, more precisely to the ancient Oriental cultures. According to him, the shape of the arabesque and 44 45

Hoffman, ‘Between East and West’. On this Graeco-Roman-Sasanian interaction, see for instance P. O. Harper, ‘Silver Vessels’, in F. Demange et al., Glass, Gilding and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran, 224–642 (New York, 2006) 26; P. O. Harper, In Search of a Cultural Identity: Monuments and Artifacts of the Sasanian Near East, 3rd to 7th Century A.D. (New York, 2006). For a detailed analysis of the Roman–Sasanian interaction see Canepa, Two Eyes of the Earth.

The Study of Early Islamic Art

the shape of the Graeco-Roman acanthus have the same, ancient oriental roots. Eastern and Western art were thus to be regarded as related to each other. At the time, as pointed out by Eva Troelenberg, scholars took this line of thought as a downright attack on the traditional narrative of European cultural history. It was indeed an important paradigmatic shift.46 The ornamentation of Mshatta was an ideal touchstone for such debates: while some of its decorative elements such as the vine scrolls or acanthus leaves show Hellenistic traits, the overall composition dominated by a large zigzag band is unfamiliar to Graeco-Roman conventions, but not necessarily unfamiliar to the Sasanian architectural tradition. Indeed, some of the iconographic motives, such as the simurgh or griffin, recall Sasanian traditions (Figure 8.2). Strzygowski dated the monument to the pre-Islamic period (fourth to sixth centuries) and argued that the workmen must have come from Amida (Diyarbakir).47 Herzfeld compared Mshatta to other Islamic buildings, such as the Dome of the Rock or the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, explaining that the system of combining very different styles and techniques observed at Mshatta was an outspoken quality of early Islamic architecture; such monumental public commissions could only be constructed by engaging the most skilled workmen from all the provinces of the Islamic dominions. Herzfeld did not put the ‘classical’ and ancient Oriental into rivalry, as Strzygowski had done. Instead, he argued that a number of earlier traditions merged at the stage of early Islamic art represented by Mshatta. Yet, in Herzfeld’s argument, Sasanian and Iranian traditions were regarded nonetheless as crucial for the development of early Islamic art. I would suggest that Herzfeld’s drive for the construction of such an inclusive model is not unrelated to his status as a Jewish convert to Lutheranism. The prominent role played by Jews in advancing modern Europe’s understanding of Islam and Muslim societies is now well documented.48 We may ask a number of substantive historiographical

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Troelenberg, ‘“The Most Important Branch of Muhammedan Art”’, 244; S. Marchand, ‘The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Humanism: The Case of Strzygowski’, History and Theory 33/4 (1994) 106–30. On this topic, see Troelenberg, ‘“The Most Important Branch of Muhammedan Art”’, 245–7; B. Schulz and J. Strzygowski, ‘Mshatta’, Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen 25 (1904) 205–73. Amida was a city in Northern Mesopotamia. On this topic see, M. Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery of Islam (Tel Aviv, 1999) esp. 1–43; Hichem Djait, Europe and Islam (Berkeley, 1985) 75–8. For another example of a prominent Jewish German-speaking scholar as a founding father of Islamic studies whose work has not been superseded, namely the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), see R. Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary (Detroit, 1987); R. Simon, Ignac Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in His Works and Correspondence (Budapest, 1986).

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questions: was there a ‘Jewish Discovery of Islam and Islamic art’ in the German-speaking world before 1933, distinct from Europe’s discovery of Islamic art? Does it make sense to assess Jewish scholars – many of them like Herzfeld only nominally Jewish or converts to Christianity – outside the broader context of European intellectual history and Orientalism? Jews fascinated by Islam were themselves the product of Europe’s scholarly, political and intellectual debates. But they were also formed by an urgent discussion about the past, present and future of the Jews – a discussion fuelled in Europe by the persistence of anti-Semitism and the rise of Zionism.49 Europe still vacillated over whether the Jews belonged to Europe or the East, whether they were compatriots or foreigners, a race apart or an assimilable minority. The thread that runs through the contribution of Jewish scholars of Islam is the denial of an opposition between East and West. The Jewish discovery of Islam was not distinct from Europe’s own discovery of Islam; it was inseparable, but it was overwhelmingly – until the rise of the state of Israel in 1948 – biased against Orientalism as an ideology of difference and supremacy. The work of Jewish Orientalists at every turn challenged the tendency to interpret Islam or Judaism as sui generis and their message urged European respect for people defined by cultures of extra-European origin, precisely because the Jews were the most vulnerable of these peoples, residing as they did in the very centre of Europe. Much of Europe debated whether the Jews belonged to the West or the Orient; Jews replied that the question itself lacked validity. Indeed, Jews found themselves in a Europe constructed upon a series of evolving dichotomies: Christendom and Islam, Europe and Asia, West and East, Aryan and Semite. Assimilated Jews in Europe posed a challenge to these on practically every level. When by the nineteenth century, Jews had entered the debate on their place in Europe, they started to question not just their classification, but the very validity of this series of dichotomies, which represented a serious obstacle to assimilation, the dominant project of central and western European Jewry from the French Revolution to the rise of Nazism.50 The gulf between Aryan and Semite came especially to the fore during the early decades of the twentieth century. The promotion of Persian art (especially pre-Islamic Sasanian) in the 1910 Munich exhibition responds,

49 50

See Lockard and Elsner, Chapter 11 in this volume. Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery of Islam, 1–43; Djait, Europe and Islam, 75–8.

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to a certain degree, to nineteenth-century trends in Indo-European linguistics and anthropology that greatly stimulated the growing European discourse on the origins of Western art. In Strzygowski’s view, Persian art enjoyed a higher status in part because it was assumed to exhibit some mixture of Aryan elements and thus was systematically contrasted with the supposedly barren Arab culture or Southern traditions.51 This view is developed further in Strzygowski’s Altai-Iran und Volkerwanderung (1917), in which the German–Iranian cultural connection was underlined.52 Following Strzygowski, some scholars would later suggest that the form of the Iranian mosque was reminiscent of the cult places of ancient Aryan religions.53 Clearly, the positive emphasis on ‘Aryan’ Persia in conjunction with the negative characterization of the Semitic Arabs in the context of European scholarly attitudes in the first third of the twentieth century is hardly surprising – although it speaks much more to the cultural politics of Europe in the era of fascism than it does to any ancient reality. What is interesting is that someone of Jewish origins like Herzfeld should devote so much of his career to the ‘Aryan’ side of Islamic and pre-Islamic art, as opposed to its Semitic aspects. In a sense, his scholarly impetus was consistently driven by the need to respond to the dominance of the ‘Aryan’ narrative as originally constructed by Strzygowski. One cannot help but think, though, that there might be a touch of self-denial in Herzfeld’s choice to spend a great part of his life working on Iranian/Aryan archaeology and in his particular disdain for everything ‘Arab/Semite’. How can we make sense of this without suggesting that Herzfeld had to prove his Aryan allegiances in order to become even more ‘German’? Assimilation and self-denial may have been one way for a Jewish scholar to survive in a predominantly anti-Semitic Germany.54

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S. Marchand, ‘Orientalistik and Popular Orientalism in Fin de siècle Germany’, in Shalem and Lermer (eds.), After One Hundred Years, 17–34, at 28. J. Strzygowski, Altai-Iran und Volkerwanderung: ziergeschichtliche Untersuchungen über den Eintritt der Wander- und Nordvölker in die Treibhäuser geistigen Lebens (Leipzig, 1917) 188–90. E. Schroeder, ‘The Iranian Mosque Form as a Survival’, Proceedings of the Iran Society 1/8 (1938) 83–4. A. Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany (London, 2002) 259–97; D. Hertz, How the Jews Became German (New Haven, 2007); M. Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992), especially his chapter on Ignaz Goldziher entitled ‘Semites as Aryans’, 115–36. As noted by Olender: ‘In asking the Christian West to recognize the mythology of the Semites (Arabs and Hebrews), Goldziher was asking his contemporaries to assimilate the Jews into European culture.’ In confronting this issue of assimilation, Herzfeld and Goldziher took different roads.

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2.

From Brothel to Cloister: Louis Massignon and the Spiritualization of Islamic Art

Responses to Herzfeld’s model emerged in France in the 1920s, in the work of Massignon.55 He was the first scholar to argue that medieval Islamic art – and especially ornamental forms – could be read through the lens of symbolism, and especially theological symbolism. His romantic mysticism and focus on the immanence of spirituality in forms56 (visual, poetical, musical) had an immense influence on the study of Islamic art.57 In his 1921 essay ‘Les méthodes de réalisation artistiques des peuples musulmans’, Massignon argued that Islamic art was based on a vision of the universe in which only God is permanent, and which was designed as a spiritual message.58 Perhaps more importantly, he was responsible for a radical methodological shift in the field. His focus on Muslim metaphysics, with a touch of Neoplatonism, replaced both superficial views of Islamic art – in which it was characterized as a decorative, meaningless and decadent manifestation of all kinds of excess – and factual art-historical descriptions, with their focus on the search for origins and formal parallelisms in the genesis of Islamic art.59 Islamic art was finally interpreted as a vehicle of religious and spiritual content.

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I borrow the title of the subheading above from a selection of letters by J. K. Huysmans, a decadent French novelist who became a mystic Catholic, and was a very close friend of Massignon’s father: The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister, tr. B. Beaumont (Columbus, 1989). Note the influence of French Catholic thought, including an emphasis on redemptory suffering and of martyrdom, on the study of Islam; see A. Hourani, Islam and European Thought (Cambridge, 1991) 44–126. Note, though, that Massignon usually does not focus on particular objects or monuments but instead thinks in terms of broad generalization about aniconism, ornament, calligraphy, and Islamic gardens. T. Burckhardt, Sacred Art in East and West: Its Principles and Its Methods, tr. L. Northbourne (London, 1967); T. Burckhardt, ‘Perennial Values in Islamic Art’, Studies in Comparative Religion 1/3 (1967) 132–41; T. Burckhardt, Art of Islam: Language and Meaning (London, 1976); S. H. Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality (New Delhi, 1990); N. Ardalan and L. Bakhtiar, The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture (Chicago, 1973). These last are non-Western scholars. More recently Wendy Shaw proposed we resuscitate some aspects of Massignon’s Sufi-based model by stripping it of its essentialist nature. See W. Shaw, ‘The Islam in Islamic Art History: Secularism and Public Discourse’, Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012) 18–22. Note also that in Islamic studies a comparable resurrection of a Sufi-based model as a mode of entry into medieval Islamic culture has been also recently proposed by S. Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016). L. Massignon, ‘Les méthodes de réalisation artistique des peuples de l’Islam’, Syria 2/2 (1921) 47–53, 149–60. The idea of Islamic excess is best characterized in the study of ornament. H. Lavoix, ‘Les arts musulmans: de l’emploi des figures’, Gazette des beaux-arts II.12 (1875) 100; A. C. T. Prisse

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By tracing the spiritual implications of Islamic art to a single unifying force at the centre of Islamic culture, Massignon developed an ahistorical and essentialist model of explanation that overstressed its Islamic-ness and timelessness.60 This problem has often been pointed out, but my concern here is not a theoretical deconstruction of Massignon’s model. Rather, my focus is on the impulses and agendas underlying the turn to mysticism and the subsequent spiritualization of Islamic art.

A Brief Biography Certain biographical elements are crucial to understanding Massignon’s sexual guilt, his subsequent turn to mysticism and his spiritualization of Islamic art.61 His father was the agnostic and successful sculptor Pierre Roche, and his mother was a fervent Catholic. Having travelled in Algeria and studied Arabic, Massignon decided in 1906 to spend a year in Cairo. On board the ship to Egypt he met a Spanish dandy, Luis de Cuadra, who was returning to Cairo where he ‘had quit Christianity for Islam so as to continue adoring God without remorse for his way of life, in the manner of Omar Khayyam’.62 The two became lovers and Massignon was always explicit about the nature of his relationship with de Cuadra.63 This intense relationship produced a profound moral crisis in Massignon. Interestingly, it was this same homosexual conflict that led, both indirectly and directly, to Massignon’s interest in Sufi mystical literature. Massignon detected in the literature powerful expressions of love that, though configured as love between a male Sufi and a male God, were nevertheless sufficiently removed from the moral dilemmas of physical homosexual contact as to sublimate moral suffering.64 Here, in the mystics, Massignon could indirectly express his homosexual desires.

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d’Avennes, L’art arabe d’après les monuments du Kaire depuis le VIIe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe (Paris, 1877); A. Gayet, L’art arabe (Paris, 1893); O. Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856). For a detailed analysis of the treatment of Islamic ornament, see Necipoğlu, Topkapi Scroll-Geometry and Ornament, 60–5. Necipoğlu, Topkapi Scroll-Geometry and Ornament, 79–80; Shaw, ‘The Islam in Islamic Art History’, 18–22. Massignon was clearly an intensely complex man. For recent comprehensive and psychologically acute biographies, see M. L. Gude, Louis Massignon: The Crucible of Compassion (Notre Dame, 1996); Kipral, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, 98–146. Gude, Louis Massignon, 21. V. Mansour Monteil, Le Linceul de feu (Paris, 1987) 30. Gude, Louis Massignon, 23; Kipral, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, 103–4.

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In 1907, de Cuadra gave Massignon the maxim that would set his lifelong quest in motion. It was a verse from al-Hallāj’ that read ‘two moments of adoration suffice in love, but the preliminary ablution must be made in blood’.65 In the prologue to the Passion, Massignon recalls this decisive moment: A brief allusion to him on the margin of Khayyam’s quatrains set down by an uncertain hand, a simple sentence by him in Arabic in the Persian memorial of ‘Attar, and the meaning of sin was returned to me, then the heart-rending desire for purity read at the start of a cruel Egyptian spring.66

The passage is charged with multiple allusions: ‘the meaning of sin’, the desire for ‘purity’ and the reference to a ‘cruel Egyptian spring’ all speak of considerable moral suffering and sexual conflict. It is only with ‘the meaning of sin’ and a subsequent desire for purity, that is, in the context of a Roman Catholic’s homosexual conflict, that Massignon’s religious and mystical life begins. The following year, on an archaeological mission in Mesopotamia, an argument broke out between Massignon and one of his servants, who spread rumours about Massignon’s effeminate manner.67 After the dispute, Massignon was accused of espionage by the local ruler to whom he had gone to resolve the argument. He had to abort his mission and board a Turkish steamer on 1 May to return to Baghdad, where he was living. He was the only European on board. The passengers stared at him ‘brutally’: as Massignon described it ‘less for being a suspect of espionage than for loose morals’.68 Later an officer told him he would be killed by morning, on the grounds that he was a French spy involved in the assassination of Nazim Bey, an Ottoman minister. After trying to convince the captain that his mission was archaeological, Massignon fell asleep, his mind ‘still haunted by impure desires’, his inner ear suggesting that ‘a Christian should kill himself rather than endure such shame’.69 Massignon became delirious. When the boat stopped near the ruins of Ctesiphon, he tried to escape without success and the next day attempted 65 66

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Gude, Louis Massignon, 23. L. Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam, tr. H. Mason (Princeton 1962), 1: lxv–lxvi. Quoted in D. Massignon, ‘Le voyage en Mésopotamie et la conversion de Louis Massignon en 1908’, Islamochristiana 14 (1988) 143. Massignon, ‘Le voyage en Mésopotamie’, 144; Kipral, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, 105–6. Massignon, ‘Le voyage en Mésopotamie’, 145; Kipral, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, 107.

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suicide. Still bound in the captain’s cabin, he was struck by what he would later call ‘the lightning revelation’.70 There are numerous references to this event in his work, but one of the most powerful discussions occurs in ‘Visitation of the Stranger: Response to an Inquiry about God’.71 The Presence visited him a month later, while he was on a train, to convince him that the truth he longed for could be found in Catholicism. He begged a priest with whom he was travelling to hear his confession, but Massignon’s sins were so great that their absolution had to be reserved for the local bishop. Not fully forgiven, he visited the Church of Saint Joseph in Beirut, following the Way of the Cross by extending his arms to form a cross and lying on the ground face down in intense prayer. He would not get up from the ground until his sins had been fully absolved.72 Scholars often refer to Massignon as a Christian mystic or a saint.73 He is also depicted as ‘a man of profound and eccentric desire’; he certainly has his critics.74 Although seriously tempted to abandon his career to join Charles Foucauld in the deserts of North Africa as a Christian hermit,75 Massignon continued his academic career and arrived at the pinnacle of French – and international – scholarship on Islam.76 70

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This revelatory mode itself inspired others, such as the French Islamicist, Henri Corbin (1903–78), on whom see S. Wassertom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, 1999) 146; the Swiss-German religious philosopher Frithjof Schuon (1907–98), on whom see H. H. Urban, ‘A Dance of Masks: The Esoteric Ethics of Frithjof Schuon’, in G. W. Barnard and J. J. Kipral (eds.), Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism (New York, 2001) 406–40. L. Massignon, ‘Visitation of the Stranger: Response to an Inquiry about God’, in H. Mason (ed.), Testimonies and Reflections: Essays of Massignon (Notre Dame, 1989) 41: ‘The Stranger who visited me, one evening in May before the Taq, cauterizing my despair when He lanced me, came like the phosphorescence of a fish rising from the bottom of the deepest sea; my inner mirror revealed Him, behind the mask of my own features . . . The Stranger who took me as I was, on the day of His wrath, inert in His hand like the gecko of the sands, little by little overturned all my reflexes, my precautions, and my deference to public opinion.’ Gude, Louis Massignon, 50–1. Seyyed Hossein Nasr calls him a ‘Catholic mystic’. S. H. Nasr, ‘In Commemoration Louis Massignon: Catholic, Scholar, Islamicist, and Mystic’, in D. Massignon (ed.), Presence de Louis Massignon: Hommages et temoignages (Paris, 1987) 50–61. H. Mason, Memoir of a Friend: Louis Massignon (Notre Dame, 1988) 120. Among the critics, Nasr notes: an overemphasis on suffering and sacrifice and an ‘academically inappropriate existential engagement with Islamic mysticism and spirituality’ (Nasr, ‘In Commemoration Louis Massignon’, 58). Massignon’s renewed Catholicism is not exceptional for this period in France. On this subject, see R. Griffith, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870–1914 (London, 1966); C. W. Ernst, ‘Traditionalism, the Perennial Philosophy, and Islamic Studies’ (review article), Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 28/2 (1994) 176–81. On Massignon’s immense influence on the study of medieval Islam and mysticism, see A. Hourani, ‘Islam and the Philosophers of History’, Middle Eastern Studies 3/3 (1967) 206–68.

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The Effects of These Events These events are inextricably linked to inner conflict – homosexuality, selfdenial, a lifelong search for purity, spiritual renewal and redemption.77 Massignon was explicit about the relationship between his homosexuality and his scholarship. He describes the sexual impetus and the psychological process that motivated his writing: I consider that a significant life (that of Hallāj’), a total human experience containing substantial allusions to mystical experience and linked to examples of heroism, all within a divine planned scenario, could make dawn in others the desire to sublimate our common misery and the secret of how to do it, and that there was no better lesson to pass on.78

Both Massignon’s interpretation of Islamic mysticism and the spiritualization of Islamic art rest largely on a single assumption, namely that any active homosexuality is sinful and something that requires conversion and redemption. Would Massignon have been so taken with the life of Hallāj’, Sufism and the esoteric dimension of Islamic art had he believed that his homosexuality was the grace of God meant to be expressed in a loving context? In his Passion of al-Hallāj’ there are numerous seemingly anomalous paragraphs of mystical, deeply personal revelations that comment on Hallāj’s life, and on Massignon’s own: descriptions of the tortured male body, reflections on the sexual natures of flowers and deeply ambiguous essays on the nature of mystical love. There is almost too much material for speculation in this work. Two points are important for this argument. First, the Sufi and heretic al-Hallāj, executed for publicly declaring his love and union with God, was the scandalous, excessive, excommunicated outlawsaint in whose life the scholar could see himself. It is undeniable that a homoerotically structured mysticism runs throughout both Hallāj’s life and Massignon’s treatment of it, with page after page delineating the

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Whether contemporary scholarship likes to admit it or not, these kinds of psychological and sexo-mystical experiences have driven the twentieth-century study of Islamic mysticism. Any analysis of the erotic subjectivity of historians of mysticism raises also a series of important questions that I cannot touch on here: the politics of desire and possible connections to colonial structures of exploitation, one’s willingness to be challenged by the erotic subjectivities of a foreign culture, and the ethics of fetishizing and revealing another culture’s religious or cultic secrets. On this see D. Kulick and M. Willson, (eds.), Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork (London, 1995) 5–12. L. Massignon, Opera Minora, ed. Y. Moubarac, 3 vols. (Beirut, 1963), 2: 371–2 quoted in Gude, Louis Massignon, 53.

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psychological, doctrinal and political consequences of loving ‘Him’.79 Massignon’s homoeroticism is more or less successfully sublimated80 into an elaborately coded, hermeneutical mysticism. Second, and equally important for our argument, there is in the Passion a consistent sexualspiritual dualism and a quest for ‘purity’. Massignon frequently evokes a vision found among certain circles of tenth- and eleventh-century Baghdadian mysticism, which claimed to see God in the reflected beauty of the human – usually young male – face that was said to give witness to what Massignon called ‘the unimaginable, superintelligible Presence’.81 Massignon was not particularly at ease with such an overtly homoerotic gaze. As a consequence, he consistently sought to transform it into a more traditionally respectable and formless intellectual mysticism of ‘pure’ love and sacrificial suffering.82 ‘Pure’ is a code word for homosexual abstinence in Massignon’s corpus. In the same vein, Massignon frequently affirms Islam has a ‘salutary horror of mixing the purity of transcendence and the dirtiness of the material world’.83 For Massignon the redemption of Islamic art through its spiritualization could hardly be separated from self-redemption; this spiritualization of Islamic art was also an imperative in his renewed Catholic faith. The elevation of a sublimated homosexuality as a path to sainthood was in itself an affirmation of the old trope of Oriental decadence, but with the creative twist of its being the driver of ascetic regeneration. The spirituality of Islamic art was the result. In the case of Massignon, I would argue that his work was driven by guilt about his homosexuality, and a craving for redemption in the context of early twentieth-century heteronormative culture. I suggest that this was performed in the semantic, metaphorical and theoretical aspects of his writings as well as in his spiritualization of Islamic art.84 This is not merely psychosexual

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For instance, Massignon’s description of the divine union: ‘The divine union in which it is consummated is the amorous nuptial in which the Creator ultimately rejoins his creature, in which He embraces him and in which the latter opens his heart to his Beloved in intimate, familiar, burning, and flowing discourse.’ Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj, 1: 274. The term ‘sublime’ is often used by Massignon. See Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj, 1: 236; 1: 343; L. Massignon, Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism, tr. B. Clark (Notre Dame, 1997) 32. Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj, 1: 280. J. Wafer, ‘Vision and Passion: The Symbolism of Male Love in Islamic Mystical Literature’, in S. O. Murray and W. Roscoe (eds.), Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (New York, 1997) 108. Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj, 1: 274. M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, tr. M. B. Smith, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1992).

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guesswork, but rather an exploration of how Massignon’s sexual suffering related to a lifelong quest for spiritual healing, and an argument that the latter lies at the heart of his theories of Islam and Islamic art. Massignon’s lifelong quest for purity and spirituality was also what structured his view on Islamic art, in which materiality, forms and the senses are denied or more exactly driven to another, more intellectual plane of experience. For Massignon, like Hallāj’, earthly beauty was a temptation; he was in search of ‘purity of regard’ unattached to temporal things. Only the sphere of the eternal and invisible was beautiful in the Muslim’s world-view, and visible forms could do no more than allude to it. Massignon thus saw Islamic art, and especially ornament, as a denial of the materiality of forms and a means of embodying a spiritual message. In his 1921 essay, Massignon stated that Islamic art is not created out of foreign influences, but that Muslim art derives its fundamental characteristics from Muslim metaphysics (Figure 8.4).85 In his attempt to prove this, he overestimates internal evolution at the expense of influence from other cultures. He denigrates the possibility of Hellenistic or Byzantine influences reading the arabesque and the Muslim rejection of naturalism as a way for Muslims to deny the eternity of natural things.86 He suggests that the ban of idolatry has fostered an alternative mode of representation in Islam: The Muslim does not want to be fooled by art because, for him, even the world, which is infinitely more beautiful than all artworks, is nothing but an automaton of which God pulls the strings.87

Massignon thus considers that Islamic art derives from a Muslim theory of the universe, in which God alone is fixed and permanent, and that all other forms exist only at the pleasure of, and according to the order imposed by, God.88 Massignon’s emphasis on the idea of a constant change of matter is the heart of his model for the explanation of Islamic ornament in architecture. For him: Geometric forms preclude the fixity of any single form and thus provides a visual counterpart to the infinite changeability of the material universe.89

85 86 87 88 89

Massignon, ‘Les méthodes de réalisation artistique des peuples de l’Islam’, 50. Massignon, Opera Minora, 1: 14. Massignon, ‘Les méthodes de réalisation artistique des peuples de l’Islam’, 50. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 49.

The Study of Early Islamic Art

Figure 8.4 Louis Massignon costumed as a student of al-Azhar, Cairo, 1909. Public domain

Massignon’s spiritualization of Islamic art culminates at the end of his essay with the verses of al-Hallāj’. He considers these teachings as a means through which to understand that Islamic art is intended to bring the viewer closer to God. Important to Massignon’s vision of Islamic art is the notion of secrecy. Throughout his work, there is a tendency to stress the importance of hermetic, esoteric and intellectual Shi’i Islamic currents of thought. Massignon’s medieval Muslims were attuned to the invisible and skilled at reading codes. Secrecy was at the heart of Massignon’s understanding of Islamic culture and art as a whole,90 as it was essential to the side of his life that he concealed. For instance, he gave an essential role to the early medieval Islamic guilds, especially craftsmen guilds, viewing them as secret organizations pervaded by Isma’ili and Shi’i influence, with the idea of tightly knit esoteric groups passing secrets on from generation to generation.91 Massignon’s ideas on the Islamic guilds have been rejected and 90

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L. Massignon, ‘Les corps de métiers et la cite islamique’, Revue internationale de sociologie 28 (1920) 437–89; L. Massignon, ‘La “Futuwwa” ou “pacte d’honneur artisanal” entre les travailleurs musulmans au Moyen-Age’, La Nouvelle Clio 4 (1952) 171–98. This hypothesis has been rejected: C. Cahen, ‘Y a t-il eu des corporations professionelles dans le monde musulman classique?’, in A. Hourani and S. M. Stern (eds.), The Islamic City (Oxford,

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interpreted as a projection of his own fantasies about European freemasons, but they nevertheless allowed Massignon to ground the esoteric nature of Islamic art in a sociological model.92 To study Massignon is not simply to study one individual; it is also to study a major strand of the modern scholarly approach to Islamic arts.93

3.

Protestant Ideology and the Opposition between Normative Aniconic Islam and the Decadent Use of Figurative Art in Palaces

The work of Oleg Grabar (1929–2011) established an alternative to Massignon’s model, dismissing a faith-based or spiritualist approach to Islamic art in favour of a model centred on the palace, which is to say patronage, with Islamic art as both the visual chronicle of the royal life and the epitome of its sensual pleasures. At the heart of Grabar’s model is an early Arab-Muslim visual culture of artistic decadence in the secretive world of the desert-castles, which stands against normative Islam as epitomized in the aniconic mosque. He first formulated this model focusing on the profane and licentious dimension of images showing the caliph surrounded by his court, entertainers, lovers and royal pastimes. Grabar’s view that the images of the desert palaces represent a type of courtly visual culture dictated by frivolous concerns remains dominant and has been echoed in the most recent studies.94 Grabar writes: ‘The art of Qusayr ‘Amra expresses the unique, _ personal desires of a prince. It is through a deeper perception of the private

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1970) 51–63. It has nevertheless appealed to several Islamic art historians including Titus Burkhardt, Seyyed Hosain Nasr, Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar, who were themselves attached to esoteric groups. R. Irwin, ‘Louis Massignon and the Esoteric Interpretation of Islamic Art’, in S. Vernoit (ed.), Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850–1950 (London, 2000) 163–70, 165. I suspect there is much more to be said about the role of secrecy in Massignon’s life and scholarship. It is inseparable from Sufism and homosexual desire. See e.g. S. Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York, 1983); R. Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (San Diego, 1996). On the impact of Massignon in the field of art history, see J. M. Puerta Miguel, Aesthetics in Arabic Thought from Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus (Leiden, 1992) 1–7, 10–14, 70–5, 105, 425, 764. For a recent approach along these lines see Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra, 78. See also A. Ballian, ‘Country Estates, Material Culture, and the Celebration of Princely Life: Islamic Art and the Secular Domain’, in H. Evans with B. Ratliff (eds.), Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (New York, 2012) 200–8.

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character of early Islamic princes that the monument’s elucidation may come about.’95

Grabar’s Princely Cycle In his doctoral thesis of 1954 and in a number of later publications, Grabar dealt in great detail with Umayyad ceremonial as it is described in the Arab sources, relating it to the archaeological remains and especially to the iconographic programs of the so-called desert-castles of Qusayr ‘Amra, _ Khirbat al-Mafjar, Qasr al-Khayr al-Gharbi and Mshatta.96 He argued that the Umayyad rulers were able to create for themselves an ambience of ‘princely splendour’ that was drawn in large measure from the defunct Persian-Sasanian court. Grabar’s central assumption was that Umayyad palatial iconography was mainly dominated by the so-called ‘princely cycle’, characteristic of Near Eastern/Sasanian aristocratic life and regalia.97 He described the cycle as follows: It consists of a number of representations of princes . . . Besides representation of the prince, we find illustrations of the pastimes: hunting, dancing, music-making, nude or half-clad women, games, acrobats, gift bearers are themes in all three major buildings.98

Grabar’s argument is mostly based on texts and on the nature of the motifs exhibited in the central hall of Qusayr ‘Amra, the inner and outer façades _ of Qasr al-Ḥayr al-Gharbī (728) and the bath-porch of Khirbat al-Mafjar _ 99 (728–43). His hypothesis that a princely cycle was borrowed from Sasanian motifs of power and luxury illustrates his assumption of ‘a series of transfers of forms and of meanings, as new sponsors and new resources 95 96

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Grabar, La formation de l’art islamique, 155. Grabar, ‘The Painting of the Six Kings at Qusayr Amra’; O. Grabar, ‘Notes sur les ceremonies umayyades’, in M. Rosen-Ayalon (ed.), Studies in Memory of Gaston Wiet (Jerusalem, 1977) 51. The hypothesis concerning the prevalence of the ‘princely cycle’ was first formulated in Grabar, ‘Ceremonial and Art at the Umayyad Court’, 1–2, 14, 192–233. See also Grabar, La formation de l’art islamique, 43–4, 154–6; Grabar, ‘Umayyad Palaces Reconsidered’, 96; Hillenbrand, ‘La Dolce Vita in Early Islamic Syria’, 9–10; C. Vibert-Guigue and G. Bisheh, Les Peintures de Qusayr ‘Amra (Beyrouth, 2007) 8; Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, 50; E. Baer, The Human Figure in Early Islamic Art: Some Preliminary Remarks (Costa Mesa, 2004) 5–6; Ettinghausen et al., Islamic Art and Architecture, 45–8; van Lohuizen-Mulder, ‘Frescoes in the Muslim Residence and Bathhouse Qusayr ‘Amra’, 128–9; F. Zayadine, ‘The Umayyad Frescoes of Quseir ‘Amra’, Archaeology 31 (1979) 19–29; Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra, 60–1, 78. Grabar, La formation de l’art islamique, 154. Ibid., 5.

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contribute to the recomposition of older forms, on the one hand, and to the development of new meaning on the other’.100 While Grabar’s proposal contains elements of truth, the fact is that many paintings and stuccos in the so-called desert-castles which have been cast into the category of ‘princely cycles inherited from Sasanian royal patterns’, actually depict agricultural calendars inspired by traditional local iconography of months and seasons.101 This means we must revise the assumption about the prevalence of ‘princely cycles’ and reassess the traditional narrative which has been too oriented towards the frivolous life of the presumed owner, al-Walīd II, supposedly modelled on Sasanian royal precedents. In many respects, the interpretation of royal Sasanian iconography and application of assumptions of decadence have been applied uncritically to Umayyad iconography. One might add that this model incorporates Massignon’s paradigm in one sense: instead of seeing Islamic art as the spiritual product of a conflict between ascetic selfrestraint and the desire for the flesh, the decadence (against which Massignon’s conflictive aesthetics is set) has simply been projected onto the Umayyad princes and come to be the very content of the arts they favoured and commissioned. Many factors have encouraged the idea of a princely cycle, including the debate over the hedonistic character of the desertcastles,102 as well as the bias of Abbasid textual sources,103 whose thrust was to emphasize Umayyad immorality.104 The anti-Umayyad outlook was set down in written form under the Abbasids, who in 750 supplanted the Umayyads as rulers of the Islamic empire. Abbasid textual sources are full of descriptions of the Umayyads’

100 101

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Ibid., 148–9. M. Guidetti and N. Ali, ‘Umayyad Palace Iconography: Some Practical Aspects of Creation’, in A. George and A. Marsham (eds.), Power, Patronage and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives from Umayyad History (Oxford, 2017) 175–251. Hillenbrand, ‘La Dolce Vita in Early Islamic Syria’, 1–20. F. Donner, ‘Umayyad Efforts at Legitimation: The Umayyads’ Silent Heritage’, in Borrut and Cobb (eds.), Umayyad Legacies, 187–8. Concerning the bias of Abbasid sources, see also P. Hitti, A History of the Arabs (London, 1970) 227. For a revision of the Umayyad historiography, see A. Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers Omeyyades (Leiden, 2010); A. Borrut, ‘La memoria omeyyade: les Omeyyades entre souvenir et oublis dans les sources narratives islamiques’, in Borrut and Cobb (eds.), Umayyad Legacies, 25–63; H. Kilpatrick, ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Al-Walīd b. Yazīd and Their Kin: The Images of the Umayyads in the Kitāb al-Aghānī’, in Borrut and Cobb (eds.), Umayyad Legacies, 63–89. One striking case is the disproportionate attention paid to the depiction of naked women in the study of Umayyad iconography. For instance, Grabar, ‘Umayyad Palaces Reconsidered’, 97; Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra, 57–79; E. Baer, ‘Female Images in Early Islam’, Damaszener Anzeiger 1 (1999) 13–24.

The Study of Early Islamic Art

sinfulness, usually focusing on their fondness for wine, their lavish court life, and their supposed ignorance of God’s revelation. Al-Walīd b. Yazīd (r. 743–4), the patron of Qusayr ‘Amra, is surely the most vilified member _ of the Umayyad dynasty. Despite the flaws of his detractors, it was alWalīd who became the caricature of Umayyad depravity, impiety and licentiousness. The Arabic sources for information about al-Walīd:105 alṬabarī’s Ta’rikh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk,106 al-Balādhurī’s Ansāb al-Ashrāf,107 and Abū l’ Faraj al-Isfahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī,108 all present him as a _ troubled and immoral deviant. As pointed by Steven Judd, modern scholars have been content to accept this image of al-Walīd as negligent of his duty as God’s caliph, using his power exclusively instead for the pursuit of pleasure.109 For J. Welhausen, al-Walīd was ‘distinguished by a foolish, frothy sense of power’.110 For Francesco Gabrieli, he was a hopeless drunk who cavorted with singing girls.111 In Robert Hamilton’s work on him, the caliph is described as ‘a pleasure-seeking idler’.112 Finally, and most relevant to Qusayr ‘Amra specifically, Robert Hillenbrand argued that _ al-Walīd was ‘indifferent to orthodox religion’ and was ‘the most dedicated playboy of his age’.113 On the whole, modern scholarship has seen al-Walīd as a figure of alcoholism, impiety and incompetence. It has become obvious to more recent scholarship, however, that such views are polemical and should not be taken at face value. Judd has recently offered a revision of the traditional view.114 Judd shows that, while the Arabic sources offer plenty of material to confirm al-Walīd’s immorality, there is ample evidence for a more nuanced approach. Yet, the old charges made by the Umayyads’ late antique enemies appeared to be

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114

For a discussion of this materiel, see S. C. Judd, ‘Narratives and Character Development: AlṬabarī and Al-Balādhurī on Late Umayyad History’, in S. Günther (ed.), Ideas, Images, and Methods of Portrayal: Insights into Classical Arabic Literature and Islam (Leiden, 2005) 209–26. al-Ṭabarī, Ta’rikh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk [The history of (God’s) messengers and kings], ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1879–1901). al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-Ashrāf (Damascus, 1996). A. F. al-Isfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī (Cairo, 1963–70). _ S. C. Judd, ‘Reinterpreting al-Walīd b.Yazīd’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 128/3 (2008) 439–41. J. Welhausen, The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall, tr. M. Weir (London, 1973) 350–4. F. Gabrieli, ‘Al Walīd ibn Yazīd: il Califfo e il poeta’, Rivista degli studi orientali 15 (1934) 4–6. R. Hamilton, Walīd and His Friends: An Umayyad Tragedy (Oxford, 1988). Hillenbrand, ‘La Dolce Vita in Early Islamic Syria’, 10, 16, 28. For a similar view among Islamicists see H. Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates (London, 1986) 112–13; G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam (London, 1987) 91. Judd, ‘Reinterpreting al-Walīd b.Yazīd’.

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confirmed by archaeological evidence, such as the naked bathers in the frescos of Qusayr ‘Amra, the buxom female figures in stucco in Khirbat al_ Mafjar and Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi or the free-standing nude females in stone of Mshatta. All this seems to show the Umayyads as devoted mainly to the cultivation of their power, wealth and worldly pleasures. In Qusayr _ ‘Amra, this vision of al-Walīd as hedonist and immoral appears to have overdetermined the interpretation of the frescoes.115 More importantly for the image question, this model has encouraged the traditional opposition between a normative aniconic public Islam, especially associated with the great mosques like that of Damascus and the Dome of the Rock, and a deviant, royal and private use of images by the Umayyads, the most vilified of Islamic dynasties. Before 1932, for example, the near-complete absence of figural art from pre-Byzantine Judaism was taken as proof that the normative form of ancient Judaism was strictly aniconic. Then came the finds of the early twentieth century, especially Beth Alpha (dug in 1928–9 and published in 1932) and DuraEuropos (excavated 1928 to 1932, with preliminary publication in 1936).116 The discovery of the Dura synagogue with its complement of biblically inspired wall paintings forced a dramatic and far-reaching reevaluation. Eighty years later, the historical assessment of Judaism in later antiquity is still in progress, including an ongoing evaluation of the putative aniconism played in the life of this community.117 The discovery of Qusayr ‘Amra – although not a religious monument – could have _ stimulated a re-evaluation of the idea that so-called normative Islam was strictly aniconic; but the argument for private imagistic deviance allowed the narrative to stand.

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In Fowden’s analysis Walīd’s reputation for hedonism is nuanced by some religious or pious aspects of Walīd’s life (as provider of service to the pilgrims on the hajj route for instance), or his ideas about the religious foundation of the caliphate. See Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra, 115–42, 323–4. See E. Sukenik, The Ancient Synagogue of Beth Alpha: An Account of the Excavations Conducted on Behalf of the Hebrew University Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 1932) and H. Pearson and C. Kraeling, ‘The Synagogue’, in M. I. Rostovtzeff, A. R. Bellinger, C. Hopkins and C. B. Welles (eds.), The Excavations at Dura-Europos: Preliminary Report of the Sixth Season of Work (New Haven, 1936) 309–83. See further Lockard and Elsner, Chapter 11 in this volume. J. Gutmann, ‘Jewish Art and Jewish Studies’, in S. J. D. Cohen and E. L. Greenstein (eds.), The State of Jewish Studies (Detroit, 1990) 193–211; H. Kessler, ‘The Sepphoris Mosaic and Christian Art’, in L. Levine and Z. Weiss (eds.), From Dura to Sepphoris: Studies in Jewish Art and Society in Late Antiquity (Portsmouth, RI, 2000) 65–72. For radical revision, see J. Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and Agendas: Jewish and Early Christian Art in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 83 (2003) 114–28 and K. P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, 2000) 1–70.

The Study of Early Islamic Art

The idea of a closet, from which Jewish or homosexual scholars may have perceived themselves as writing, was transposed in Grabar’s argument onto the decadent visual culture of the palaces, themselves closeted away from the normative and from aniconism as associated with mosques. It is telling that in recent discussion of early Islamic iconophobia and iconophilia, Qusayr ‘Amra has been omitted.118 The reason for this omission is _ to be found in the widespread idea that Qusayr ‘Amra represents an _ isolated and unique example of profane, private and deviant royal art.

Image and Text, Decadence and Theology Islamicists too often contrast the use of figural images by the Umayyads and the strict opposition to iconic theology developed at the same time. In this opposition, the eighth- and ninth-century traditions of the Hadith are interpreted as speaking for an emerging ‘normative aniconic Islam’,119 whereas the Umayyad elite – and especially al-Walīd II with his fondness for pictures – represent the decadent inclinations of an elite simultaneously isolated and rejected but also immoral, alcoholic, homosexual and materialistic,120 committed to the pursuit of worldly pleasures, in stark contrast to the ‘primitive ideal Arabs’, such as Muhammed and his followers or the early Abbasids. The presumption of a conflict of evidence between literary and archaeological sources, a conflict which is supposed to reflect an opposition between anti-image clerics and the image-loving Umayyad establishment, 118

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S. Griffith, ‘Christians, Muslims and the Image of the One God: Iconophilia and Iconophobia in the World of Islam in Umayyad and Early Abbasid Times’, in B. Groneberg and W. Spieckermann (eds.), Die Welt der Götterbilder (Berlin, 2007) 347–80. C. S. Hurgronje, ‘Kusejr Amra und das Bilderverbot’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 61 (1907) 186–91; K. A. C. Creswell, ‘The Lawfulness of Painting in Early Islam’, Ars Islamica 11–12 (1946) 159–66. A more balanced narrative suggests that the hadiths opposed to images were developed at the same time of Qusayr ‘Amra _ and were thus not yet effective. As pointed by Gülru Necipoğlu, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the presence of figural imagery in architectural decoration objects or in manuscript painting was conspicuously downplayed in constructing the otherness of the Arabo-Islamic visual tradition. For contextualized study on aniconism see P. Crone, ‘Islamic, Judeo-Christian and Byzantine Iconoclasm’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 2 (1980) 59–85; G. R. D. King, ‘Islam, Iconoclasm and the Declaration of Doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48/2 (1985) 267–77; T. Allen, ‘Aniconism and Figural Representation in Islamic Art’, in T. Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art (Sebastopol, 1988) 17–37; D. van Reenen, ‘The Bilderverbot: A New Survey’, Der Islam 67/1 (1990) 27–77; Fowden, ‘Late-Antique Art in Syria and Its Umayyad Evolution’, 296–304. On the opposition between materialism/art and spirituality in early Christianity, see P. C. Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (Oxford, 1994) 102–4.

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is not only unconvincing, but builds the European fantasy of Oriental decadence into the very origins of Islamic culture. In the one site where the surviving empirical evidence is sufficient to judge the issue, namely in the Umayyad palaces, this putative opposition between normative and deviant Islamic attitudes towards images makes little or no historical sense. The conflict between the advocates of aniconism and Qusayr ‘Amra’s _ figurative paintings is more apparent than real. The two are better characterized as different but contemporary expressions of commitment to certain commonly held principles, including belief in an invisible God. The conflict between our two types of evidence – literature and material culture – is a smoke-screen. Scholars have exploited this as a pretext to justify a larger, synthetic, monolithic and timeless picture of Islam as a fundamentally aniconic form of religiosity – effectively a Protestant fantasy – coupled with the advent of corrupting image-centred deviance in the aristocracy – that is, ultimately a Protestant fantasy about Catholics. The functions of aniconism in the definition of Islamic art have been complex. It has been seen in a positive light by Protestants like Immanuel Kant,121 who saw in Islam a confirmation of the view that primitive Christianity and Judaism were aniconic. On the other hand, Islamic (and Jewish) aniconism is often used as the ultimate anti-type of Western art with its commitment to the Hellenistic culture of naturalistic representation. Islamic art, like Jewish art, was merely decorative; its genius never substantive but at best ornamental. The question of aniconism actually yokes Judaism and Islam together. In both cases, anti-Semitic prejudices describe the Semites as artless.122 The category of ornament as it is constructed in European scholarship seems to function as an ideal concept that reflects both the Protestant anti-image culture and the assumed decadent nature of Islam.

4.

Conclusions

We have been tracing a very particular history: that of the shifting paradigms in the conceptualization of Islamic art from decadence to spirituality and back to decadence, from formal analysis to essentialist theological interpretation and ‘historical contextualization’.

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See Chapter 11 by Jesse Lockard and Jaś Elsner in this volume. Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and Agendas’.

The Study of Early Islamic Art

I argue that, in these instances, and at the birth of an academic field, personal history cannot be separated from scholarly approaches. The questions of a historian’s agenda are, of course, important: Why did a German-speaking Jew turn to the study of early Islamic art and give so much prominence to the Iranian/Aryan dimension? Can we speak of a Jewish discovery of Islamic art? Why did a French Catholic homosexual turn to the study of Islamic mysticism as the main portal to medieval Islamic culture and art? I suggest that the modern study of Islamic art is the product of a series of projections from ‘closets’, out of which Jews and homosexuals were forced to speak within the normative culture of late imperial Europe.123 The identification with the allure of an East that was simultaneously exotic and decadent was a compelling means by which both Herzfeld and Massignon could find space for their own voices.124 123

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I am aware of the risk of ‘essentialism’ in my analysis. I do not argue for a monolithic Jewish or homosexual identity that would inevitably lead the scholars in certain direction. But no, the facts that Herzfeld was an assimilated Jew and Massignon a Catholic/homosexual are not beside the point. They are the point. I have tried to use these particular aspects of their complex and oceanic identity as a ‘psychographical cipher’ to understand their works. My speculations are not offered as certainties, much less as winning arguments. I may well be mistaken about a number of things imagined in this chapter including my main speculative suggestion regarding the centrality of the personal in the scholarship on early Islamic art. But so what? I am writing to provoke, not to be right. I fully recognize how useful anti-essentialist (and ultimately post-colonial) criticism can be. But I cannot help but note that the antiessentialist card was played again and again, especially in our field. The reason for my suspicion of this kind of criticism is that this particular discourse often constricts conversations. Any critical work that does not fit into the current orthodoxy or into some dubious notions of ‘ethics’ is framed as ‘essentializing’. This is indeed a clever way to shut down the discussion by trumping up a series of false moral charges. I can go further. I also suspect that the post-colonialist allergy to ‘essentialism’ is equally myopic. With respect to my own case, the truth is that I am an equal ‘essentializer’. For what it is worth, I can essentialize myself in far more excessive ways than I did with Herzfeld and Massignon. It is more difficult and surely too premature to trace the biographical issues around Oleg Grabar and the relationship between his life and his work. But it is worth noting that a central aspect of his work concerned the caliph, both theatrical dimensions of ceremonial and royal pomp at the Umayyad court. The title of Grabar’s PhD thesis, ‘Ceremonial and Art at the Umayyad Court’, is quite telling. The caliph, we are told, presented his image to the public not only in the iconography of the Qusayr ‘Amra paintings or the Khirbat al-Mafjar stuccoes, but in the living _ imagery of court ceremonial where he was the main protagonist in processions, receptions, eulogies and staged public appearances. The colourful and perfumed dress of the caliph, the hierarchy of court officials, especially the role of the hajib that regulated the access to the caliph, court attendants and the chanted poems offered to him are all themes carefully deployed by Grabar to interpret Umayyad palatial iconography. At the same time, the secular pomp modelled on Sasanian kingship is transposed to the religious sphere. For instance, Grabar compared the Umayyad throne-rooms of the palaces with the mihrab in the mosques. The ceremonial of the palace in which the central space is figured as reserved especially for the caliph and his guests, while the guards and visitors gathered in the surrounding aisles and ambulatories, is imagined to be that of the ‘basilical’ Umayyad mosque. This royal symbolism also embraces the decoration of

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Yet one may wonder what is left when the new generations of historians of Islamic art rejected Herzfeld’s search for influences and dismissed Massignon’s spiritual model as essentialist or dogmatic. New models affirm their basis in claims of objectivity, factualism, textualism and historical contextualization, in which the most impressionistic interpretations have come to replace bolder grand narratives. Ultimately, Grabar’s compartmentalization of palace versus mosque has been extended to the entire field and was reformulated by Grabar himself: ‘Islamic arts are almost exclusively secular arts, with the corollary paradox that most of the arts from a culture defined by its religious identity have been devoted to the beautification of life rather than to the celebration of the divine.’125 This conceptual flaw is still with us. Yet, the recent self-reflection and deconstructive efforts in the field have not much aided the task of calling into question dominant fictions, because scholars remain stuck within easy post-colonial postures, disembodied biographical essays, and theoretical discussions that sometimes obscure other more implicit agendas and ideologies that undergird scholarly models. The scholar as a human being in his or her mundane and messy glory is missing. It is imperative that we be self-aware about our methods, something only Massignon of my three examples was able to be. In order to construct new fictions, we need to ask ourselves how our personal lives and objects of study, our political interests and scholarly products are intimately intertwined in what we say? And to what conflicts and desires, what fantasies and failings, to what lingering doubts or darkness does the current interest for Islamic art seem to respond?

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religious buildings. For instance, Grabar interpreted the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock as symbols of Byzantine and Sasanian regalia evoking the triumphalist nature of the first Islamic empire. See Grabar, ‘Ceremonial and Art at the Umayyad Court’, 1–15, and ‘The Umayyad Dome of the Rock’, esp. 47–52. Hence, one may ask: To what extent was Grabar’s construction of a secular, monarchical and ultimately Eastern symbolism related to his nostalgia for the aristocratic and decadent climate of the Old World, be that a mythologized Russia or France? How much of it echoes Grabar’s longing for ‘the East of Xerxes’? Grabar was a double exile: the child of a Russian Orthodox refugee from the Revolution brought up in France, who conducted his scholarly career as a European émigré in the United States. Not unlike our previous cases (Herzfeld and Massignon), the relationship between his scholarship and biography resembles a set of mutually reflecting ‘fun-house mirrors’, the scholar standing caught between the mirrors of art and life. On Russian émigré experience, see R. Johnston, New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian exiles 1920–1945 (Kingston, 1988). O. Grabar, ‘Islamic Art’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, vol. 16 (London, 1996) 100. Blair and Bloom note: ‘Most scholars accept that the convenient if incorrect term “Islamic” refers not just to the religion of Islam but to the larger culture in which Islam was the dominant – but not the sole – religion practiced . . . Islamic art is therefore not comparable to such concepts as “Christian” or “Buddhist”’. S. Blair and J. Bloom, ‘The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field’, Art Bulletin 85/1 (2003) 152–3.

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Connecting Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies  

A stark divide lingers between the themes and problems addressed by art historians and those explored in historical accounts of Zoroastrianism under the Sasanian Persian Empire (224–651). Although shaped by numerous intertwined investments and catalysts over the centuries, the divergence in the attentions of the two fields crystallized during imperial and antiimperial movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, active both within Iran and without. Art has been framed as irrelevant for the history of Zoroastrianism, demonstrating the absence and avoidance of religious themes; at the other end of the scale, art has been seen as, containing innate sacred significance in its composition. Certain narratives central to the development of Sasanian studies - of continuity, exceptionalism, and eurocentricism, in particular - have shaped approaches to how iconography and art can be incorporated into discussions of Sasanian religion. Convergent interests have promoted the continuity of iconography’s sacred meanings from earlier in antiquity through the Sasanian period to the modern day, diminishing the contemporary contribution and context, and see the visual evidence as demonstrating the distinctiveness and exceptionalism of Zoroastrianism from other religions, and of Iranian culture from others. As the last pre-Islamic Iranian imperial power and the last moment of Zoroastrian political hegemony, the Sasanian period is often posited as the crucial moment for modern conceptions of both Iranian cultural identity and Zoroastrian history. Considerable work has been undertaken in the past decade to demonstrate the impact on Sasanian art history of discourse on related areas such as Zoroastrian history, the status of Parsis within the British Empire, and imperial and nationalistic Iranian interests sponsored by the Qājārs (1785–1925) and Pahlavis (1926–79). This chapter aims to show how these factors have also determined interpretation of, or even avoidance of, images and objects in the history of Zoroastrianism under the Sasanians.1 1

It would likely be impossible to compose a comprehensive discussion of all areas of study that have contributed to the state of scholarship in a discussion of this length. Premodern periods of interest in Sasanian art, notably in Samanid and Buyid Persia, are also a significant part of this story. Among the other areas that need their own in-depth study might be, for example, the impetus of Russian scholarship.

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It should be noted that frequently an approach is, whether consciously or not, determined by an author’s response to the impact of the Islamic conquest and the fall of the Sasanian empire in the mid seventh century, whether they see it as calamitous, benign, or beneficial.

1.

From Ubiquity and Consistency of Sacred Significance in Art …

The first of our commonly recurring methodological problems in discussing religion from objects arises where visual evidence is stretched beyond its interpretive capacity. Sometimes this occurs in order for the material record to stand in the place of absent or fragmentary written testimonies, or an image or object is presumed to speak for now-lost images and objects. Imposition of textual accounts onto the extant images can contort or restrict the images’ meanings so that they adhere to existing understandings.2 In the latter case, a motif on one object may be assigned the exact same purpose and meaning as a similar motif on a very different object from a very different time and place. In these ways, an untenable consistency of meaning is ascribed across a variety of media and contexts. Approaches to the decoration of Sasanian silverware provide examples of this perceived necessity for consistency of meaning in iconography, and for conformity of the objects’ interpretation to existing understandings. Gilded silver vessels form a major part of the extant Sasanian material record and are a rich source of iconography. Numerous interpretations of 2

Concerning those textual accounts, the significance of the Sasanian period to the history of Zoroastrianism is difficult to overstate since the Avesta, the collection of Zoroastrian sacred texts, was written down from an existing oral tradition in the late Sasanian period under Khosro I (r. 531–79). Earlier phases of the codification of the Avesta are identified under Ardašir I, Šāpur II, and an earlier Parthian king called Vologases (which king of that name, however, is unknown). It was not until 1771 that the earliest extant manuscript of the Avesta, dated to the thirteenth century, was brought into academic consciousness from the Parsi community in India by the French scholar Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron. Other Middle Persian texts are mostly dated to the late Sasanian or early Islamic period, while other textual sources include scattered references in Greek and Roman authors from the Classical period through to Late Antiquity, contemporary accounts of Syriac and Armenian Christians, and Manichaean texts and Arabic histories of the post-Sasanian period. As this highly cursory summary indicates, the study of Sasanian religion has many challenges to overcome in the task of creating historical reconstructions from textual sources, let alone from images. Integrating the visual record is imperative to our understanding of religion in the Sasanian period since this material forms the majority of the extant contemporary evidence from Iran itself. For a recent introductory survey of these sources, see J. Wiesehöfer, ‘The Late Sasanian Near East’, in C. F. Robinson (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge, 2010) 98–104.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

silverware decoration insist upon detecting religious significance to otherwise ambiguous imagery. Subtle sacred allusions, for example, are identified throughout the depictions of vines and bounteous scenes of harvest, drinking and nature that appear on many silver vessels (see Figure 9.1). Rather than interpreting images of vines or the pastimes of hunting and banqueting as pertaining to the function of the vessels for drinking wine and the leisure activities of the elite who used them, in this view the iconography is a manifestation of the Zoroastrian view of the cosmos, whereby the symmetrical or balanced compositions convey a dualistic conception of the universe, while bucolic motifs represent prosperity resulting from proper observance of the Good Religion.3 Sacred significance is identified also in the style of decoration, where ‘clear emphasis on order and clarity of design . . . [in which] adherences to formal rather than realistic images predominate’ is an expression of the desire for truth (aša), the foremost principle of Zoroastrianism.4 It is possible, for instance, scenes of inhabited vines on silverware relate to the Middle Persian blessing of ‘increase’ (abzōn) that frequently appears on Sasanian seals, sometimes accompanied by abbreviated vine motifs.5 From this identification, however, more specific meaning to these scenes of festivity on silverware has been drawn, arguing that wine represented the sacred drink haoma and that vines thus represented its source, the hom tree, the Tree of Life and immortality.6 While these interpretations are possible, with some more convincing than others in particular circumstances, there remains the risk of losing nuances within an indiscriminate application of understandings from text to extant decorative arts. The careful construction of these arguments and insistence on multiple layers of ingrained meaning at times sparks suspicion of the legacy of (whether consciously or unintentionally) a presumed Oriental

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P. O. Harper, ‘Art in Iran V: Sasanian Art’, in E. Yarshater (ed.), Enciclopaedia Iranica, vol. 2 (London, 1986) 585–94: www.iranicaonline.org/articles/art-in-iran-v-sasanian, updated 2011. B. I. Marshak, ‘Zoroastrian Art in Iran under the Parthians and the Sasanians’, in P. Godrej and F. P. Mistree (eds.), A Zoroastrian Tapestry: Art, Religion and Culture (Ahmedabad, 2002) 147 also identifies consistency and order in Sasanian art, which for him presents ‘a whole and harmonious worldview underlying what at first sight might appear to be disparate or perplexing elements’. Harper, ‘Art in Iran V: Sasanian Art’. See also P. O. Harper, The Royal Hunter: Art of the Sasanian Empire (New York, 1978) 62. P. O. Harper, In Search of a Cultural Identity: Monuments and Artifacts of the Sasanian Near East, 3rd to 7th Century A.D. (New York, 2006) 87. A. S. Melikian-Chirvani, ‘From the Royal Boat to the Beggar’s Bowl’, Islamic Art 4 (1990–1) 52–3.

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Figure 9.1 Gilded silver bottle bearing viticulture imagery, 5th–7th century. H. 18.5 cm. British Museum, BM 1897,1231.189. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

mysticism that imbues all Eastern art with spiritual significance.7 Yet it is not the intention here to deny all sacred significance to Sasanian art. It is clear that many motifs refer to the divine directly or obliquely, although it is also clear that a degree of caution and contextual re-evaluation may be necessary in some cases. In a recent publication of two silver dishes in the Khalili Collection, a sacred explanation is attributed to the depiction of ducks due to their affinity with water, particularly since here they are accompanied by fish. Watery or horticultural subjects can be viewed as appropriate decoration since Sasanian silver vessels were often gifts, along with a flowering branch, at ritual banquets during which offerings were made to two of the Ameša Spentas (Bounteous Immortals), Haurvatāt (‘Wholeness’, guardian of water) and Ameretāt (‘Immortality’, guardian of plants).8 Yet ascribing consistency or singularity of meaning over ambivalence creates difficulties, such as in identifying the depiction of birds as always referring to their role as defenders of the Avesta, whether peacock, cockerel, or even duck (a bird not mentioned in the Avesta).9 The methodological problems inherent in using the Avesta to understand Sasanian art have been often discussed but not yet fully digested into art historical interpretations.10 Ambivalence in the sacred content of Sasanian art is clear also in the identification of animal motifs as avatars of yazatā (divine beings, literally meaning ‘worthy of worship’). The boar (Figure 9.2), for example, is one of ten incarnations of Verethragna (yazata of victory), yet boar hunting is another popular theme in Sasanian art. Gherardo Gnoli observes that several of Verethragna’s avatars as described in the Bahrām Yašt were also the preserve of other yazatā, such as the bull, horse, and youth of Tištrya (yazata of rain), and the camel, wind, and bird of prey also representing Vāyu (yazata of wind).11 As well as an avatar of Verethragna, the boar, along with rams, horses, sunflowers, lotus flowers, pearls, the senmurw, or a 7

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Conversely, the charge of not being able to comprehend mysticism has been directed at Western scholars by Zoroastrian scholars; see J. R. Hinnells, ‘The Parsis’, in M. Stausberg and Y. Vevaina (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (Oxford, 2015) 168. J. Rose, ‘83. Dish with Fish and Birds’ and ‘85. Wine Boat or Oval Dish’, in S. Stewart (ed.), The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination (London, 2015) 130–1 (Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, MIW 1666 and 1401). Rose also attributes a connection of these watery themes to fertility, presumably through reference to the role of Anāhitā, yazata of the waters and abundance. A. S. Melikian-Chirvani, ‘The Wine Bull and the Magian Master’, in Ph. Gignoux (ed.), Recurrent Patterns in Iranian Religions: From Mazdaism to Sufism, Studia Iranica 11 (Leiden, 1992) 144. See M. Shenkar, Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the PreIslamic Iranian World (Leiden, 2014) 8–9, 191–2 with further bibliography. G. Gnoli, ‘Bahrām’, in E. Yarshater (ed.), Enciclopaedia Iranica, vol. 3 (London, 1988) 510–14, 511. See Yt.14 for the manifestations of Verethragna.

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Figure 9.2 Charging boar relief, stucco wall panel, Ctesiphon, c. 6th century. 29.5  38.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Rogers Fund, 1932; 32.150.23. Creative Commons Licence. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

necklace or ribbon held or worn by a bird, has been interpreted also as a manifestation of farr (Avestan xwarneh, divine glory).12 A boar’s head is one motif that appears on royal headgear – as do wings, rays, dog heads, birds of prey, palmettes, crenellations, and crescents – prompting the question of its purpose in a royal context: does it evoke the blessing of Verethragna, or represent the bestowal of farr, or symbolize another message as yet unknown to us?13 Some, or all, of these motifs surely acted as references to the divine, yet their precise interpretation often remains open to discussion. Assigning a single precise interpretation to a solitary motif can, therefore, be difficult or ineffectual. Similarly, assuming consistency of meaning between representations on different media, and across temporal, spatial, social and functional divides, appears to be, at the very least, inexpedient. A prominent recurring example of assigning divine connotations to ambivalent images in Sasanian art is the identification of female figures, whatever their appearance, as Anāhitā, yazata of the waters.14 Nude female 12

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A. Soudavar, The Aura of Kingship: Legitimacy and Divine Sanction in Iranian Kingship (Costa Mesa, 2003); the xwarneh appeared to Zoroaster also as a ram, bird of prey, fish, and white horse. On this point of ambivalence in motifs, see S. Simpson, ‘Rams, Stags and Crosses from Sasanian Iraq: Elements of a Shared Visual Vocabulary from Late Antiquity’, in A. Peruzzetto, F. D. Metzger and L. Dirven (eds.), Animals, Gods and Men from East to West: Papers on Archaeology and History in Honour of Roberta Venco Ricciardi (Oxford, 2013) 104–5. V. S. Curtis, ‘Royal and Religious Symbols on Early Sasanian Coins’, in D. Kennet and P. Luft (eds.), Current Research in Sasanian Archaeology, Art and History (Oxford, 2008) 137–47. On this problem, see J. Duchesne-Guillemin, ‘Art et religion sous les Sassanides’, Atti del Convegno internazionale sul tema: La Persia nel Medioevo (Rome, 1971) 379. Identifications as Anahita have become less prevalent in recent work (see, for example, Marshak, ‘Zoroastrian Art in Iran’, 142), but continue to be made and have consequences for further interpretation of other images and Sasanian religion more broadly.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

figures among the vines on silverware, for example, have been interpreted variously as a syncretism of Dionysus and Anāhitā, as illustrating an Iranian fertility cult, as depicting Anāhitā’s priestesses after a resurgence of her cult, or as purely secular motifs.15 Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin put forward an alternative explanation for these motifs, along with the Dionysiac themes of the Bišāpur mosaics and images of putti, to be interpreted as the artistic survival of imagery that was formerly religious from the Hellenistic period of Iran’s history.16 Yet, continuing connections with the Mediterranean world, including the forced settling of Roman prisoners within Ērānšahr by victorious Sasanian kings, should allow us not to discount continued awareness of any association with the Graeco-Roman world. If explanations for unusual motifs cannot be found in the sacred texts, another tendency in scholarship is to explain anomalies as visual attestations of religious upheavals. Such an image becomes a deliberate act of dissent. Two prominent examples of unusual motifs interpreted as religious upheaval are the presumed advocation of Mithra by Ardašir II (r. 379–83) and of Anāhitā by Narseh (r. 293–302) due to the identification of these yazatā in rock reliefs featuring those kings.17 Caesuras in the visual record, and the absence of clear explanations in textual sources for motifs such as those on Sasanian silverware, have been viewed as the result of suppression or prohibition of artistic representations by the Zoroastrian 15

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D. Shepherd, ‘Sasanian Art in Cleveland’, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art (1964) 83–8; O. Grabar, Sasanian Silver, Late Antique and Early Medieval Arts of Luxury from Iran (Michigan, 1967) 64ff.; R. Ettinghausen, ‘A Persian Treasure’, Arts in Virginia 8 (1967–8) 41 and From Byzantium to Sasanian Iran and the Islamic World: Three Modes of Artistic Influence (Leiden, 1972) 3–10; P. Callieri, ‘“Dionysiac” Iconographic Themes in the Context of Sasanian Religious Architecture’, in Kennet and Luft (eds.), Current Research in Sasanian Archaeology, 115–25. See also M. Mousavi Kouhpar and T. Taylor, ‘A Metamorphosis in Sasanian Silverwork: The Triumph of Dionysos?’, same volume, 127–35 for a suggestion that Dionysiac leopard skins were the visual rendering that took the place of, or was assimilated with, the Avestan description of Anāhitā’s garments made from beaver skins. V. G. Lukonin, Persia II: From the Seleucids to the Sassanids (London, 1970) 182 reattributes such vessels to the rule of Šāpur II and the reforms of his mowbed Ādurpāt-ī Mahrspandān who ‘transformed the nature of the cult of Anāhitā, associating the goddess more closely with the worship of vegetation, of water, of flowers’. Duchesne-Guillemin, ‘Art et religion sous les Sassanides’, 385. Duchesne-Guillemin does, however, also relate the iconography of these mosaics to the contemporary royal religious concerns and whims ‘reflecting the universalistic tendencies of Šāpur I’ (381). On these rock reliefs, see A. S. Shahbazi, ‘Studies in Sasanian Prosopography I: Narse’s Relief at Naqs-i Rustam’, AMI 16 (1983), 255–68 and ‘Studies in Sasanian Prosopography II: The Relief of Ardaser II at Taq-i Bostan’, AMI 18 (1985), 181–5; R. Wood, ‘Identifications: Mihr in Sasanian Iran’, in P. Adrych, R. Bracey, D. Dalglish, S. Lenk and R. Wood, Images of Mithra (Oxford, 2017) 81–105.

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priesthood (see further, below). In the absence of clear textual explanations, however, ambivalence remains. As in so many fields of art history, we must beware presuming or constructing a planned or coherent overarching development of artistic production, rather than of seeing production in its own moment, or that there was on standby an ‘omniscient scholar viewer’ to interpret the true significance of every image.18

2.

… To the Absence of Sacred Significance in Art

In addition to the ubiquitous presence of sacred significance, we are also often faced with the opposite interpretation: of a perceived absence of sacred significance in Sasanian art, especially in the later period. As already mentioned, this narrative is in part influenced by an aniconic interpretation of Zoroastrianism, in which figural imagery occupies an uncomfortable position. Aniconism is not a straightforward story, however, and the Sasanian period is an extraordinary time of anthropomorphic representations of Zoroastrian divine beings.19 Artistic production has also been sidelined in the study of Zoroastrianism’s history because artisans formed the lowest of the social orders in the Sasanian period, and thus was not deemed worthy of a significant place in the narrative. Furthermore, difficulty in identifying sacred content in late Sasanian art complements the nineteenth-century conception of the period, put forward by E. G. Browne, and still advocated by some, as a period of religious decline.20 According to these views artistic production reflects political and religious reality (see also n. 17). The impact of nineteenth-century Parsi reforms that responded to Protestant pressures, and the royal emphasis in the material record, discussed further below, compound this situation. According to this interpretation that eschews religious connotations to Sasanian art, the iconographic themes of prosperity and fertility on Sasanian silverware outlined above can be interpreted as displaying the real or, more likely, desired prosperity of the late Sasanian empire.21 This 18

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J. Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.–A.D. 315 (Berkeley, 2003) 9–13. On Sasanian aniconism, see M. Boyce, ‘Iconoclasm Among the Zoroastrians’, in J. Neusner (ed.), Christianity, Judaism, and other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty (Leiden, 1975) 107 (contra Lukonin, Persia II, 154) and M. Shenkar, ‘Aniconism in the Religious Art of Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute 22 (2012) 239–56. E. G. Browne, A Year among the Persians (London, 1893). Few would argue for the reality of prosperity and political stability throughout the late Sasanian period, however, due to testimonies of discord and upheaval (such as the Mazdakite uprising and massacre), successive military defeats, and royal power being gradually undermined by the nobility.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

secularized utopian interpretation is in accordance with, for example, the replacement of the legend ‘from the lineage of the gods’ (ke čihr az yazdān) with ‘increase’ (abzōn) on coins of Kavād I (r. 488–531) and his successors, and post-Sasanian literary constructions of ‘quasi-divine faultless kings’ such as are portrayed in the canonical tenth-century Persian epic, Ferdowsi’s Šāhnāmeh.22 A step further, however, sees this increase in production of gilded silverware and its decorative emphasis on fertility and prosperity as embodying decadence, effeminacy and degeneracy, typifying the decline into luxury characteristic of the Oriental despot caricature. Here, the disintegration and collapse of the empire can be attributed to the kings’ own moral decline into perpetual dining at the expense of pious behaviour, as warned against in the ninth-century Middle Persian Zoroastrian text, the Denkard (III.34). Similarly in the Middle Persian Žāmāsp-Nāmag, the piety of the king and the fortunes of Ērānšahr are intertwined: Khosro II Parviz (r. 590627) is presented as an impious and unjust tyrant responsible for religious and imperial decline.23 The rock-cut ivān at Tāq-e Bostān (Figure 9.3) attributed to Khosro II, commissioned after a two-century caesura in rockrelief production and without precedent in scale or amount of decoration, is seen as the zenith of this extravagance and arrogance.24 By the end of the sixth century, in this view, the fate of the declining Persian royal power was intertwined with a failing Zoroastrian hierarchical order that was haemorrhaging adherents before the final blow of the Islamic conquest.25 Arthur Upham Pope, in An Introduction to Persian Art since the Seventh Century AD (1930), presented a congruent line of thought in attempting to dispel the image of the Islamic conquest as a cultural catastrophe brought about by external forces, framing it instead as the result of a Zoroastrian collapse. He expounded upon Persian art’s continued vitality and ‘ardour for beauty’ under Islamic rule, whereby artists shed the shackles of clerical and monarchical Zoroastrianism and prospered under their new patrons: the masses found in the simpler and more viable faith of the Prophet a welcome relief from the artificialities and complexities to which the official Zoroastrianism had descended under the late Sasanians.26

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R. Zia-Ebrahimi, ‘Self-Orientalisation and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the Aryan Discourse in Iran’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford 2011) 105. J. Duchesne-Guillemin, ‘Zoroastrian Religion’, in E. Yarshater (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3(2) (Cambridge, 1983) 896. A. Christensen, L’Iran sous les Sassanides (Copenhagen, 1944) 453–92. M. G. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton, 1984) 301. A. U. Pope with P. Ackerman (eds.), A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present, 9 vols. (London, 1930–9) vol. 1, 7.

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Figure 9.3 Ivān of Khosro II (r. 590–627). Tāq-e Bostān, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

James Russell identified this narrative of the fall of a decadent empire tightly controlled by the priesthood as a thinly-veiled Protestant Christian polemic against Catholicism, a theme that resonates in so many fields under consideration in this volume.27 One crucial methodological difficulty in attempts to incorporate art in to discussions of Sasanian religion is that the majority of the extant material 27

J. R. Russell, ‘Zoroastrianism as the State Religion of Ancient Iran’, Journal of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute 53 (Mumbai, 1986) 74–142.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

consists of royal, administrative, and elite-sponsored images such as rock reliefs, coins and silverware. The primary focus in studies of religious significance to Sasanian art, therefore, is on displays of divine sanction of royal authority on these forms of objects. This is in part due to the prestigious nature of this material, which attracts contemporary public interest and contributes to the objects’ survival, and the relative lack of systematic excavations where more ordinary objects from the daily life of wider society might be found. The main focus of discussions on religious iconography therefore has centred on the status of the king, particularly concerning signifiers of divine glory (Middle Persian farr; Avestan xwarneh), courtly ritual, how depictions of rulers relate to that of the divine, and how this informs our understanding of royal status. Such an approach can result in a narrow view of religion as a means of control, encourage the conception of an organised and sanctioned ‘state church’, and suggest religious policy was a tool or motivating factor for political decisions. Russell suggests that a focus on royal promotion or control of Zoroastrianism supports interpretations of Sasanian religion ‘as consistently intolerant in matters of religion, partly for ease of contrast with its predecessors and probably also to make the Islamic conquest of Iran somehow more justifiable’.28 Islam is thus seen to liberate the people from the tyranny of Zoroastrian rule, explaining the apparent speed and universal espousal of Islam.29 This malleable narrative maintains popularity, managing to suit the requirements of Islamist, Protestant, Marxist and Zoroastrian readings of the fall of the Sasanian empire and Zoroastrianism’s loss of hegemony.

3.

Sasanian Art and Religious Continuity

Distinguishing between artistic convention, political presentation and religious change is often an inextricable entanglement frequently left unacknowledged. Due to the forms of the extant material, as discussed above, the story presented is usually the royal message. But how does that element relate to the wider religious landscape of the Sasanian empire, and how did others interact with images and objects in their religious life? On the whole, current scholarship has rejected the formerly held concept of 28

29

J. R. Russell, ‘Kārtīr and Māni: A Shamanistic Model of their Conflict’, in D. Amin and M. Kasheff (eds.), Iranica Varia: Papers in Honor of Professor Ehsan Yarshater, Acta Iranica 30 (Leiden, 1990) 180–93, at 181. Such an instant universal conversion to Islam in the former Sasanian empire is no longer the predominant view, thanks to studies such as, among others, by Michael G. Morony and Patricia Crone.

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Zoroastrianism under Sasanian rule as a uniform institution and state church, while acknowledging the expansion of the priesthood and its power during the period.30 In doing so, scholarship has drawn away from imposing the Eurocentric model of the contemporary Roman relationship with Christianity after Constantine onto the Sasanian empire. Yet it is undeniable that prominent in early Islamic histories of the crystallization or codification of Zoroastrianism through the collection and definition of the sacred textual corpus, is the agency of the Sasanian kings themselves (particularly Ardašir I and Khosro I).31 The impact of royal actions and policies on the empire’s religions is clear, as is that of royal patronage and precedent for the material record, and the part played by images in disseminating sacro-political ideology is demonstrable and marked; but these elements cannot be the whole story for the role of objects and images in religious experience in the Sasanian empire. The close relationship between royal power and religion was repeatedly and publicly proclaimed from the beginning of Sasanian rule. Ardašir I’s father, Pāpak, and perhaps his grandfather Sāsān, were chief priests of Anāhitā at Stakhr. It is likely that this position was the main source of the support base from which he could challenge the Parthian king Artabanus IV. Ardašir’s coins display this integral relationship pictorially through the design of the throne and fire holder (atešdān) that support each other, as well as in the accompanying titles of the ‘Mazda-worshipping’ ruler ‘whose lineage is from the gods’ (ke čihr az yazdān).32 The fire holder appears on the reverse of almost all Sasanian coin types, with slight alterations to the two flanking attendants’ appearance and gestures; or with additions such as inclusion of the throne, ribbons, or a head in the flames representing the sacred fire lit for the king. It has, however, recently been asserted that the unchanging motif of the fire holder ‘is proof that the basic political and religious concepts of the dynasty and its imperial propaganda did not drastically change during the nearly four and a half centuries of its existence’.33

30

31

32 33

S. Shaked, ‘Administrative Functions of Priests in the Sasanian Period’, in G. Gnoli and A. Panaino (eds.), Proceedings of the First European Conference of Iranian Studies. Part 1: Old and Middle Iranian Studies (Rome, 1990) 261–73. A. de Jong, ‘Religion and Politics in Pre-Islamic Iran’, in Stausberg and Vevaina (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism, 85–111. R. C. Zaehner, Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (London, 1961) 284. N. Schindel, ‘Sasanian Coinage’, in D. T. Potts (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran (Oxford, 2013) 829.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

Yet a direct equation of consistent iconography with a consistent Sasanian religious policy is difficult to sustain. There are many instances that nuance any impression of an unchanging relationship between ruler and religion, including alterations to the royal titles proclaimed in coin legends; varying conciliatory or persecutory policies of particular kings towards other religions; and changes in the religious role of the kings, as indicated by the abandonment of the earlier ubiquitous coin legend ke čihr az yazdān. Notably in the matter, Bahrām II bestowed the position of ‘caretaker of Anāhitā at Stakhr’ on his chief priest Kirdir, a role that seemingly until this point had been the traditional preserve of members of the Sasanian family and key to their original power base at the establishment of the dynasty. Efforts to escape the royal sphere in the study of Sasanian art and visual culture – focusing on sacred space and non-royal commissions – have advanced considerably since Duchesne-Guillemin argued that, with no financial resources and without stimulus from the upper classes, there was no religious art to be found outside of the kings and court, particularly in the face of Zoroastrian priests’ negative attitude to figurative artwork.34 Iconoclastic episodes are attested, such as Kirdir’s inscriptions that proclaim he destroyed idols (uzdēs), but a sixth-century Sasanian law-book account of the replacement by priests of an image-shrine with a sacred fire under Khosro I (r. 531–79) elucidates the lack of finality to Kirdir’s reforms and the ongoing dialogue around the place of images in sacred contexts.35 Shaul Shaked’s work on popular religion and magic has been crucial in efforts to expand our understanding of religious life in the Sasanian empire away from court and king.36 Studies of small, more personal, types of object, particularly glyptics and clay incantation bowls, provide a wealth of information that enriches our understanding of the Sasanian religious world.37 These studies demonstrate interconnectivity in artistic exchange between the religions of Sasanian Iran, which included Christian, Manichaean, Mandaean and Jewish communities. In this way, we gain another facet to interactions between religions in the Sasanian empire, processes that are most often attested by accounts of royal policy. Instances of close relationships between religious communities in their use of objects and images call into question the exclusivity of the religious attribution of an object in the

34 35 36 37

Duchesne-Guillemin, ‘Art et religion sous les Sassanides’, 386. See n. 20. S. Shaked, Dualism in Transformation: Varieties of Religion in Sasanian Iran (London, 1994). For example, work by Rika Gyselen and Philippe Gignoux.

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Sasanian empire.38 A more intricate view of Sasanian art and Zoroastrianism is supported further by studies on amulets, votive plaques in precious metal, stuccoes, and wall-paintings from sites such as Kuh-e Khwājeh, Bandiyān and Takht-e Solaimān that feature anthropomorphic and symbolic designs. Based on her analysis of the wall paintings in the Kuh-e Khwājeh fire temple, Soroor Ghanimati proposes a more fluid interpretation of the role of art in Sasanian sacred space as evolving throughout this period, in keeping with current interpretations of ongoing developments in Sasanian Zoroastrianism.39 Constructing the history of Sasanian religion as stable and unchanging magnifies the impact of the Islamic conquest as a dramatic upheaval. Such a conception of the destruction of Persian culture after AD 651 is exemplified in Abdolhossein Zarrinkub’s 1957 monograph Two Centuries of Silence, and was the predominant view during the twentieth century, building on the ideas set forth in the sixteenth-century Parsi poem narrating their diaspora from Iran to India, the Qesse-ye Sanjān.40 When Kingship went from Yazdegerd the king, the infidels arrived and took his throne. From that time forth Irān was smashed to pieces! Alas! The land of Faith now gone to ruin! Qesse-ye Sanjān vv. 95–7, trans. A. Williams 2009

In addition to artistic continuity evident during the transitional period from late Sasanian to early Islamic rule, this image of catastrophe and destruction in the material record has been dispelled by recent archaeological studies that instead attribute a time of economic decline to the chaotic years of late Sasanian rule rather than the early Islamic period, markedly altering the impression of the conquest as cultural calamity.41

38

39

40

41

Among others, see S. Shaked, ‘Popular Religion in Sasanian Babylonia’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 21 (1997) 103–17; D. Friedenberg, Sasanian Jewry and Its Culture: A Lexicon of Jewish and Related Seals (Chicago, 2009). S. Ghanimati, ‘Kuh-e Khwaja and the Religious Architecture of Sasanian Iran’, in Potts (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran, 901. K. Abdi, ‘Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran’, American Journal of Archaeology 105/1 (2001) 51–76; A. Williams, The Zoroastrian Myth of Migration from Iran and Settlement in the Indian Diaspora: Text, Translation and Analysis of the 16th-Century Qesse-ye Sanjān ‘The story of Sanjan’ (Leiden, 2009) 73. __ See Derek Kennet’s revision of cross-Gulf trade in the late Sasanian and early Islamic periods: D. Kennet, ‘Transformations in Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Eastern Arabia: The Evidence from Kush’, in J. Schiettecatte and C. J. Robin (eds.), L’Arabie à la veille de l’Islam: bilan Clinique, Orient & Mediterranée 3 (Paris 2009) 135–61.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

4.

Antiquity and Continuity in Iranian Kingship: The Secularization of Sasanian Art

While the emphasis in the Sasanian material record on elite and royal prerogatives may be an obstacle to broader discussions of religion, it was ideally suited to the purposes of successive ruling powers of Iran who wished to promote their Persian heritage and link themselves to the former glories of the vast Sasanian empire. Several premodern dynasties such as the Samanids and Buyids promoted aspects of their pre-Islamic Iranian heritage, but a particularly intensified interest was sponsored in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Qājār and Pahlavi dynasties. Engagement with Sasanian material culture alluded to the status and reach of the ruler, as well as attesting to the antiquity of Persian kingship and the vitality of Iranian culture. These interests encouraged a focus in scholarship on royal themes in Sasanian art, and led to direct relationships between the ruling authority and Sasanian monuments as well as instances of secularization of Sasanian sacred imagery in Iranian culture. For the Qājārs, the Sasanian period spoke to imperial aspirations and political clout that by this time were fading memories. After the Treaty of Golestān (1813) and the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) that concluded the Perso-Russian wars, the fortunes of the Qājār Persian empire were waning. In the face of the loss of much territory and autonomy to their Russian neighbours, the Qājārs rejuvenated their artistic and ceremonial patronage. Fath ‘Ali Shāh (1772–1834), ruler during this period of depreciation, commissioned rock reliefs (a practice with long-established precedent for Iranian rulers) that celebrated his court and successors, often clearly drawing on Sasanian precedents.42 He added a relief (Figure 9.4) to perhaps the most famous Sasanian monument, the ivān of one of the last Sasanian kings, Khosro II, at Tāq-e Bostān mentioned above (Figure 9.3). This addition was carved in the 1820s, at a stage when seemingly there was little to celebrate for the Qājārs. Although the Shāh’s relief erases the Sasanian carving in that part of the ivān, and its painted colours draw the eye, it is placed relatively sympathetically in the uppermost rear corner on the left of the ivān’s intrados, setting the Qājār ruler and his court among the Sasanian royal hunting scenes (and in immediate proximity to images of Anāhitā and Ahura Mazda).43 Qājār affinity with the Sasanians

42

43

T. Grigor, ‘Orient oder Rom? Qajar “Aryan” Architecture and Strzygowski’s Art History’, The Art Bulletin 89/3 (2007) 567. The sympathetic nature of this choice is made clear when this relief is contrasted with, for example, the late seventeenth-century Safavid vizier Sheikh ‘Ali Khān Zanganeh’s obliteration

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Figure 9.4 Detail of ivān of Khosro II, showing the relief of Fath ‘Ali Shāh (r. 1797–1834), Tāq-e Bostān, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

Figure 9.5 Rock relief of Ardašir I (r. 224–242), Naqš-e Rostam, Iran. © the author. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

was more overtly stamped on this site when Fath ‘Ali Shāh’s grandson, Imām Quli Mirzā, built a summer palace immediately east of the Sasanian reliefs in the second half of the nineteenth century.44 As well as making their own additions to, and thereby drawing attention to, Sasanian monuments, Qājār artists and patrons drew on Sasanian artistic legacies (particularly rock reliefs) as inspiration for new creations. The tympanum of ‘Afif Ābād Palace in Shiraz, built in 1863, displays a polychrome tiled reimagination of Ardašir I’s investiture relief from Naqše Rostam showing Ahura Mazda bestowing honour upon the Šāhanšāh (King of Kings) and trampling Ahriman (Figure 9.5).45 An even more

44

45

of the Parthian Mithridates relief at nearby Bisotun. It should also be noted that to the Qājārs these two figures accompanying the Sasanian king may not have been interpreted as Zoroastrian divine beings but other individuals from Persian history such as, for example, Shirin and the Byzantine emperor Maurice or a Zoroastrian high priest; see A. W. Jackson, Persia Past and Present: A Book of Travel and Research (London, 1906) 223–8 and F. Sarre and E. Herzfeld, Iranisches Felsreliefs (Berlin, 1910) 202. B. Overlaet, ‘Ahura Mazda and Shapur II? A Note on Taq-e Bustan I, the Investiture of Ardashir II (379–383)’, Iranica Antiqua 47 (2011) 134. T. Grigor, ‘Kingship Hybridized, Kingship Homogenized: Revivalism under the Qajar and Pahlavi Dynasties’, in S. Babaie and T. Grigor (eds.), Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (London, 2015) 227.

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creative commission can be seen inside the Qājār-period Tekieh Mo’āven al-molk in Kermānshāh (built in 1897 and renovated in 1912). The walls of this tekieh – a shrine of Imām Husayn ibn ‘Ali, one of the most important figures in Shi’a Islam – are covered with murals and glazed tiles bearing figural decoration. The tiles show Zoroastrian divine beings such as Mithra, Anāhitā, and Ahura Mazda as they are portrayed on Sasanian monuments. Achaemenid and Sasanian monuments are referenced together in a grand glazed collage, and portraits of Qājār rulers (r. 1785–1925) sit alongside those of Sasanian (r. 224–651) and Safavid emperors (r. 1501–1736) and mythical Iranian heroes, near large paintings showing scenes from the life of the Imām (Figure 9.6). By compiling these subjects into one decorative scheme, the artist formed a constructed ideal religious and imperial Iranian heritage unified over millennia. This is not an uncommon use of the Sasanian kings’ legacy: in the Šāhnāmeh, Sasanian kings such as Khosro I were incorporated into Iran’s legendary history alongside mythical heroes such as Frēdōn, Zāl and Rostam. Yet it is striking that in this case, the replication on these tiles of the same Naqš-e Rostam relief (Figure 9.5) emulated on the ‘Afif Ābād Palace alters the basic premise of the scene’s meaning. In these enamelled tiles, the equestrian figures of Ardašir and Ahura Mazda are labelled as a Persian and a Parthian king agreeing peace, thus secularizing the scene by stripping it of its Zoroastrian connotations, and creating an overt message of Iranian unity (Figure 9.7).46 For the purposes of these modern resurgences of interest in ancient Iran, therefore, Zoroastrian associations of Sasanian art were sidelined and submerged into a broader theme of Iranian national identity and Iranian kingship. After Rezā Khān’s 1921 coup, attention to pre-Islamic Iran was reinvigorated further in order to assist in solidifying Iranian national identity and the position of the new dynasty. Even the adopted name for the new dynasty, Pahlavi, the term for Middle Iranian languages, evokes the imperial fortunes of the Sasanians. For Rezā Khān, declared Shāh in 1925, the principal aims in utilizing Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage were to create an independent and strong modern Iranian identity; a strategy driven by reactions against foreign political interference.47 Studies focusing on religion were unlikely to have been popular

46 47

With thanks to Massoumeh Safinia for assistance with the translation. Grigor, ‘Kingship Hybridized, Kingship Homogenized’, 219.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

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Figure 9.6 Details of tiles from Tekieh Mo’āven al-molk, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author (a) Āgā Mohammad Khān (founder of the Qājār dynasty, r. 1789–97); (b) Mohammad ‘Ali Shāh _ (r. 1907–9) (c) Šāpur I (r. 239–70); (d) Bahrām V Gur (r. 420–38); (e) Yazdegerd II (r. 438–57) (f) the hero Rostam. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

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Figure 9.7 Detail of tiles from Tekieh Mo’āven al-molk, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

with the avowedly secular government, where the art of ancient Persian kings now served to promote the modern monarchy.48 Murals in Rezā Shāh’s White Palace at Sa’adābād in Tehran feature deeds of Iranian heroes and past kings, including Rostam and the mythologized Sasanian king Bahrām V Gur (r. 420–38).49 Just as on the Qājār monuments mentioned above, Sasanian motifs were used in combination with motifs from other ancient dynasties and the mythical past in order to reinforce the concept of a strong and lasting Iranian kingship. A desire for modernization brought with it the requirement for a stronger national identity, and ancient material culture and heritage were deemed tools by which to compete on an international stage.50 Direct involvement of international interests in Iran’s ancient material culture was a contentious and charged topic throughout the nineteenth

48 49

50

Abdi, ‘Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran’. For Bahrām Gur’s place in Iranian legend, see, for example, Nezāmi Ganjavi’s twelfth-century _ Haft Paykar and Amir-e Khosro’s Hašt Behešt, written c.  1302. See also Muhammad ibn Zafar al-Siqilli ( 1104–70), Sulwān al-mutā, trans. Joseph A. Kechichian and R. Hrair Dekmejian, The Just Prince: A Manual of Leadership (London, 2003), in which Šāpur II, Bahrām V, and Khosro I are among the exemplary wise rulers. Grigor, ‘Kingship Hybridized, Kingship Homogenized’, 219.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

and early twentieth centuries. Under the Qājārs, the majority of early archaeological explorations were undertaken by European government officials and aristocratic travellers, and large-scale excavations began in the nineteenth century under the direction of European archaeologists. Franco-Persian relationships had blossomed in the face of British and Russian aggression, and by the end of the nineteenth century Persian imperial patronage of the exploration of their pre-Islamic heritage entrenched European involvement when, in 1895, Nasir al-Din Shāh (r. 1848–96) awarded the French a monopoly on all archaeological work in Persia.51 The subsequent French excavations and involvement in cultural institutions in Iran (such as by Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy, Jacques de Morgan, Andre Godard and Roman Ghirshman) form the foundation of modern archaeological research. It was only after 1927 that Rezā Shāh, after hearing a lecture by Arthur Upham Pope in 1925 on the contribution of pre-Islamic Iran to world civilization, ended the French excavation monopoly and permitted more foreign scholars to work in the country (most notably Ernst Herzfeld), and he also founded key cultural institutions and enacted those whose foundations were established in the late Qājār period.52 Inspiration was also taken from Achaemenid and Sasanian monuments for new architectural commissions and government emblems, including the design of riāl notes and the Pahlavi crown.53 It must be noted, however, that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iranian interest in their ancient heritage focused predominantly on the Achaemenids over the Sasanians, a topic very suited to the invested interests of European scholars and the Qājār and Pahlavi rulers. 51

52

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V. S. Curtis, ‘The Legacy of Ancient Persia’, in J. Curtis and N. Tallis (eds.), Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (London, 2005) 256. See N. Nasiri-Moghaddam, ‘Archaeology and the Iranian National Museum: Qajar and early pahlavi cultural policies’, in B. Devos and C. Werner (eds.), Culture and Cultural Politics under Reza Shah: The Pahlavi State, New Bourgeoisie and the Creation of a Modern Society in Iran (London, 2014) 121–48 on the Pahlavi development of cultural institutions begun in the Qājār period. Among other significant developments in the early twentieth century, the National Monuments Council of Iran was founded in Tehran in 1922 to promote and preserve Iran’s cultural heritage, and Tehran University’s Archaeology Department was established in 1937. Achaemenid subjects far outnumber Sasanian motifs, but see the senmurw on a 1948 ten riāl note (see BM 1984,0605.2278). The particular formulation of this senmurw bears close resemblance to that on the cataphract’s armour on Khosro II’s ivān at Tāq-e Bostān. The senmurw (Arabic simorgh, Avestan saēna), which was part of Zoroastrian tradition and prominent in legends of the Šāhnāmeh, also appears in the Pahlavi coat of arms. Although the majority of Pahlavi architecture was modernizing in style, and a few buildings draw on Achaemenid models, the façade of the Tehran Irān-e Bāstan Museum built in 1936, designed by Andre Godard, the first director of the Iran Archaeological Service, features a monumental Sasanian-inspired ivān based on the Tāq-e Kisra at Ctesiphon.

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For the most part, the earliest studies, commentaries and travelogues by European travellers focused on the Achaemenids (550–330 ), encouraged by the first Persian empire’s greater antiquity, the monumental remains at sites such as Persepolis, the tantalizing abundance of Old Persian inscriptions, and by the Achaemenids’ status as contemporaries and primary antagonists of Classical Greece. Patronage of large-scale systematic excavations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued this focus on Achaemenid remains, partly as a consequence of Qājār and Pahlavi promotion of the first Persian empire’s legacy to accentuate the antiquity of both royal power and Iranian national identity.54 This concern was to be most explicit, of course, at Persepolis in 1971 for Mohammed Rezā Shāh’s lavish celebration of 2,500 years of Iranian kingship, where world leaders and royalty were treated an array of entertainment, parades and banquets. It was not until 1934 that there commenced an excavation intentionally focused on the Sasanian period, at the city of Bišāpur in Fars, led by Roman Ghirshman. The Achaemenid period provides the earliest Iranian source for studies of Persian imperial ideology, Iranian national identity, Zoroastrianism and Aryanism (discussed further below) – all issues affecting the study of Sasanian art and religion. What the Sasanians could offer to these endeavours was the material to identify a resumption of Iranian culture after the rule of Alexander, the Seleukids, and the ‘hellenizing’ Parthians, all perceived as catastrophic for the development of national identity. In this narrative, in which inherent meanings remained unchanged over the centuries, the Sasanian period functions as a vessel for revival rather than as a new creative force.55

5.

Antiquity and Continuity in Zoroastrianism: Fitting Art in the Narrative

As well as for the continuity and antiquity of Iranian kingship, Sasanian art has been used as part of the story of continuity in Zoroastrianism. Continuity is a key theme in the Avesta itself, which proclaims that Zoroastrian beliefs and practices were unbroken since Ahura Mazda spoke to Zoroaster, save for the destruction or dispersal of the sacred texts by 54

55

Among other Qājār revival pieces in the British Museum, see BM 2012,6028.4 that plays with a Sasanian theme. See, among others, E. Herzfeld, Archaeological History of Iran (London, 1935) 107 and Iran in the Ancient East (New York, 1941) 305 and 329.

Art and Zoroastrianism in Sasanian Studies

Alexander in 330 . The Avestan language of the Zoroastrian sacred texts bears close Indo-European connections to the Rig Veda of the second millennium  and the religion clearly has far-reaching roots. The date of Zarathuštrā’s life and teachings, however, is attributed variously to the sixth century  or c. 1200 .56 Diverging opinions over this seemingly fundamental matter of the inception and spread of Zoroastrianism have led to vitriolic exchanges within a relatively small academic community.57 Antiquity, continuity and orthodoxy of Zoroastrian beliefs are perceived as crucial to religious authority for modern adherents and are prominent themes in scholarship on the religion. Debates on this topic are of a heightened sensitivity due to the dwindling number of Zoroastrians, in part because it can be difficult to discuss distinct characteristics of early forms of Zoroastrianism without seeming to impinge the authenticity of current beliefs and practices. Dastur Firoze Kotwal, however, has highlighted the inconsistencies and fraught debates within the Zoroastrian community in correct interpretation of certain issues.58 Mary Boyce’s 1992 monograph Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour exemplifies the search for origins and the tracing of continuity from ancient times to the present. Boyce’s time spent among the Zoroastrian community in Yazd, central Iran, from 1963–4, was formative for her emphasis on analysing modern practices and beliefs to explain aspects of ancient religion. While this research was ground-breaking for Zoroastrian studies and resulted in opening many new avenues of interpretation and valuable observations, the methodology would be treated with caution by studies of other religions’ histories. As a result, although acknowledging some anomalous variations, namely Zurvanism and the Mazdakite movement, Boyce advocated the overall coherence of Zoroastrianism by the late Sasanian period.59 Beyond supporting internal continuity and heritage, identification 56

57

58

59

For the later date, see W. B. Henning, Zoroaster: Politician or Witch-Doctor? (London, 1951) 35–51; G. Gnoli, Zoroaster in History (New York, 2000). For the earlier date, see M. Boyce, Zoroastrianism: Its Antiquity and Constant Vigour (Costa Mesa, 1992); M. Boyce, ‘Further on the Calendar of Zoroastrian feasts’, Iran 53 (2005) 1. M. Stausberg, ‘On the State and Prospects of the Study of Zoroastrianism’, Numen 55 (2008) 568; Y. S.-D. Vevaina, ‘No One Stands Nowhere: Knowledge, Power and Positionality across the Insider-Outsider Divide in the Study of Zoroastrianism’, in A. Williams, S. Stewart and A. Hintze (eds.), The Zoroastrian Flame: Exploring Religion, History and Tradition (London, 2016) 27–60. D. F. M. Kotwal, ‘Continuity, Controversy and Change: A Study of the Ritual Practice of the Bhagaria Priests of Navsari’, in Williams et al. (eds.), The Zoroastrian Flame, 97–112. Boyce, Zoroastrianism, 141ff. See Kh. Rezakhani, ‘Mazdakism, Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism: In Search of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Late Antique Iran’, Iranian Studies 48/1 (2015) 55–70 on the problems of identifying these as heterodoxies.

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Figure 9.8 Rock relief of Šāpur I (r. 239–70), with relief of Kirdir on the right, Naqš-e Rostam, Iran, © the author. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

of Zoroastrianism’s ancient roots was taken further elsewhere to advocate the position of Zoroastrianism as the ‘original’ religion that influenced the formation of other world religions, particularly the Abrahamic faiths.60 The creation and establishment of an orthodoxy is very much the message of the mowbed (chief priest) Kirdir’s inscriptions at Naqš-e Rostam, Sar Mašhad, Naqš-e Rajab, and on the Ka’ba-e Zardošt also at Naqš-e Rostam, which proclaim his role in protecting and reinvigorating the Good Religion. Kirdir is the only non-royal personage known to have commissioned rock reliefs in the Sasanian period; he added his own reliefs during the reign of Bahrām II (r. 274–93) to those of the first Sasanian rulers, Ardašir I (r. 224–242) and Šāpur I (r. 239–70) (Figure 9.8) that were carved over fifty years earlier. Kirdir thereby associated himself and his reforms with the establishment of Sasanian rule, and he also features among the figures gathered in the court scenes of Bahrām II’s rock reliefs. The section of Kirdir’s text repeated at all four sites declares that he struck 60

Features identified as bequeathed from Zoroastrianism include, among others, the concept of personal voluntary subscription to the religion, of the virgin birth of a saviour (Saošyant), and dualism between good and evil.

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down non-Mazda-worshipping communities and increased rituals for the gods. How do we relate his account, composed at the height of his career under Bahrām II, to the reality of the religious landscape in Ērānšahr, particularly under the earlier rulers? As mentioned above, doubt is cast on quite how successful, early, or permanent his claims are to have set up more temples, smashed idols, and persecuted numerous religious communities, including, among others, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Manichaeans. Other accounts, such as of Mani at the court of Šāpur I and the good relationship of Yazdegerd I with Christian and Jewish communities present a varying picture of religious interactions in the Sasanian empire.61 Using Kirdir’s autobiography that was publicly displayed as a memorial to his personal achievements as a biography of the totality of empire-wide religion, suggesting constancy of royal policy, or temporal, social or geographical consistency of religious beliefs and practice is highly dubious.62 Besides Kirdir’s rock reliefs, another methodological obstacle in tracing continuity in Sasanian religion through visual culture is that between the commissioning of the rock reliefs of Šāpur III and Khosro II at Tāq-e Bostān, we have a gap in Sasanian rock-carving production of over two hundred years. During these two centuries, however, there was a boom in the production of silverware. Fitting these two key bodies of material into one consistent narrative for relationships with objects and images in the history of Zoroastrianism, therefore, is compromised. It is now for the most part accepted that the Sasanian period was an essential moment in the crystallization of beliefs and rituals belonging to what we recognize today as Zoroastrianism, a process that was facilitated and promoted by the establishment of the priesthood into official positions of power with legal authority outside sacred space. An alternative view, however, is proffered by Michael Stausberg and Yuhan Vevaina in their recent compendium of Zoroastrian studies, which discounts an essence of Zoroastrianism that would provide the one authentic, real, or normative version of this historically and geographically diverse religion. . . we do not see Zoroastrianism as something given for one and all times or as simply the outcome of the words of the founder or 61

62

The Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon met in 410, following an edict the previous year that allowed Christians to worship openly. In the late eighth- or early ninth-century Middle Persian text Šahrestānihā-i Ērānšahr, the daughter of the Jewish exilarch, Šušandokht, married Yazdegerd (T. Daryaee, Shahrestaniha i Eranshahr: Middle Persian Text on Late Antique Geography, Epic and History (Costa Mesa, 2002) 28). Lukonin, Persia, 182 on Aturpāt cleansing the religion of its impurities and rebuilding the shrines of Anāhitā under Šāpur II, only 30 years after Kirdir’s death.

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prophet, but rather as a complex network of dynamic ongoing recreations that its makers – believers and practitioners – are situated within, continually engaged with, and often contest.63

This more flexible conception allowing for thorough contextualization has the potential to encourage fruitful investigation into what we mean by ‘Zoroastrianism’ for the Sasanian period, avoiding narrower text-driven interpretations that compound the impression of consistency and continuity. Concern for authenticity and continuity from antiquity, to get back to an ancient truth of the religion, is a key theme in nineteenth-century Zoroastrian debate. Just as in other areas examined in this volume, postEnlightenment European Christian frameworks shaped the discussion of Zoroastrianism – both in contemporary life and regarding perception of its history – and, therefore, the place of art and objects in that discussion. For Zoroastrianism, the epicentre was among the Parsi community in nineteenth-century Bombay who engaged enthusiastically in debates on the true nature of Zoroastrian religion. Monica Ringer emphasizes the Parsi merchant elite’s agency in reforming their religion in order to ameliorate their social standing under British rule: presenting themselves as respectable, modern and relevant so as to be acceptable to British sensibilities and thus maintain and develop commercial connections with British interests, particularly after the rebellion of 1857.64 Such a call for amicable and profitable relations is clear in Dosabhoy Framjee Karaka’s 1858 work The Parsees: Their History, Manners, Customs, and Religion, which positions the Parsi community as loyal subjects and natural allies of the British: The object of the present work is to make the English public acquainted with the history, belief, and manners of the Parsees, who, though unimportant in point of numbers, have, by their commercial habits, formed an important link between the English in India and the native inhabitants. Throughout the rebellion in the East the Parsees have maintained an unshaken loyalty to the British, whom they are proud to call their fellowsubjects, and while preserving their own independence of religion and customs, their chief desire is that the British rule in India should be consolidated upon a basis of strict justice and mutual interest.65

63 64 65

Stausberg and Vevaina (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism, xiii–xiv. M. M. Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (Syracuse, 2011). D. F. Karaka, The Parsees: Their History, Manners, Customs, and Religion (London, 1858) x. Framjee dedicated another volume published in 1858, The British Raj Contrasted with its

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Contact between the Parsi community and Protestant missionaries, notably the Scottish minister John Wilson, sparked debates over the ‘true’ nature of the religion, prioritizing the authority of sacred texts (and, in the process, forming that now recognizable textual canon) at the expense of ritual and sacerdotal intervention.66 Dadabhai Naoroji, later the first Indian British MP and ‘Grand Old Man of India’, formed the Rahanumae Mazdayasne Sabha (Guides on the Mazdayasne Path) association in 1851 to ‘bring the Parsees to their old good and simple ways’, and in 1854 he founded a fortnightly publication, the Rast Goftar (The Truth Teller), whose aim was to clarify Zoroastrian concepts.67 Opposition was strong, however, and a rival association, the Raherastnumae Mazdayasne (True Guides), was formed. Naoroji’s 1864 paper, The Manners and Customs of the Parsees, details the disputes of the Kudeemees (Ancients) and Shenshaees (Royalists) over the calendar and festivals, and tensions between the ‘Old Class’ and the ‘Young Class’ over what was proper. The Young Class disputed the necessity and authenticity of certain practices, such as the shunning of cutlery and the Nirang practice (washing the face and hands with urine of a goat, sheep or cow), arguing that there was no true Zoroastrian instruction for these, but rather that the practices relied on later accounts of priests.68 Ringer’s study of nineteenth-century Zoroastrian reforms elaborates upon how identifying features of an admirable religion were determined by European scholars working with Christian standards, although their measures and criticisms in some ways were already familiar to Zoroastrianism from earlier and contemporary Islamic detractors.69 Accusations of polytheism and worshipping fire had already for a long time placed the Zoroastrian community in Iran in an ambiguous position under Islamic rule.70 By presenting Zoroastrianism as a monotheistic religion ‘of the book’ and emphasizing the role of its prophet, however, its adherents could

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Predecessors, specifically to expound on this cause, which was a raw topic in the wake of the 1857 Indian rebellion. J. Wilson, The Pársí Religion as Contained in the Zand-Avastá and Propounded and Defended by the Zoroastrians of India and Persia, Unfolded, Refuted, and Contrasted with Christianity (Bombay, 1843). Ibid., 23. D. Naoroji, The Manners and Customs of the Parsis (London, 1864) 24. Ringer, Pious Citizens, 5. A chapter of Karaka’s The Parsees is dedicated to the subject: ‘The Parsees are not FireWorshippers’.

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be protected under Shari’a law.71 The German Orientalist Martin Haug brought to European public attention a monotheistic interpretation of an original Zoroastrianism before a later corruption into dualism. In this understanding, Angra Mainyu (the evil spirit) and Spenta Mainyu (the Bounteous Spirit) sprang from the creator Ahura Mazda, before the conflation of Ahura Mazda and Spenta Mainyu that identified Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu as coexistent from the beginning. Unlike Wilson’s view of the Ameša Spentas as testimony to the polytheistic quality of Zoroastrianism, Haug proposed that they were abstract qualities, manifestations of Ahura Mazda akin to Christianity’s distinction between God and the Holy Spirit.72 Haug’s theory was adopted and integrated by the Parsis into their own reinterpretation of their religion, in part as a defence against their Christian criticizers.73 The Enlightened view of Zoroastrianism was accepted into wider scholarship as the norm, although those who advocated continuity since antiquity rejected it.74 A Protestant reconfiguration of the contemporary religion itself, as well as the dispositions of individual scholars or the character of academic endeavour, therefore precluded consideration of art as part of religion due to the focus on the authority of text, and so Sasanian art remained ignored in the majority of Zoroastrian studies. The search for religious origins, coupled with the desire to identify a distinct identity (discussed further below), directed Parsi attention back to Iran. Emigrants had left Iran in large numbers during the tenth century and settled on the east coast of the Arabian Sea, as accounted in the fifteenth-century poem Qessye Sanjān mentioned above, although it is likely there was already an established Zoroastrian community in India

71

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73 74

Zoroastrians in Iran under Islamic rule were subject to severe impositions on their lifestyle, including the jizya tax, restrictions on their clothing and buildings, and it was forbidden for a Zoroastrian to ride a horse in the presence of a Muslim. Persecutory treatment was inconsistent, but was particularly acute during the early Safavid period (early sixteenth century) and in the early nineteenth century under Qājār rule. On the prominence of the prophet, see W. Darrow, ‘The Zoroaster Legend: Its Historical and Religious Significance’ (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1981) 175–6. M. Haug, Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis (Bombay, 1862) 158–9. Ringer, Pious Citizens, 17. Boyce, Zoroastrianism. This interpretation of Zoroastrianism, amenable to twentieth-century European sensibilities, was seen to be impinged by the Swedish scholar Henrik Nyberg’s interpretation of Zoroaster in shamanistic terms: H. Nyberg, Die Religionen des alten Iran (Leipzig, 1938, translation of Irans forntida religioner, Stockholm, 1937). Nyberg’s theory was distasteful both to Nazi scholars of Aryanism and also to those who fled 1930s Germany (see E. Herzfeld, Zoroaster and His World (Princeton, 1947) and Henning, Zoroaster).

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by this time.75 We can turn once again to Framjee, whose very first sentence in The Parsees revels in the glory of the Parsis’ ancient Iranian legacy: The remnant of that mighty and flourishing race of people who inhabited Persia centuries before the Christian era . . . whose kings were at once the most powerful of monarchs, and the wisest and most beneficent of rulers; that remnant is known in India under the designation of Parsees, a name which they derive from their original country, Pars or Fars.76

Relationships with the Iranian homeland had changed dramatically by the mid-nineteenth century since, whereas once the Parsis had sent envoys for authoritative answers to religious matters, by that time the Iranian community was in such a dire situation that a humanitarian mission was embarked upon. This mission succeeded in putting pressure on the Qājārs (via the British) to end the jizya on Zoroastrians in 1884. After this, the renewed connections to their Persian homeland fostered further interest in ancient Iran and an increased popularity of ancient Iranian motifs in Parsi art and architecture.77

6.

Shared Interests in Antiquity for Modern Identities

A pervasive and recurring motif across the topics under consideration in this volume is the role of antiquity for demonstrating distinct identities, whether religious, ethnic or cultural. We see this concern heightened and intensified in the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among convergent interests, which had consequences for the interpretation and study of histories of Zoroastrian religion and Sasanian art. For Parsis, a primary concern was to evince their distinctiveness from other religions (particularly the proximate majority in India: Muslims and Hindus). The racial aspect is also paramount here: for Parsis and Iranians, interests converged in the shared desire to demonstrate their distinctiveness from Arabs. In Iran, relationships with foreign powers – particularly external intervention in internal affairs – catalysed reactionary nationalist 75

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Ringer, Pious Citizens, 26. See Hinnells, ‘The Parsis’, 157ff. on the narrative of a single moment of diaspora in the Qesse-ye Sanjān. Karaka, The Parsees, 1. Stewart, The Everlasting Flame, 200 cites the impetus of K. D. Kiash, Sculpted Figures of Zoroaster, Ardeshir Babejan and Shapoor I - Takhat-i Bostan Ancient Persian Sculptures (Bombay, 1889).

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sentiment that shaped engagement with their Sasanian heritage. These mutual interests in emphasizing the distinct nature of contemporary Iranian and Zoroastrian identity promoted themes that made exploration of pre-Islamic Iran an attractive subject to scholars of Aryanism and those with an anti-Semitic agenda. Iran’s foreign relations in the late Qājār and Pahlavi periods were a crucible of old military antagonisms, lingering imperial cultural influences, and active political interferences, many of which remain sources of rancour and sensitivity today. While Iran was never a colony, the legacy of the ‘Great Game’ and imperialism is strong.78 The most prevalent antagonism for Iranian nationalism was and is, however, that between Iran and Arab countries, which manifests in forms varying from direct violence such as the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war in 1980 to the still provocative resonances of nomenclature for the Persian or Arabian Gulf.79 These tensions are amplified by hostilities between the Shi’a and Sunni Islamic denominations: Iran has been a Shi’a nation since the first Safavid ruler, Ismā‘il I (1501–24), yet although Shi’ism is the majority position in Iran, it is in the minority within the Islamic world. This imbalance has created tension and insecurities in the alliances and politics of the Middle East over the centuries and is particularly acute in the current political climate. Threats to Iranian autonomy in the modern political environment contributed to the strengthening of

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The British and Russian empires increased their involvement in Iranian internal politics during the nineteenth century, culminating in 1907 when, in response to the 1905 Constitutional Revolution, the Anglo-Russian Treaty divided Qājār Persia into official zones of British and Russian influence. Qājār rule remained highly unstable, buffeted by Anglo-Russian interests and internal unrest, such as the 1914–21 Jangal Movement of Gilān, which grew in part out of anger at Russian interference in Persia, and formed the short-lived Soviet Republic of Gilān. Official neutrality in both world wars did little to prevent the incursion of outside powers. The Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941 replaced Rezā Shāh with his son, Mohammed Rezā Shāh, and a new player, America, saw the opportunity to use Iran as a pawn against Russia in the Cold War, as well as the potential for involvement in Iran’s oil production (played out in the removal of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953). Continued involvement of outside pressures, such as Anglo-American support for Mohammed Rezā Shāh in the 1979 Revolution and for Saddam Hussein in the 1980–8 Iran–Iraq war, sustained political resentment towards foreign powers. See Zia-Ebrahimi, ‘Self-Orientalisation and Dislocation’ on Iranian ‘dislocative nationalism’. Current tensions regarding vocabulary also apply to the appellation of Arabic names for places within Iran, such as referring to Takht-e Jamšid (Persepolis) with the Farsi name Parsa, or even, away from territorial connotations, in the choice of words in day-to-day conversation. Precedent for objection to Arabic words in Farsi lies as far back as 1868 (Abdi, ‘Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran’, 63).

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nationalist causes and, in doing so, motivated the search for Iranian cultural identity before any perceived external corruption: Iran before the Arab conquest. Numerous permutations of Iranian nationalisms employed elements of the pre-Islamic past to illustrate and accentuate their causes. Indefatigable and constant, the distinct and unique nature of the Iranian character is detected in pre-Islamic Iranian art. Thus, ancient Zoroastrian symbols, such as the faravahar, and festivals, in particular Nowruz (new year), also play a significant role in secular modern Iranian culture and identity.80 Identification and assessment of Sasanian legacies in art after the Islamic conquest in  651 is therefore a particularly charged topic in art history. As Khodādād Rezkhani observes, emphasizing the internal collapse of the Sasanian empire over the success of the Muslim armies in the seventh century undermines the Arab achievement in ‘the central identity issue in the whole of modern Iranian historiography’.81 But, just as in other moments of political transition, there are many identifiable features of continuity of Sasanian art into the Islamic period in material culture, from coinage to stuccoes and textiles. This question of the Iranian character in Islamic-period material culture was a core concept in the monumental works on Persian art in the early twentieth century, and still resonates now. Ernst Herzfeld, for example, concluded that since the Arab conquerors lacked a superior civilization, Iranian art survived, was rejuvenated, and became even more powerful in its Islamic guise (unlike its earlier fate at the hands of the Macedonian – European – Alexander).82 Almost eighty years later, Parvāneh Pourshariati defends the identification of Iranian legacies after the Arab conquest: The discourse of nationalist Iranian scholars of the past two generations, some of whom tenaciously, and at times belligerently, underlined the Iranian contribution to the early medieval history of the Middle East, has also been partly responsible for the subsequent scholarly disregard of the

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See M. M. Ringer, ‘Iranian Nationalism and Zoroastrian Identity: Between Cyrus and Zoroaster’, in A. Amanat and F. Vejdani (eds.), Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective (New York, 2012) on the secularization of the pre-Islamic past. Zoroastrian names for the months and a solar calendar were instituted by Rezā Shāh in 1925. Kh. Rezakhani, ‘Review: Parvaneh Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran’, Iranian Studies 44/3 (2011) 416. Herzfeld, Iran in the Ancient East, 305–6.

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history of Iran during this period. It created a defensive backlash in the field in which any subsequent scholarly effort towards highlighting the Iranian dimension of late antique history of the Middle East became more or less suspect. In this climate, one can scarcely discuss any dimension of Iranian history in a positive light without being accused by some of Iranian cultural chauvinism.83

Continuity in Iranian understandings, values and identity, and Iranian exceptionalism in the face of surrounding societies and cultures, repeatedly come to the fore in historical studies.84 Pre-Islamic Iran, from the Achaemenids to the Sasanians, is frequently (whether implicitly, accidentally or overtly) elided into a comprehensible single unit. Successive rejuvenations of the nationalist cause and anti-Arab sentiment during the twentieth century therefore were catalysts for work on these two great Persian empires before the Arab conquest. The intervening periods of Macedonian rule, and often the ‘hellenizing’ Parthians from the north, were treated as a caesura, a brief hiatus interrupting the purity of Iranian culture.85 This presentation of the Parthians, less popular in recent decades, accentuated the portrait of their successors the Sasanians as national champions who reinstated Persian pride and rejuvenated Persian culture. By embodying Iranian exceptionalism and the antiquity of Iranian national identity, Aryanism and Indo-European studies were warmly embraced in Iranian intellectual circles in the early twentieth century. Under the Pahlavis, Aryanism provided the perfect construct to set the new Iranian nation apart from its Middle Eastern neighbours and onto the international stage next to admired European powers, particularly

83

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P. Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran (London, 2009) 453; T. Daryaee, ‘The Fall of the Sasanian Empire to the Arab Muslims: From Two Centuries of Silence to Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: the Partho-Sasanian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran’, Journal of Persianate Studies 3 (2010) 250. Soudavar, Aura of Kingship; A. Soudavar, ‘The Vocabulary and Syntax of Iconography in Sasanian Iran’, Iranica Antiqua 44 (2009) 417–60; A. Soudavar, Mithraic Societies: From Brotherhood Ideal to Religion’s Adversary (Houston, 2014). For an example of the call to an innate connection between Iranians and their ancient heritage, see A. Soudavar, ‘Looking through The Two Eyes of the Earth: A Reassessment of Sasanian Rock Reliefs’, Iranian Studies 45 (2012) 30. D. Schlumberger, ‘Parthian Art’, in Yarshater (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3(2) 1028. Pope, Survey of Persian Art, vol. 1, 5 implies the Parthians are Turkic invaders, being ‘half indigenous, half foreign . . . dominated by the Greek taste’. See also Zaehner, Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, 22.

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Germany and France. Later in the twentieth century, this conception, labelled ‘dislocative nationalism’ by Rezā Ziā-Ebrāhimi, was made explicit in a declaration by Mohammed Rezā Shāh: Yes we are Easterners, but we are Aryans. This Middle East, what is it? One can no longer find us there. But Asia, yes. We are an Asian Aryan power whose mentality and philosophy are close to those of the European state, above all France.86

Identifications of the antiquity and constancy in meanings of Sasanian art have uncomfortable resonances with early twentieth-century scholarship on Aryanism. Iranian cultural continuity under Arab rule forms part of the Aryan and Orientalist narrative of the early twentieth century whereby Semitic unimaginative culture could not contend with the virility of European culture. In the Orientalist and Aryan narrative, just as in the Pahlavi narrative, Iranians have a closer relationship with Europe than with Arabic culture. Such views were advocated by the Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski – whose long shadow falls over several chapters of this volume – for whom Iran was characterized by its originality and deep antiquity.87 Strzygowski is, as Talinn Grigor convincingly sets out, the ‘tacit tie’ between late Qājār and early Pahlavi promotion of Aryan heritage as the origin of Western culture in efforts to increase Iran’s stature on an international stage and foster relations with Germany, especially in the 1930s.88 A letter to the League of Nations from Rezā Shāh in 1935 requested that countries speaking European languages use the Farsi and Sasanian name for the country: Iran.89 This symbolized a new beginning in the country’s identity,

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Mohammed Rezā Shāh Pahlavi in Kayhan International, 19 September 1973 (from ZiaEbrahimi, ‘Self-Orientalisation and Dislocation’, 168). Upon his coronation in 1967, twenty-six years after he assumed power, Mohammed Rezā Shāh took the title Āryāmehr ‘Light of the Aryans’ as well as Šāhanšāh (‘King of kings’, the title of Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian rulers). S. L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009) 407. Grigor, ‘Orient oder Rom?’ See also Y. Kadoi, ‘Strzygowski and Pope: The Reformulation of Persian Art History across the Trans-Atlantic World’, in I. Foletti and F. Lovino (eds.), Orient oder Rom? History and Reception of a Historiographical Myth (1901–1970) (Rome, 2018) 37–49. G. Gnoli, The Idea of Iran: An Essay on Its Origin (Rome, 1989) on Aryanism in the Achaemenid period as a cultural rather than racial term (with reference to Darius I’s Bisitun inscription). Gnoli argues that the Sasanian period is the first attestation of Erān as a political and territorial construct.

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reasserted the demand for domestic control, and was closer to the country’s self-denomination, but also took advantage of the contemporary popularity of Aryanism in Europe by suggesting ownership of the Aryan homeland. Reception of Aryan ideology in Iranian intellectual and academic circles created the environs for a new ally, Germany.90 Relations between Iran and Germany also prospered in part because Germany was seen as a potential foil to British and Russian interference, and in 1936 a German decree exempted Iranians from Nuremberg Racial Laws as Aryans.91 Aryan scholarship was sponsored by the Nazi state and so German studies in Zoroastrianism, as the most ancient Indo-European religion par excellence, blossomed in the 1930s.92 It must be noted that the most prominent German archaeologist of ancient Iran, Ernst Herzfeld, despite some Orientalist interpretations of Iranian art or his emphasis on the continuity of the Iranian artistic spirit, never attached these interpretations to racial concepts or regarded cultures as exclusive.93 His rejection of the racial angle taken by many contemporary scholars made Herzfeld subject to anti-Semitic abuse and weakened his institutional position. In 1934 Herzfeld was forced to return from Iran to London rather than Berlin, and from there he emigrated to the USA in 1936.94 Since the Second World War,

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See Zia-Ebrahimi, ‘Self-Orientalisation and Dislocation’, 184 on Seif Azad, an Iranian Nazi activist, who founded the Nāme-ye Irān-e Bāstān (Journal of Ancient Iran) in 1933 (not to be confused with the journal of the same name founded in 2000 by Touraj Daryaee). Reza Shāh’s refusal to expel German citizens from Iran was officially the reason for British and Russian occupation of the neutral country and deposition of the Shāh in favour of his son in 1941. See N. A. Kozhanov, ‘Reasons for the Allied Invasion of Iran in 1941’, Iranian Studies 45/ 4 (2012). Several German scholars of ancient Iran, Zoroastrianism, and Indo-European studies were members of the National Socialist Party, such as Walther Hinz, Heinrich Junker, and Walther Wüst, who was President of the Ahnenerbe from 1937. See H. Junginger, The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism (Leiden, 2008) 111 and Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. S. R. Hauser, ‘History, Race, and Orientalism: Eduard Meyer, the Organisation of Oriental Research, and Ernst Herzfeld’s Intellectual Heritage’, in A. C. Gunter and S. R. Hauser (eds.), Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900–1950 (Leiden, 2005), 505–60. Legislation in 1933 forced government employees in Germany of Jewish descent to resign their positions and, although Herzfeld had a Protestant upbringing, he was compelled to leave due to the Jewish lineage of his grandmother. Herzfeld had founded and edited the journal Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran in 1929, and contributed the majority of its substance until 1936. He also founded the Iranische Denkmäler journal in 1932. The first branch of the DAI opened in Esfahan in 1938, by which time Herzfeld had moved to America. Gunter and Hauser (eds.), Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900–1950 includes analysis of other scholars’ deliberate minimization of Herzfeld’s

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therefore, there has been a discomfort around works that attempt to discern Iranian origins in other cultures due to their (not always intended) implications of a time of Iranian cultural purity before the fall of the Sasanian empire to the Arab armies.95 Zoroastrianism was particularly amenable to Aryan interpretation due to the Indo-European roots of the Avesta. In the late nineteenth century, Browne had observed that, their religion has prevented [Zoroastrians] from intermarrying with Turks, Arabs, and other non-Aryans, and they consequently represent the purest Persian type, which in physical beauty can hardly be surpassed.96

These interests in distinguishing Zoroastrianism from other religions via a racial aspect and disassociating themselves from their neighbours were shared by the Parsi community during their reform movements in the mid nineteenth century. In this case it was the Muslim and Hindu communities who were arranged in opposition. The Young Class reformers deemed that elaborate and costly marriage ceremonies, for instance, derived from Hindu practices, and thus were improper.97 Framjee states clearly this concern to distinguish the Parsis from other religions in India and advocate a close connection to Europeans: A perusal of the following pages will show that the Parsis are a distinct race, and that neither in their religion nor in their habits of life, do they assimilate with either the Mahomedans or the Hindoos. The Parsees are endeavouring to follow the example which the British have set them. Western civilization has had great influence on their characters, and they are now eagerly embracing the opportunities for improvement and advancement that are offered to them. When the distinguishing characteristics of the people of Oriental nations are taken into consideration, it must be evident that the Parsees form a striking exception to the other races.98

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work and impact; in particular, see A. C. Gunter and S. R. Hauser, ‘Ernst Herzfeld and Near Eastern Studies, 1900–1950’, 3–44. See also J. Wiesehöfer, ‘Ernst Herzfeld and Sasanian Studies’, 281–94 in the same volume on Herzfeld’s substantial contributions to Sasanian archaeology. J. T. Russell, ‘Review of Yamauchi’s Persia and the Bible’, Jewish Quarterly Review 83/1–2 (1992) 257. Browne, A Year among the Persians, 374. Naoroji, The Manners and Customs of the Parsis, 24. Karaka, The Parsees, x–xi.

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A tirade of vitriol directed at Muslims follows shortly after.99 The exceptionalism of Zoroastrianism was taken up and advanced also by European theologians. In the discussion after Naoroji’s 1861 lecture in Liverpool, one participant, Dr Collingwood, argued that unlike all other pre-Christian religions, ‘the religion of Zoroaster was singularly refined and purified from the more ancient grossness’.100

7.

Concluding Thoughts

Through this brief exploration of some of the plentiful and complex investments that have affected the investigation and presentation of Zoroastrianism and art in the Sasanian period, and the relationship between them, we can begin to appreciate the tangled web of claims to exceptionality, constancy and antiquity driving the narratives that came to the fore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the core, these are often concerns that are framed in reaction to the Islamic conquest of the Sasanian empire in the mid seventh century , and that are immersed in the ‘insider–outsider’ debate – whether from the point of view of Zoroastrians or of Iranians – wherein ownership of the past and claims to a single true understanding are contested.101 Underlying tensions centre on Iranian relations with external powers that prompted particular emphases in cultivating national identity, and the definition and vitality of the Zoroastrian community and its practices and beliefs. While, as also prevalent in other fields discussed in this volume, Eurocentrism pervades the academic framework through which we approach Sasanian art and religion, it is striking that such Eurocentrism also underlies ideologies and foci that we might otherwise identify as internally driven; many predominant Iranian and Zoroastrian concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were in fact responses to European scholarly priorities and political stimuli. What is true of all art history still bears repetition in this field: it is apparent that histories of the fortunes of Zoroastrianism under Sasanian rule cannot be mirrored directly onto material evidence without

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Ibid., 4–5. D. Naoroji, The Parsee Religion (London, 1862), 30–1. Vevaina, ‘No One Stands Nowhere’.

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qualification or caution, but that room should be allowed for a more heterogeneous account. Without full appreciation of the distinct contextual situations, creativity and innovation of the period has been minimized at the expense of emphasizing continuity and constancy. Sasanian art has much to contribute to the debate.102

102

With many thanks to all those who offered comments, assistance and critique in the development of this chapter, notably Richard Payne, Yuhan Vevaina, Touraj Daryaee, my Empires of Faith colleagues, and the anonymous reviewers.

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‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva  

Śiva is Time beyond time, Time undivided by its plenitude, as it was before and is beyond creation.1

This chapter is concerned with the question of time, or rather the absence of it. The absence of time, the notion that something can be primordial or unchanging, is encountered in two very different sorts of textual strategies which impact our understanding of the religion(s) known as Hinduism and also the arts of South Asia in the first millennium. The first textual strategy is the frequent claim in South Asian religious texts that a particular teaching or text is of unprecedented antiquity, either primordial or at least so old as to be functionally primordial, and is therefore authoritative. The second is the thread in colonial historiography of South Asia which presents the history of the region as unchanging, or perhaps even stagnating, except under external pressures – the latter imagined as successive Greek, nomadic, Islamic, and British conquests. A specific discussion will follow in the second part of this chapter, about the identification of a group of second century images of the god Wesho as the Hindu god Śiva. Arguably the second century is a moment before Hinduism, which would make this identification problematic, though as will be explored below the notions of both ‘before’ and ‘Hinduism’ are slippery. Time is the central issue in this, and of the historiographical problems in the study of Indian art in the first millennium it is the one most relevant to a comparative project. Time and temporal distinctions are at the heart of a historical approach, but if a subject can claim to be ‘beyond’ or ‘undivided’, to have no ‘before’, if in short it can claim a special status with regard to the central concept of history, how can it be compared with anything historical whose status is not special in that way? The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how a tendency to collapse temporal distinctions in South Asian history has arisen, been sustained, and threatens a comparative exercise with other traditions.2 1 2

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S. Kramrisch, The Presence of Śiva (Princeton, 1981) 272. This chapter was written while working for the Leverhulme funded Empires of Faith project and completed while working for the ERC funded Beyond Boundaries project. It benefited from

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

1.

Hindu Art, Hindus, and Hinduism

The term ‘Hindu art’ is doubly problematic.3 It is problematic for all the usual reasons that encompassing a vast geographical and chronological range within a single ‘art’ based solely on an unspecified relationship to a religion (is it by, for, or about Hindus?) is necessarily problematic. It is problematic in addition because the term ‘Hindu’ is problematic – and for more than the usual ontological difficulties of defining a religion. The term ‘Hindu’ was employed by Arab, then Persian and Turkish, Muslims to refer to the inhabitants of what are today Pakistan and Northern India, and subsequently by Europeans for most of South Asia. The term Hinduism to denote a single religion practised by those people, particularly associated with concepts of caste, dharma, karma, Brahmin officiants and a pantheon of gods associated with Vishnu and Śiva, came into use in the late eighteenth century, the earliest recorded usage being by Charles Grant in 1787.4 Today this definition found on the internet might be considered representative of, or at least broadly encompassing, or acceptable to, many outsiders and insiders and descriptive of at least some insiders’ identities: Hinduism is the dominant religion, or way of life, in South Asia, most notably India. It includes Shaivism, Vaishnavism and Shaktism among numerous other traditions, and a wide spectrum of laws and prescriptions of “daily morality” based on karma, dharma, and societal norms. Hinduism is a categorisation of distinct intellectual or philosophical points of view, rather than a rigid, common set of beliefs.5

This definition is associative, Hinduism is defined not as much by what the ‘traditions’, ‘laws’ or ‘norms’ are but by their ‘dominant’ practice in

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discussion with members of the Empires of Faith team and particularly from comments on various sections presented at the Globalising Classics event in Berlin in August 2015 and at the University of Chicago in October 2015. A number of general surveys employ this term, for example R. Blurton, Hindu Art (London, 1992) and G. Michell, Hindu Art and Architecture (London, 2000). Though most, like the standard introduction of S. L. Huntington, The Art of Ancient India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (New York, 1985), use Hindu art as a subdivision of Indian art. This is a subdivision with a wide remit as it encompasses all pre-Islamic Indian art that is neither Jain nor Buddhist. G. A. Oddie, ‘Hindu Religious Identity with Special Reference to the Origin and Significance of the Term “Hinduism”, c. 1787–1947’, in E. Bloch, M. Keppens and R. Hegde (eds.), Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism (London, 2010) 41–55, esp. 45. From https://sukfco.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/hinduism/, also https://wikivisually.com/wiki/ Category:Hinduism (both accessed January 2019).

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South Asia. Unusually amongst religions, though not uniquely, Hinduism is not defined by its origin, in part because there is very little agreement on when or where it began. There is no temporal element at all in this description, which leaves open the question of how far back in time it is necessary to go before the ‘dominant religion’ of South Asia was not Hinduism. Of course, by this definition it does not matter how far you go back, since India was always Hindu, and the reader is free to imagine Hinduism as the primordial religion of India, as the Sanātana Dharma, ‘Eternal Law’. Another common, negative, definition of Hinduism is as the collective of South Asian religions which are not Buddhist, Christian, Jain, Muslim, Parsi or Sikh. The exact list of what is or is not included in that varies, with Buddhist, Jain and Sikh practitioners sometimes counted as Hindu, but the common characteristic of the list that is not Hindu, is the definitional element of a founding figure or moment. The one group without a clear foundational figure are the Parsis, though they are usually assumed to have arrived in India at a distinct historical moment. This form of definition is often associated with the constitution and law of modern India.6 Like the associative definition above it says nothing about what the belief, practice or texts of Hinduism actually are, and as such it has a timeless quality. If you strip away the ‘foreign’ religions and the reformers it raises the possibility of a moment in time when Hinduism, and only Hinduism, was the religion of South Asia. By contrast, many scholars do see a moment (or at least a period of time) in which Hinduism originated. Responding to the difficulty of definition, it has become commonplace amongst those who study the history of South Asian religion to assert that ‘Hinduism’ was made up. The bewildering range of practices, beliefs and sacred texts which cannot, in this view, be glossed by a common creed or proclamation, which are collectively called Hinduism, were probably once distinct traditions: at some indefinite period, probably not a single moment, consciously or unconsciously, an identity was created which associated them together on the basis of little more than geographic and cultural proximity. Some historians think the British did it, or a native intelligentsia in Calcutta, but the Muslims, the Gupta Emperors, the Brahmins, or wandering poets have

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Though for a nuanced account of the complexity of this in Indian law see R. Sen, Defining Religion: The Indian Supreme Court and Hinduism, Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics Working Paper 29 (Heidelberg, 2006).

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

all been suggested and some think there is still not a single Hinduism but that Indian nationalists are trying to create one.7 This disagreement is not a matter of evidence, or at least not entirely, but revolves around the problem of definitions. When Hinduism began depends on how you define what Hinduism is. If it is associated with particular texts, then it originates with those texts. Advocates for an origin in the mid-first millennium often accord this role to the various Puranic texts, collations of knowledge including creation myths and stories of gods. Others divide Hinduism at this point speaking of a Puranic Hinduism later and an earlier Brahmanical Hinduism stretching back to the Vedas, a set of texts that originated as oral traditions in the second millennium . However, most practice associated with the term Hinduism is not textual in nature and it is equally possible to base a definition on certain pantheons of deities, such as the three gods Vishnu, Śiva and Brahma, or particular rituals, practices or beliefs. Definitions based on practices, some of which are very old, or beliefs, whose age is hard to determine, serve to further obfuscate the beginnings of Hinduism. This lack of common agreement on what Hinduism is makes it hard to agree on when it began and, since elements that are used to define it can be found as far back as the evidence stretches, it leaves the possibility, believed by many practitioners, that there has always been a Hinduism or at least it is so old its origins are lost.8 7

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The literature is significant. R. King, ‘Orientalism and the Modern Myth of “Hinduism”’, Numen 46 (1999) 146–85 gives a nuanced argument for a British origin with the active input of Indians. B. K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford, 2005) 169–72 offers a critical response to assumptions of British agency. D. N. Lorenzen, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 414 (1999) 630–59 argues against the British position and in favour of the encounter with Islam as the defining moment and B. K. Smith, ‘Exorcising the Transcendent: Strategies for Defining Hinduism and Religion’, History of Religions 27/1 (1987) 32–55 goes earlier into the Middle Ages. Putting the blame on a Brahmanical reform in the mid-first millennium (see P. Mitter, Indian Art (Oxford, 2001) 33; A. Michaels, Hinduism: Past and Present (Oxford, 1998) 38–43) are common positions, as well as V. Nath ‘“Brahminism” to “Hinduism”: Negotiating the Myth of the Great Tradition’, Social Scientist 29/3–4 (2001) 19–50 which places the events in the late first millennium and associates it with interactions between Brahmins and tribal peoples, driven by economic stresses. There is relatively little actual research, but see J. T. O’Connell, ‘The Word “Hindu” in Gaudiya Vaisnava Texts’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 93 (1973) 340–4. __ An interesting summary and nuancing of this debate is to be found in W. Sweetman, ‘Unity and Plurality: Hinduism and the Religions of India in Early European Scholarship’, Religion 31 (2001) 209–24. The extent to which this idea has infused popular culture will be apparent with a simple internet search for ‘world’s oldest religion’: even counter claims (for Judaism, Christianity, Indigenous African religions) begin from an assumption that ‘secular scholars the world over seem to endorse Hinduism as the world’s oldest religion’, see ‘Why Should I Believe Christianity When Hinduism is the World’s Oldest Religion’, https://iamtymaximus.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/

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Problems of definition also make comparison difficult. One common strategy is to define Hinduism as all of those traditions which acknowledge the authority of the Vedas. This helps distinguish most modern selfidentified Hindus from Jains and Buddhists, though it is less useful as we shall see in the first millennium. The problem is that the Vedas are not central texts to the practice of most of these traditions, even if they are often referred to by modern insiders. In some ways this is akin to treating the term ‘Abrahamic’ as a religion and Judaism, Christianity and Islam as simply sects, because they all acknowledge some elements of the same Old Testament texts. This raises problems of how commensurable studies of Hinduism are, problems which matter in a comparative investigation. If for example it were desirable to investigate the relative tolerance for heterodoxy and diverse religious practice, it is obvious that the question becomes incoherent if you compare a broad grouping of religions with a single religion. For the purposes of this chapter I choose to see Hinduism as an issue of identity. Pashupatas (members of a Śaivite tradition founded in Western India in the second century ) are Hindu at the point where they see themselves as having something fundamental in common with followers of the ISKCON (a twentieth-century Vaishnava sect commonly known as the Hare Krishnas)9 that neither group shares with Buddhists, Jains or Sikhs.10 Hinduism is therefore an identity that recognizes similarity over difference. In this respect I take seriously emic claims by the Lingayats (founded in twelfth-century South India by Basava), the Ramakrishna mission (a Vaishnavite tradition founded by the Bengali reformer Vivakenanda in the nineteenth century), or the Satsangi (the tradition founded by Swaminarayan) that they are not Hindus, claims often rejected by outsiders.11

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why-should-i-believe-christianity-when-hinduism-is-the-worlds-oldest-religion/ (accessed January 2019). I very much doubt that this is a correct assessment of what scholars working on South Asia believe, but it is interesting, given the discussion of interplay between the academy and non-academic perceptions of the past explored in other chapters that even those with a vested interest in the contrary position attribute this to the academy. ISKCON says of itself that it ‘belongs to the Gaudiya-Vaishnavasampradāya, a monotheistic tradition within the Vedic or Hindu culture’ and so by the definition I deploy here is Hindu, though its practitioners are clearly wary of using the term ‘religion’. ISKCON, unlike Hinduism, has a moment of foundation, by ‘Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda in New York City in 1966’ which (as will be argued here) makes ISKCON more akin, as a categorical entity, to Christianity and Islam than Hinduism is, see www.iskcon.org/what-is-iskcon/ (accessed January 2019). I am choosing here to ignore the possibility, one widely recognized in Indian law, that members of these groups are in fact Hindus. Scholarly discussion consistently treats them as distinct. The case of the Ramakrishna mission is complex as there was a political element to the claim, see ‘Supreme Court to RK Mission: “You’re Hindus”’, www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

Further I take the position that Hinduism in this sense cannot be projected indefinitely into the past; it is neither primordial nor timeless. In general Hinduism, defined this way, can only be conceived of as a religion when the bonds of common identity are very strong. That, it seems reasonable to suggest, is true for many practitioners today and to refer to someone who self-identifies as Hindu as such is no more, and no less, problematic than to refer to a Muslim or Christian.12 However, when dealing with the first millennium, I would see the category ‘religion’ as being more coherently applied to what are often described as sects or traditions within Hinduism – such as the Pashupata. Conversely there is a great deal that is clearly ancestral for modern Hindus, which is of huge antiquity. The Vedas are very old indeed, and the iconographies of gods, such as Śiva, or important texts like the Puranas, were formed in the first millennium . However, the existence of these ancestral elements is not the same as the existence of Hinduism. At some point Hinduism began, and I would suggest however you define that, as sense of identity, or beliefs very similar to modern practitioners, or as a constellation of texts, Hinduism is older than the nineteenth century but later than the third century . Critically, for a significant part of the first millennium there was no Hinduism.

2.

The Āgamadambara _

A more specific example might assist this discussion. The Āgamadambara _ is a play, written in Kashmir in the ninth century .13 Its narrative concerns a young Brahmin Sānkarshana who sets out to ‘humiliate the enemies of the Veda, who dirty their speech with incessantly brandished pernicious argumentation’ (Āg 1.60). In his various debates and engagements with other religious practitioners the play allows us to see how

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smartsection/item.php?itemid=3536 (accessed January 2019), and Sen, Defining Religion, 20–1, so one might suspect many individuals would indeed think of themselves as Hindus. Likewise for the Satsangi, see Sen, Defining Religion, 15–19, where a desire to enforce caste distinctions may have underpinned the claim. The case of the Lingyat seems more straightforward, as insiders do not think of themselves as Hindu though scholars feel entitled to disregard this sense of identity; see for example A. Good, Review of K. Ishwaran, Religion and Society among the Lingayats of South India, Pacific Affairs 5 (1985–6) 725–6. By ‘no more problematic’, I mean very problematic indeed! A translation has been published by C. Dezső, as Much Ado About Religion by Bhatta Jayānta (New York, 2005). I dislike the play on a Shakespeare title used in that translation which frames the play in European terms and so have retained the Sanskrit title in the discussion.

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someone conceived of his contemporary religious world. What we are offered is just one perspective, that of the author as presented through the protagonists (who each represent slightly different traditions). For example Dhairyarashi, who settles the religious dispute in the final act, is clearly presented as part of the same Vedic Brahmin tradition as the main hero, Sānkarshana. But while Sānkarshana is a Mimāmsaka, the author and Dhairyarashi are Nyaya Brahmins, which suggests both a sense of common identity and that the Nyaya rather than the Mimāmsaka are being presented as the conceptual centre. Other practitioners are presented in a variety of ways, some as similar, others as deserving of respect, or debate, or as dangerous, or even as beyond acceptable limits. A central dramatic point is that Sānkarshana is reluctant to debate with the Vaishnava, a sect of which he is not a member but with which he sympathizes strongly. On the other hand he is happy, perhaps keen, to debate with the Śaivite Siddhāntas, who are distinguished from, but clearly understood to be related to, the Pashupata and Kalamukhas, also Śaivites (3.22). Nonetheless, when the opportunity arises he joins forces with the Siddhāntas to defeat the sceptical materialist Charvakas. The Buddhists are also defeated in debate, but the Jains are used only for broad comic relief. Though the play finishes with a plea for a form of tolerance, it is not one which rests on a common identity, or equal validity, nor is it open-ended. The limits of the acceptable are clearly defined, and one group in the play, the ‘Black Blankets’, fall beyond these limits. This group was actively suppressed in Kashmir during the lifetime of the author. The resulting picture that the play gives us is complex. At the centre are the author’s own tradition, allied ones, and those with whom his protagonist can express sympathy. These are either Brahmin traditions which centre on the Vedas or those which accept the Vedas and see Vishnu as the supreme god. The other traditions are not, however, undifferentiated: the author can recognize those which are related by their adherence to the god Śiva or distinguish grades of deviance/acceptability, including those such as the ‘Black Blankets’ which must be suppressed (see Figure 10.1 for a diagram of some of these relationships). Obviously the perspective of Sānkarshana and the author of the Āgamadambara is unlikely to have been shared by the other practitioners, _ particularly the adherents of the many sects with whom Sānkarshana debates. However, the important point is that the playwright could conceive of firm boundaries between religions, particularly the Vedic and nonVedic, and also how little resemblance this has to any modern notions of the boundaries of Hinduism. Though the ‘Black Blankets’ are simply too

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

Figure 10.1 Diagram of the relationships between sects outlined in the Āgamadambara. _

obscure for us to draw any conclusions, the Charvaka would fit better Western notions of a philosophical tradition rather than a religion, a distinction that seems to mean very little to the author.14 Curiously the various sects which worship Śiva are presented as falling in the same broad category of acceptable but ‘other’ as the Buddhists and Jains, though in most modern presentations of Hinduism they would certainly be amalgamated with the Vaishnava and Brahmins as ‘Hindu’.15 14

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The Charvakas are one of a number of traditions which are not ancestral for modern Hindus, their philosophy being known only from records associated with their opponents, see for example K. D. Toso, ‘The Stanzas on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata in the Skhalitapramathanayuktihetusiddhi’, Journal of Indian Philosophy 38/6 (2010) 543–52; R. Bhattacharya, ‘What the Cārvākas Originally Meant: More on the Commentators on the “Cārvākasūtra”’, Journal of Indian Philosophy 38 (2010) 529–42; or B. Heera Uniquenesss of Cārvāka Philosophy in Traditional Indian Thought (New Delhi, 2011). See D. N. Lorenzen, The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaivite Sects (Princeton, 1972). In fact the play places the Śaivite cults, as groups that reject the Vedas, closer to the Buddhists and Jains than to the Brahmins and Vaishnava.

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If the Western term ‘religion’ is to be imposed on Indian data it should at least be used consistently.16 Applying it to Hinduism leads to the woolly definition offered by the internet and cited earlier.17 It obliterates genuine difference by appealing to a plurality. If instead a particular Śaivite group, like the Pashupata, are conceived as a religion it looks much more like conventional descriptions of the category (there is a founder, a beginning, a common doctrine). Reconceived this way, a term like Saivism which incorporates both the Pashupata and the lingam cults, which will be discussed later in this chapter, becomes a grouping of similar religions (those which see the god Śiva as pre-eminent), a similar sort of category to the term Abrahamic. And the term Hinduism, when not used specifically of nineteenth- or twentieth-century practitioners identifying themselves as such, becomes a vague notion of similarity, something more like the term monotheism.

3.

The Origin of Timelessness and the History of Ahistoricity

So far we have seen several possible definitions of Hinduism, involving either geographical association, particular texts, beliefs and practices, negative contrasts with other religions, or a common identity. The common sense of identity is useful as it allows us understand how the Āgamadambara can present its various traditions as if they are separate _ religions, when many of them make up the component parts of what is referred to as Hinduism today. There is an alternative strategy to defining Hinduism historically which is quite common amongst specialists in the first millennium. That is to approach it in terms of its pan-Indian characteristics. Essentially before Hinduism there were ‘local’ cults and these were incorporated into larger traditions, becoming pan-Indian in the process; it

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A. Tweed, ‘Marking Religion’s Boundaries: Constitutive Terms, Orienting Tropes, and Exegetical Fussiness’, History of Religions 44 (2005) 252–76 makes the point that there is no direct translation for the term religion, but this kind of argument can be overly trite. The issue is not the etymology of a Western term but the danger that its current usage imports Western concepts, which are inappropriate. See also Bloch et al. (eds.), Rethinking Religion in India, 3. I do not wish to suggest here that the term Hinduism is the problem, though I have sought to avoid it in the central part of this essay. There are good accounts that historicize particular early religious life in relation to art while using the term, for example H. Bakker, ‘Throne and Temple: Political Power and Religious Prestige in Vidarbha’, in H. Bakker (ed.), The Sacred Centre as the Focus of Political Interest (Groningen, 1992) 83–100 and H. Bakker, The Vākātakas: An Essay in Hindu Iconology (Groningen, 1997). _

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

is this movement to pan-Indian that often implicitly defines Hinduism.18 This is quite a reasonable definition and clearly reflects important historical changes. No tradition depends entirely on either strategies of incorporation or exclusion but incorporation seems to have been more common in South Asian contexts than in Christianity or Islam, both of which – it is important to remember – are unusual historical examples in their frequent dependence on exclusion. Many people who identify as Hindus would not agree with any of the preceding accounts of an origin to Hinduism, though some probably would (the reality of practitioners is complex): they see their practice as ancient and their identity as continuous with a primordial or timeless tradition.19 If the problem were simply a discrepancy between the humanistic, historicized analysis of scholars and the tenets of believers, it would not be much of an obstacle. However, for most of the nineteenth century scholars believed exactly the same thing, accepting the timeless model of Hinduism. European scholarship favoured textual accounts, often sources that themselves made claims of timelessness. European political and cultural conceptions favoured an image of India as unchanging or as a curious mixture of stagnation and decline. This ahistorical thread in nineteenthcentury academic constructions has been well studied and is often blamed for creating the fantasy of a singular unified Hinduism out of a diverse range of beliefs.20 Those early errors, driven by essentialist discourses about India (either negative or positive), have never relinquished their grip on the discipline, as we shall see.

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See for example the nuanced treatments of D. G. White, ‘Digging Wells while Houses Burn? Writing Histories of Hinduism in a Time of Identity Politics’, History and Theory 45/4 (2006) 104–31 and J. Shaw, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India: Sanchi Hill and Archaeologies of Religious and Social Change, c. Third Century BC to Fifth Century AD (London, 2007) 53–9. Many Hindu groups are capable of deploying huge funds and considerable sophistication to assert these points of view. This video www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBZRTzXARWM (accessed January 2019) is aimed specifically at California schools and claims the origin of Hinduism is to be found much earlier than the first millennium . The content is aimed at directly propagating ideas of continuity. It makes several claims for the worship of the god Śiva in the prehistoric period which do not bear scrutiny (though all were once part of academic discourse). Individual colonial scholars had diverse views on India’s past but the notion of stagnation can be found in many of them. See, for example, T. Trautmann, ‘Does India have History? Does History have India?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (2012) 174–205 or V.Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003) 27–78 for the argument that India never developed a historical genre of its own, which is entwined in much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinking with the idea that India itself did not have a history, 58–9.

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The timelessness of Hinduism created a discrepancy between the theory that twentieth-century scholars espoused and their actual practice. On the one hand scholars made constant nods to the historically constructed nature of Hinduism, to its diversity across time as well as space, and recognized at least in principle that there was a time before Hinduism. They attempted to study when and where and how particular aspects of practice, ritual or iconography developed. However, even in good scholarship an ahistorical Hindu belief or practice is often assumed.21 The discipline itself became increasingly aware of this from the 1970s onwards, when Richard Fox wrote the following: The scholarly current which denies significant structural alterations in modernizing India runs surprisingly strong. It is as if the anthropologist and area specialist had unconsciously imbibed a scholarly world view consonant with the Indian culture they study – that is, one which accords great importance and necessity to the maintenance of tradition and social continuity.22

4.

Timeless Hinduism and the Study of Art History

The notion of timeless Hinduism poses substantial difficulties for the study of Indian art in the first millennium . It is wrong to suggest scholars simply ignore the theoretical position and presume that Hinduism always was as it is. There are many good studies on the development of particular sects and iconographies. For example Mann gives a brilliant account of how the god Karttikeya was created in the first half of the first millennium by combining an Iranian inspired warrior god and a North Indian malevolent guardian (Graha) and how that was driven by an intersection of

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It is not hard to find examples of this. The god Śiva is often projected back onto the Vedic god Rudra (e.g. D. M. Srinivasan, ‘Vedic Rudra-Śiva’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 103/3 (1983) 543–56) and even to a theoretical, literally primordial, Indo-European homeland (e.g. M. J. Shendge, ‘The Primordiality of Śiva: Some New Linguistic Evidence’, Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 76/1–4 (1995) 119–28). See R. G. Fox, ‘Avatars of Indian Research’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 12/1 (1970) 59–72, esp. 59; also A. McCalla, ‘When is History Not History?’ Historical Reflections/ Réflexions Historiques 20/3 (1994) 435–52 or for example White, ‘Digging Wells while Houses Burn?’, 121 who sees this timelessness exemplified in a particular brand of Western scholarship: ‘the religion of choice of the University of Chicago-schooled historians of religions has been Hinduism as viewed through a lens that has privileged the scriptures of the so-called classical traditions of the pre-medieval period. This has translated into a marked emphasis on timeless myths and doctrines that were revealed in a time before secular, linear history began.’

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

beliefs, Brahmanical interests and political goals.23 Dhavalikar similarly surveys the evidence for the earliest representations of Ganesh sometime in the third or fourth century ,24 and also suggests the formation of his cult from a number of originally distinct cults.25 Even here, however, in discussing origins notions of the timeless or primordial are apparent. Dhavalikar devotes a substantial section of his account to images of elephants in the Northwest of India, understandably given that Ganesh is depicted with an elephant’s head. Given the possibility of both Indian interpretations and Hellenistic ones, he privileges the symbolic value of the elephant in later third- to seventh-century  India, assuming that ‘it was so even in the remotest past’.26 As the rest of this chapter will use Śiva to explore the effects ideas of timelessness have had on Indian art history, the figures of Karttikeya and Ganesh are particularly interesting. From the early- to mid-first millennium , both are described in texts as sons of Śiva. Given the degree to which Śiva is defined by his relationship with others – his consort, his sons, the gods Vishnu and Brahma – it is legitimate to ask if worship of Śiva is really the same thing, before and after the objects of those relationships existed. It is important to affirm that I am not suggesting that scholars are simply too naïve to recognize the created nature of Hinduism; they clearly do imbibe that theoretical standpoint and do study origin and change in the religion and art of the subcontinent. Nor am I suggesting that there is no continuity in South Asia; substantial amounts of this early material are ancestral to modern Hinduism even if they are not in themselves ‘Hindu’. I want to suggest that – away from the point of focus in any given study – the notion of a timeless India, the idea of the ‘remotest past’, asserts itself 23

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See R. D. Mann, The Rise of Mahāsena: The Transformation of Skanda-Kārttikeya in North India from the Kusāna to Gupta Empires (Leiden, 2012). _ _ See M. K. Dhavalikar, ‘Origin of Ganeśa’, Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 71 (1990) 1–24. The account of Ganesh is less convincing than Mann’s account of Karttikeya partly because Dhavalikar’s study is at a less developed stage but also because his earliest dates depend on the attribution of ‘Kushan’ characteristics to particular sculptures. The chronology of the early first millennium has been the subject of long debate and the position adopted by Dhavalikar is now widely discredited: for the disagreement see J. G. Williams, ‘The Case of the Omitted Hundreds: Stylistic Development in Mathurā Sculpture of the Kusāna Period’, in D. M. Srinivasan (ed.), _ _ Mathurā: The Cultural Heritage (New Delhi, 1989), 325–31; it has now been settled in favour of the long and late chronology not used by Dhavalikar, see for example H. Falk, ‘Gandharan Eras’, in C. Luczanits (eds), Gandhara, the Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Legends, Monasteries and Paradise (Mainz, 2008) 70–1 and other papers in the same volume. Dhavalikar, ‘Origin of Ganeśa’, 11 and more broadly 8–15.

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because it is deeply rooted in the historiography. Like the problems discussed in Chapter 2, I would characterize this problem as insidious – for it is a mistake to which all of us fall victim, because knowing it is a problem is not in itself sufficient to avoid it.

5.

Wesho and Śiva

The iconography, cult, and theological understanding of Śiva clearly underwent dramatic changes in the first millennium.27 The god Śiva is not known in the Vedic texts, though the word Śiva does appear as an epithet there for a number of gods. There is a Vedic deity, Rudra, who is equated by later Śaivites and by scholars with Śiva, sometimes anachronistically referred to as Rudra-Śiva. Before the early centuries of the first millennium , there are no extant anthropomorphic depictions associated with Śiva. Whether this is because there were no earlier images is unclear, but by the end of the first millennium Śiva’s anthropomorphic imagery is well developed and the Śaivite cult is prominent. The earliest text focused on Śiva as supreme deity, the Mahapurana, was composed as we know it in the fourth century . Figures 10.2 and 10.3 both depict deities in human form. The first is the design of a coin, made probably in Balkh (modern Afghanistan) between  110 and 127. The second is a male and female pairing from Northern India of the tenth century. Until very recently both were identified as Śiva. The second attribution is uncomplicated but the first is not. Its identification is based solely on its resemblance to later images, particularly through attributes like the trident, animal skin draped over the arm, animal face, hair, and nudity. Figure 10.2 is not quite the first anthropomorphic image of the god. An alternative iconography is used on another type of gold coin in the same reign and a single type from the preceding reign ( 90 to 110) probably depicts the same god.28 A figure holding a trident on coins of the king Gondophares (early- to mid-first century ) has been, incorrectly, identified as the same god, and this identification was followed in the most

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This is well recognized in theory: ‘Today the god known today as Shiva, seems to be made up of a number of originally different divine characters. To the devotee this variety implies the allpervasive nature of the god. To an outsider it may also suggest the way in which separate cults have joined to become one cult’, Blurton, Hindu Art, 33. R. Bracey, ‘The Coinage of Wima Kadphises’, Gandharan Studies 3 (2009) 25–75.

Figure 6.6 Icon of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, encaustic on wooden panel, sixth–seventh century, one of the four early icons brought by Porphiry Uspensky from Mount Sinai. Museum of Western and Oriental Art, also known as Bogdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Art, Kiev. Photograph: author

Figure. 6.8 Natalia Goncharova, The Virgin and Child, oil on canvas, 1911. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 150  107 cm. Photograph: author

Figure 8.2 Mshatta façade, 743–4, detail showing simurgh. Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, Germany. Photograph © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0

Figure 8.3 Watercolour depiction of a wall painting with two dancers reconstructed by Herzfeld from fragments found in the main caliphal palace in Samarra (Dar al-Khilafa). Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Series 3.1 (Drawings, Watercolors and Prints: Excavation of Samarra). Metropolitan Museum of Art (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943), New York. No known restriction on use

Figure 9.1 Gilded silver bottle bearing viticulture imagery, 5th–7th century. H. 18.5 cm. British Museum, BM 1897,1231.189. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

Figure 9.2 Charging boar relief, stucco wall panel, Ctesiphon, c. 6th century. 29.5  38.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Rogers Fund, 1932; 32.150.23. Creative Commons Licence

Figure 9.3 Ivān of Khosro II (r. 590–627). Tāq-e Bostān, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author

Figure 9.4 Detail of ivān of Khosro II, showing the relief of Fath ‘Ali Shāh (r. 1797–1834), Tāq-e Bostān, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author

Figure 9.5 Rock relief of Ardašir I (r. 224–242), Naqš-e Rostam, Iran. © the author

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

Figure 9.6 Details of tiles from Tekieh Mo’āven al-molk, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author (a) Āgā Mohammad Khān (founder of the Qājār dynasty, r. 1789–97); _ (b) Mohammad ‘Ali Shāh (r. 1907–9) (c) Šāpur I (r. 239–70); (d) Bahrām V Gur (r. 420–38); (e) Yazdegerd II (r. 438–57) (f) the hero Rostam.

Figure 9.7 Detail of tiles from Tekieh Mo’āven al-molk, Kermanshāh, Iran. © the author

Figure 9.8 Rock relief of Šāpur I (r. 239–70), with relief of Kirdir on the right, Naqš-e Rostam, Iran, © the author

Figure 10.2 Gold coin of Wima Kadphises from Kushan (modern Afghanistan). c. 110–127 . 20 mm diameter. Reverse, with a figure holding trident and animal skin. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

Figure 10.4 Copper coin (tetradrachm) of Huvishka from Kushan. c. 155–190 . 25 mm diameter. Reverse, with a four-armed figure inscribed Wesho, in Bactrian but in Greek script, holding diadem, thunderbolt, trident and water flask. The detail is of the hands holding diadem and thunderbolt. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

Figure 10.5 Detail from a gouache painting on paper from the Punjab. c. 1790–1800 . Śiva in the form of Bhairava, clad in an elephant skin and a tiger’s hide, with the goddess Varahi, seated on an elephant. He is pictured with his attributes of a drum, a corpse, a trident, a bowl, a stick and a deer in his six hands. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

Figure 10.6 Granite statue of Śiva as Bhairava from the South Indian Chola kingdom. Eleventh century. 108 cm in height. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

Figure 11.1 Gold glass base probably from Rome. Diameter 10.5 cm. Fourth century . The upper tier shows a torah shrine, two menorahs and other Jewish symbols (lulab and ethrog to the right, amphora and shofar to the left), the lower tier a banqueting table with a fish platter and cushions for seating. The inscription is a funerary invocation to a family. Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Art Resource, NY (ART191276)

Figure 11.2 Gold glass base probably from Rome. Diameter 11 cm. Fourth century . Jonah being flung into the mouth of the Sea Monster (ketos). Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais, Art Resource, NY (ART150761)

Figure 11.3 500 Pruta bill: obverse and reverse, issued by the State of Israel, 1955.

Figure 11.4 The mosaic floor, Beth Alpha Synagogue, sixth century , excavated 1929. Photo: The Picture Art Collection, Alamy Stock Photo.

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

Figure 10.2 Gold coin of Wima Kadphises from Kushan (modern Afghanistan). c. 110–127 . 20 mm diameter. Reverse, with a figure holding trident and animal skin. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

recent catalogue of those coins.29 The attribution depends on misreading the Hellenistic iconography of Poseidon, on a coin with a Greek inscription, as Śiva without any supporting evidence by projecting later depictions backwards for making the identification.30 For the purposes of this chapter, Figure 10.2 may be treated as the earliest clearly datable iconography and perhaps the earliest depiction of the god represented on the coin – whomsoever that god may be, an issue that has provoked some debate over the last twenty to thirty years. The problem is not the recognition that this image resembles later depictions of Śiva; it is the assumption that this image is Śiva. There is no evidence of 29

30

See R. Senior, A Catalogue of Indo-Scythian Coins, 3 vols. (Glastonbury, 2000), particular types 216 and 217, but cf. Bracey, ‘The Coinage of Wima Kadphises’. J. N. Banerjea, The Development of Hindu Iconography (Calcutta, 1956) 119 projects backwards rather than searching for antecedents. He begins by assuming Figure 10.2 is an image of Śiva and, when talking of the Gondophares coin, reasons ‘the standing posture of the god in this type is exactly similar to that of Śiva (undoubtedly so) on some gold coins of Wema Kadphises’. His confidence even causes him to see features, a battle-axe and an animal skin, which do not exist. The pose is part of the standard repertoire of contemporary artists and exactly like (along with divine attributes) earlier images of Poseidon (see O. Bopearachchi, Monnaies GrécoBactriennes et Indo-Grecques: Catalogue Raisonné (Paris, 1991) Antimachus Series 1–4), a far more plausible identification. Elements of the earliest depiction do have antecedents, the trident/battle-axe which Wesho holds is distinctive and appears on a group of first and second century  coins with the inscription bhagavatamahadevasarajaraja, which is usually interpreted as Śaivite, though without clear reasons, see O. Hoover, Handbook of Coins of Baktria and Ancient India (Lancaster, 2013) 284–7.

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Figure 10.3 Limestone relief of Śiva and Parvati, his consort from the Amora hills, Northern India. c. 900 . 38 cm high. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

Figure 10.4 Copper coin (tetradrachm) of Huvishka from Kushan. c. 155–190 . 25 mm diameter. Reverse, with a four-armed figure inscribed Wesho, in Bactrian but in Greek script, holding diadem, thunderbolt, trident and water flask. The detail is of the hands holding diadem and thunderbolt. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Śaivite cults in Afghanistan in the first and second centuries.31 The iconography here and in the Northwest of India predates by centuries any application of the same iconographies to an unequivocal image of Śiva. It predates the Mahapurana, and is probably earlier than the final stages of the formation of the Mahabharata, the earliest textual sources. More seriously the figure is associated by its use on subsequent coins of the same dynasty (Figure 10.4) with a pantheon of divinities who are primarily Iranian in conception, and on which it is clearly labelled, not as Śiva, but by the name Wesho. Let us look at ways in which a practice that takes the interpretation of this iconography as singular and timeless has conditioned the interpretation of these images. The first is the identification of the attributes Wesho holds in his right hands in Figure 10.4. The second is how the 31

Buddhism, particularly the Sarvastivada, Dharmaguptaka, and Mahasamgika sects are represented in Afghanistan and in Northern Pakistan, and some evidence of dedications to Graeco-Roman gods survives. In the fourth century  a cave site came into use at Kashmir Smast in Northern Pakistan which is certainly Śaivite, as demonstrated by inscriptions, see M. N. Khan, ‘Re-interpretation of the Copper Plate Inscription and the Discovery of More Epigraphic Specimens from Kashmir Smast’, Ancient Pakistan 14 (2001) 1–8, but this is the earliest unambiguous evidence.

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interpretation of the image in Figure 10.2 has conditioned the understanding of its inscriptions. The attribute in the deities’ right hand is a single loop of material, that in the upper right hand a small stumpy device held in the centre. These elements are not unique to the coins. The same iconography is known from sculpture and seals in Gandhara (NE of modern Pakistan), and though the coins were probably made in Afghanistan they belong to the same period (second to third centuries ) and likely shared artistic conventions. Alexander Cunningham, one of the first to write a detailed account of the coins, identified the loop as a ‘noose’ and the other object as a ‘drum’. Both he felt appropriate attributes of Śiva.32 They are found together in the aspect of Śiva known as Bhairava. Figure 10.5 is an eighteenth-century watercolour that shows Śiva in this aspect mounted on an elephant. Amongst his attributes are the tiger-skin draped over his arm, the trident, drum (lower left), and a noose (lower right) all shared with the coin. Obviously, the image is of no forensic use for interpreting the earlier images but it shows the sort of Śiva imagery Cunningham would have been exposed to and which he recognized in coins like Figure 10.4. Images of this aspect of the god are older, for example Figure 10.6 is a South Indian depiction of a fierce aspect of Śiva (he is befanged), with the drum in his top right and the noose in his top left, but none of these Bhairava images are as old as the coins. Bhairava, the divine beggar, represents Śiva after he is driven mad (or acts out madness) following one or more polluting murders. In an important essay Stella Kramrisch, one of the twentieth century’s most important scholars of Śiva and a student of Josef Strzygowski, weaves together an account of this episode from Puranic texts.33 These texts compile knowledge on diverse subjects but primarily through the lens of traditions of particular gods in the first millennium, linking them to older texts and also to creation myths. The Puranas do not represent a particular moment in time; they are composed from existing traditions (possibly oral), continue to be altered in later times, and are preserved in still later manuscripts. The Mahapurana, one of the earliest, is believed to have

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A. Cunningham, ‘Coins of the Kushans or Great Yue-Ti’, Numismatic Chronicle 12 (1892) 40–82, 98–159, esp. see 47, 80, 101, 119–20. Kramrisch, The Presence of Śiva, 250–300; I am not aware of a biography of Kramrisch (her papers are archived in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) but an overview of her career is provided in the introduction to B. Stoler Miller (ed.), Exploring India’s Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch (Philadelphia, 1983).

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

Figure 10.5 Detail from a gouache painting on paper from the Punjab. c. 1790–1800 . Śiva in the form of Bhairava, clad in an elephant skin and a tiger’s hide, with the goddess Varahi, seated on an elephant. He is pictured with his attributes of a drum, a corpse, a trident, a bowl, a stick and a deer in his six hands. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

been composed principally in the fourth or fifth centuries . Kramrisch mixes it freely with other later examples which clearly refer to the drum but not the noose. The texts and the sculptures postdate the coin images by centuries, and the coins (Figures 10.2 and 10.4) belong to the Northwest, parts of modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, while the texts are probably from Northern India. To construct our understanding of the earlier with reference to the later would be bizarre unless contemporary comparanda were lacking (they are not). Yet a hundred years after Cunningham this device was still being referred to as a noose in a catalogue of Indian sculpture, where Pal

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Figure 10.6 Granite statue of Śiva as Bhairava from the South Indian Chola kingdom. Eleventh century. 108 cm in height. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

wonders if the noose, paśa, might be an Indianization of the Hellenistic diadem.34 In fact, the problem of identifying the object in Śiva’s hand is easily solved by contemporary comparanda. It is the same as the object in the hands of most other gods depicted on contemporary coins, the same as that worn by the king on the obverse of the very same coin – it is a diadem. The identification of what is certainly a thunderbolt, not a drum, in the upper hands has been more easily accepted, though it is not hard to find descriptions of it as a drum. It is possible that the noose and drum on later depictions are genuine substitutions of objects which resembled the diadem and thunderbolt on these early depictions 34

P. Pal, Indian Sculpture, Volume 1, c.500BC to AD700 (Los Angeles, 1986), 77.

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

but which were understandable for later Indian Śaivites, though simple coincidence cannot be excluded. What is not possible is for the connection to run in an antichronological direction unless the chronological relationship is destroyed by collapsing the time distinction between second-century images, fourthto tenth-century texts, and eleventh-century and later depictions. But if the images of Śiva are timeless, because Śiva was always depicted that way, primordially, it becomes easy to interpret the antecedent in terms of its successors.

6.

Mahesvara, Śiva and Two Episodes of Debate

On the earliest coins, such as Figure 10.2, the image is not labelled. Instead there is an inscription in the Kharoshthi script giving the titles of the king. Whitehead wrote of the inscription: in the kharosthi inscription he is called ‘The great king, king of kings, __ lord of the world, the Mahiśvara, the defender’. Mahiśvara is a name of Śiva, so perhaps Vima Kadphises claimed to be an incarnation of the Indian destroying deity.35

Now this clearly rests on the assumption that the epithet Mahiśvara (literally ‘Great Lord’) is in fact the same as Mahesvara, which with variable orthography appears as paramamāhessarassa and paramamāheśvara in inscriptions of the fourth century, where it is intended to indicate a devotee of Śiva.36 But the inscription is simply a list of titles and the name of the king. They are entirely in keeping with the use of inscriptions on earlier coins, though the titles and types are innovative as a regular gold coinage had not been made in the region for several centuries. Unfortunately, the desire to link the text to the god persists, despite it clearly being a list of royal titles.37 On two occasions in the last thirty years scholars have debated the identity of the figure on Kushan coins – first, in a series of academic articles in the 1990s, and second on two online discussion forums in 35

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R. B. Whitehead, Catalogue of Coins in the Punjab Museum, Lahore, Volume 1: Indo-Greek Coins (Oxford, 1914) 173–4. A. Sanderson, ‘The Śaiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism during the Early Medieval Period’, in S. Einoo (ed.), Genesis and Development of Tantrism (Tokyo, 2009) 41–348, esp. 44. See for example F. Grenet, ‘Iranian Gods in Hindu Garb: The Zoroastrian Pantheon of the Bactrians and Sogdians, Second–Eighth Centuries’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute 20 (2006) 87–100, esp. 88.

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2008. These episodes show how ingrained the notion of timeless Hinduism is for the practical interpretation of images. One of the difficulties in interpreting the image as Śaivite had always been the label ‘OHþO’ on some coins, with the suggested derivations from epithets of Śiva being considered unsatisfactory.38 There had been alternative suggestions, but these had appeared in German and Japanese (languages in which few Kushan scholars were conversant) and had little effect on general interpretations until the early 1990s.39

The First Debate In the early 1990s, an article suggesting a new solution was submitted by Gail to the journal Silk Road Art and Archaeology.40 The editor, Tanabe, published it but alongside his own rebuttal.41 Gail had proposed to read the name Wesho as derived from an epithet of Śiva known from medieval sources. He was aware of an alternative,42 that the name Wesho was the same as the element Weš in the name of a Sogdian god Weš-parkar – whose iconography postdates the coins by a few centuries but was similar to them. However, Gail insisted that the image ‘without any doubt, represents the Indian Śiva’,43 and that therefore the Kushan image could not be related to the Sogdian one. Though both the evidence for Śiva and Wešparkar (images and text) are later than the second-century Kushan image, Gail gave primacy to the medieval text. The reasoning is not explicit but it is undoubtedly founded on the notion of timelessness. To demonstrate an epithet of Śiva in a medieval text is to demonstrate it for Śiva from his beginning – and to recognize an image of Śiva now is to see Śiva as always akin to that image. Tanabe in his response concluded that Wesho represents some form of syncretism – a Kushan (or in Tanabe’s terminology

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J. R. Rosenfield, The Dynastic Art of the Kushans (Princeton, 1967) 92–5, esp. 93: ‘I do not believe the philological problems have been thoroughly explored’. M. Yamada, ‘Kushana kahei no Shiva shinzouwa hatashite Shivaka’, Seinanajiakenkya 22 (1971) 37–50; H. Humbach, ‘Vayu, Śiva und der Spiritus Vivens im ostiranischen Synkretismus’, in J. Duchesne-Guillemin (ed.), Monumentum H.S. Nyberg, vol. 1 (Leiden, 1975) 397–408. A. J. Gail, ‘OHþO = Bhūteśa: Śiva as Lord of the Demons in the Kusāna Realm’, Silk Road Art _ _ and Archaeology 2 (1991–2) 43–9. K. Tanabe, ‘OHÞO: Another Kushan Wind God’, Silk Road Art and Archaeology 2 (1991–2) 51–72. Humbach, ‘Vayu, Śiva und der Spiritus Vivens im ostiranischen Synkretismus’. Gail, ‘OHþO = Bhūteśa: Śiva as Lord of the Demons in the Kusāna Realm’, 43. _ _

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

‘Avestan’) god who assimilates much of Śiva (and a little bit of Heracles) and whose name is shared with that of Weš-parkar.44 Amongst Kushan specialists, but only among specialists, this position would become something of a consensus, though its use of the terminology of ‘syncretism’ glosses over many difficulties. The next intervention, in the same journal, came from Lo Muzio. He placed the images of Wesho in their political context as part of an iconography of divine support for the ruler. The coins present Wesho amongst a pantheon of divinities all of whom offer some symbol of authority, frequently the diadem, or make a gesture of blessing. These gods, with two exceptions, form a group of more than twenty which have no links with Śaivite cults. Despite this Lo Muzio rejected the syncretic solution preferring to see the image simply as Śiva on the grounds that it ‘is not possible to point out in the figure of OHþO [Wesho] any trait proper to Vayu’ (Vayu being the Avestan god assumed to be represented by the name Weš-parkar).45 The reasoning is not explicit but it seems to be the idea that later images of Śiva holding a trident demonstrate his association with the trident and thus the trident cannot be a ‘proper’ attribute of Wesho (or Vayu). Again, the underlying assumption of timelessness enables a backwards chronology for purposes of interpretation. Somewhat parallel to this debate Srinivasan published a survey of the evidence of early Śiva images. This publication did not, unfortunately, inform the debate, nor was it informed by it. Srinivasan outlined the Śaivite images which predate the Kushan depictions,46 and then compared the two early groups of iconography that are available, that in Gangetic India and that associated with the Northwest and thus the Kushan empire and the coins. The Gangetic group are associated with the linga, a phallic representation of the god. The figural representation of the god is usually revealed in the mukhalinga, where anthropomorphic representations emerge from the linga itself.47 These generally share the

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Tanabe, ‘ΟΗÞΟ: Another Kushan Wind God’, 64–5. C. Lo Muzio, ‘OHþO: A Sovereign God’, Silk Road Art and Archaeology 4 (1995–6) 161–74, 166. D. Srinivasan, Many Heads, Arms and Eyes: Origin, Meaning and Form of Multiplicity in Indian Art (Leiden, 1997) 221–6, though note that the Reh inscription is in fact of Kushan period, as is the Taxila seal used by a person with the theophoric name ‘Śiva?’ and she misattributes the presence of Śiva on both the coins of Maues and Gondophares (see Bracey, ‘The Coinage of Wima Kadphises’). Srinivasan, Many Heads, Arms and Eyes, 223.

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Figure 10.7 The Gudimallam Linga, sandstone, with Śiva standing on the dwarf _ Apasmara, from the Parasurameswara Temple in Andhra Pradesh, Southeastern India. Perhaps first century . Photo: Creative Commons Licence on Wikipedia

same iconographic features, a water pot and a spear. Only four images are widely accepted to predate the Kushan period of which the earliest is the Gudimallam Linga in which a naked ithyphallic figure of the god emerges _ from the linga with his own erect penis (Figure 10.7). Interpreting this image is difficult. Though it shares much of the iconography of the Gangetic valley types, it was made far away in South India. Taking it as representing the same idea runs the risk of collapsing geographic distinctions in the same way some scholars have collapsed temporal distinctions to associate Wesho and Śiva. The linga is very familiar from later Śaivite practice but the iconography of the god on these earliest linga is unlike later depictions. As already noted, later Śaivite iconography resembles the Kushan coins of the Northwest. As Srinivasan recognizes, ‘the most

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

characteristic śaiva iconography [that of Wesho] does not reflect the prevailing śaiva iconography in the Doab’.48 The two groups are not entirely different; they share the ithyphallic connection and a water pot (the Northwest group employs it occasionally, the Gangetic group always). Though Srinivasan raises the two distinct but related iconographies she does not recognize the possibility that they represented two distinct but related sets of beliefs. This is partly because, although she is focused on a historical change at a particular time (the development of multiplicity in Indian art from the ‘second century BC through the third century AD’)49 she gathers evidence for it by treating the category of Hinduism as unproblematic and collapsing the chronological differences between prehistoric Vedic and late medieval texts to apply them to the images.50 Though not as detailed as Srinivasan’s account, Cribb’s intervention in the debate does recognize the disconnect between the Northwestern and Gangetic sculptures.51 The article is the most detailed account of the coinage currently available. Cribb supports the syncretism position not just for the coins but for all images in the Northwest: they are Wesho in the guise of Śiva, to be distinguished from the linga cult of Śiva in the Gangetic region. ‘Syncretism’ is frequently used in these debates to elide the problems of the relationship between Śiva and Wesho. It allows Gnoli to state that ‘it is

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I am omitting several complexities in this discussion, including that the Pashupata also had their own independent iconography and the suggestion that the early linga cult might not be Śaivite either. See M. Aktor, ‘The Śivalinga between Artefact and Nature: The Ghrsneśvaralinga __ _ in Varanasi and the Bānalingas from the Narmada River’, in K. A. Jacobsen, M. Aktor and _ K. Myrvold (eds.), Objects of Worship in South Asian Religions: Forms, Practices, and Meanings (London, 2015), 14–34, esp. 18 and B. Flemming, The Cult of the Jyotirlingas and the History of Śaivite Worship’ (PhD thesis, McMaster University, 2007), suggesting the linga iconography might be a Yakshi cult absorbed by the later Śaivites during their expansion. This would render the discussion here unmanageable, though it should be remembered that the reality was probably unmanageably complex once the beliefs and practices of people across centuries and thousands of miles are considered. Srinivasan, Many Heads, Arms and Eyes, 3. Many historians do avoid the term Hindu when working in a pre-Gupta context preferring designations such as Brahmin, Śaivite or Vaishnavite, but some like Srinivasan are happy to employ it. Srinivasan has no difficulty in ascribing multiplicity as an issue ‘only with the Hindu deities’ (Many Heads, Arms and Eyes, 4) though the example she explores alongside it is a Jain sculpture. The identification of ‘Hindu’ deities in art that is overtly Buddhist or Jain ought to be problematic but it is not treated as such – see for example D. Srinivasan, ‘Hindu Deities in Gandharan Art’, in Luczanits (ed.), Gandhara, the Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan, 130–4. J. Cribb, ‘Shiva Images on Kushan and Kushano-Sasanian Coins’, in K. Tanabe, J. Cribb and H. Wang (eds.), Studies in Silk Road Coins and Culture (Kamakura, 1997) 11–67.

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quite possible that a three-headed Śiva influenced the iconography of οηþο [Wesho]’.52 Gnoli does not tackle the problem of how depictions of Wesho can be influenced by an iconography which postdates them. It is clear that he assumes images are Śiva unless they are specifically labelled as Wesho and that our recognition of the Wesho image as Śiva demonstrates that the three-headed iconography of Śiva must already have existed at that time. In an article published in the Bulletin of the Asia Institute, Carter deployed two wall panels depicting a similar iconography to the coins and statues of Wesho.53 Carter used them as part of a syncretic argument to return Śiva to the centre of the stage. First, she suggested that an Iranian version of Rudra-Śiva, Śarva, was elevated from a demonic position under the Achaemenids (fifth to fourth centuries ). This was achieved by fusing him with the god Vāyu to become the ‘syncretistic OEŠO [Wesho]’.54 Centuries later the Kushans ‘adopted OEŠO/Śarva as a deity recognizable as Śiva in their Indian territories to serve as a unifying element in their conquered empire’.55 The iconography is later adopted in a Śiva context but this causes no problem for Carter, as the collapsing of the distinction between the Vedic god Rudra and the early historic Śiva means that Wesho’s iconography was borrowed from Śiva anyway. These panels are interesting because, although they are unprovenanced, they have a context, as part of a set of four. Only the two used by Carter depict the four-armed god Wesho. To interpret these as Śaivite in something like the Puranic (mid-first millennium) form of Śaivism, it would be reasonable to expect these juxtapositions to be Śiva’s consort, or his sons Ganesh and Karttikeya, or perhaps the other supreme gods, Brahma and Vishnu. They are not any of these. One is similar to the Kushan depictions of the god Pharro, identified by the flames emanating from his shoulders, the other is possibly Sarapis, a complex syncretistic figure of Hellenistic Egyptian origin.56 All of these gods are shown receiving worship from a figure dressed in clothes associated with the political elite of the Kushan period. 52

53 54 55 56

G. Gnoli, ‘Some Notes upon the Religious Significance of the Rabatak Inscription’, in W. Sundermann, A. Lintze and F. de Bloi (eds.), Exegisti Monumenta: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas Sims-Williams (Wiesbaden, 2009) 141–59, esp. 148. Now both in the Metropolitan Museum along with two others (accession numbers 2000.42.1-4). M. Carter, ‘OEŠO or Śiva’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute 9 (1995) 143–58, esp. 150. Ibid., 154. A bearded standing figure could equally be Zeus, Ahura Mazda, or Oxus (for the latter two see R. Göbl, Münzprägung des Kušānreiches (Vienna, 1984), types 240 and 241), all of which have rather vague attributes at this period. Regardless the figure cannot be linked to any god associated with Śiva.

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

The juxtaposition with Pharro and Sarapis strongly suggests this is not a Śaivite context. The same conclusion has always been possible from coins, but the nature of coins means it is much easier to dismiss the juxtapositions as incidental – an eclectic mix of gods designed for a diverse population with no coherence as a pantheon. In this way Wesho has usually been identified as Śiva and isolated from the other images as part of a small contingent of ‘Hindu’ (sometimes ‘Indian’) gods. Or ‘syncretism’ has been used to elide the difference between the Iranian/Bactrian Wesho and the early centuries  Śiva linga cult of the Gangetic valley. By this stage in the debate enough evidence had been deployed to demonstrate the distinction between the religious understanding of Wesho and that of the early Śiva cults associated with the lingam, and that the later Śiva iconography derived from Wesho. There were certainly elements – the water pot and phallic association – which were adopted in Wesho’s image from the early linga cults; but other elements derived from a variety of sources, such as the club of Heracles on some Kushan depictions. The degree to which these borrowings reflected mutual recognition of the respective deities by their followers or were accompanied by the transfer of more than iconography, and thus how syncretistic they were, remains unclear. Despite resistance, some specialists have swung gradually towards a position recently summarized by Sanderson: it is clear that what we have here is an interpretatio indica of non-Indian deities, Hellenistic and Iranian, features of whose iconography were incorporated in the development of Śiva during this period.57

In a broader intervention the Iranian specialist Grenet applied a similar argument to a whole pantheon of gods, examining both Kushan depictions and those in Sogdia. Zoroastrian or Mazdean-based religions, lacking religious iconography of their own, adopted iconographies from contemporary Gandharan and Gangetic art for the purpose of depicting their gods.58 Grenet made an argument only for borrowing of iconography and assumed that ideas and rituals, such as the Hindu rājasūya investiture ceremony, came with the admixture of iconography.59 Grenet’s account of Iranian and Indian syncretism does not escape the notion of timeless Hinduism. For example, in his figure 16, he schematically represents the

57

58 59

A. Sanderson, ‘The Impact of Inscriptions on the Interpretation of Early Śaiva Literature’, IndoIranian Journal 56 (2013) 211–44, esp. 222. Grenet, ‘Iranian Gods in Hindu Garb’. Ibid., 89.

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process by which a syncretic god combines the deified Iranian king Wahrām and the Hindu god Karttikeya. He presents two chains of connection, a Kushan coin through a coin of Hormizd III supplying the crown and an Indian sculpture (c) through a wooden relief from Panjikent (d) supplying the basic iconography for a terracotta (e). The caption, including the dates, reads: (c) Kārttikeya, stone relief from India, 10th c.; (d) Wahrām as Kārttikeya, wooden relief, Panjikent, early 8th c.; (e) syncretic image of Wahrām and Kārttikeya, terracotta figure from Samarkand, 6th or 7th c.60

The order of the influence proposed exactly inverts the chronological order in which the material objects were made. This passes without comment and it is hard to find a more overt case of the way the notion of timeless Hinduism collapses chronological differences. The debate had, however, worked through in the literature. Wesho was not Śiva, and the terminology of ‘syncretism’ was used to paper over the cognitive dissonance this created with notions of timelessness in the understanding of Hinduism.

The Second Debate The second episode of debate took place online. It was shorter and added no new analysis or primary materials but reiterated much of what had been said in the first debate. On 5 March 2010 responding to an aside that arose during a discussion of Mithra on the Kushanas Yahoo group, a public forum, Francesco Brighenti briefly outlined the arguments that Wesho was the Sogdian wind god Veshkapar. An amateur, with no knowledge of the scholarship outlined above, refused to accept the identification as he argued Wesho looks like Śiva (‘has the shape of Śiva’). John Huntington made his first intervention on 7 March agreeing that it was obvious it was Śiva, ‘it is better to take the image at face value, i.e., it is the deity we now recognize as Shiva’. Huntington is a leading art historian and was undoubtedly aware of the previous debates but clearly did not find it problematic to identify the image on the basis of later iconographies. On 9 March elements of the discussion were cross-posted to Indo Eurasia, a moderated list run by specialists in Indo-European studies. Huntington expressed the opinion in that post that images were more important than words and that therefore he was confident the Kushans ‘placed a

60

Ibid., 95.

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

recognizable Shivite image on their coins as a communication factor of the “approval” of Shiva of their reign – regardless of what he was called’. Interventions followed, notably by Joe Cribb and Nicholas SimsWilliams, and the broad outlines of scholarly opinion can be summed up that Wesho was a syncretic Kushan deity who absorbed much of Śiva while retaining a name related to the Sogdian Wes-parkar. Doris Srinivasan commented on how unsurprising this was and the Indo Eurasia moderator Steve Farmer tagged it as a ‘hyper-syncretism’ typical of Gandhara. Several of these correspondents had of course contributed articles in the late 1990s, notably Cribb and Srinivasan, as discussed above. Farmer would go on to point out (10 March 2009) that the discussion had been played out previously in October 2007 on the same list and to express surprise that despite being settled by the general syncretism hypothesis, it continued routinely to replay on the internet: With gods merging everywhere in this period, what’s the big deal about Oeshu [Wesho]? Is it just another example (as Benjy suggested in a post in 2007) of an all-too-familiar ‘mapping’ or backdating of much later ‘Hindu’ gods onto earlier regional deities? Is its source resistance by conservative religious forces to the idea that later ‘Hindu’ gods drew heavily on non-Indian sources?61

It is not necessary to dwell here on Farmer’s own confrontation with conservative religious forces – he had just had a bruising encounter with Hindutva campaigners touched on elsewhere in this volume (see the discussion of the California Textbook Case in Chapter 12). That was clearly not the motivation of a noted art historian like John Huntington in resisting the weight of evidence. If you collapse space and time so that Śiva was always Śiva, and always looked that way, then Śiva can never look like Wesho, but Wesho must always look like Śiva.

7.

Conclusion

This chapter has presented less of an argument than a series of disconnected vignettes intended to illustrate an underlying problem in Indian art history. It began by exploring how definitions of Hinduism could create a notion of a timeless religion, the ‘eternal law’ as it is sometimes called. There is much politics (the discussion of which has been postponed to Chapter 12) and historiography in this, but it also reflects strategies in 61

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Indo-Eurasian_research/conversations/messages/12239.

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Indian textual sources, which project practices back to primordial time. The ninth-century play from Kashmir, the Āgamadambara, discusses _ precisely these sorts of claims in relation to the oldest Indian religious texts, the Vedas, in its denouement (Āg 4.125ff.). It also no doubt reflects institutional realities. Every scholar is aware of the danger of confusing the account they give with the reality it seeks to represent, as summarized in Jonathan Z. Smith’s famous title Map is Not Territory.62 What is often forgotten is that our maps are not of a single order. There are fewer specialists in the Western academy for South Asia than for European history. Institutions, or projects, often make do with a single South Asian specialist, where they have several working on an equivalent span of European history. The period and cultural context individuals must command is correspondingly greater and often for an audience less attuned to the specific problems of the field.63 All maps are simpler than the territory, but the maps Europeans and Americans make for other Europeans and Americans of South Asian history are far simpler than the maps they make (for example) of the Roman past. And finally there is an issue touched upon in other chapters in this book on the equally problematic questions of ‘Roman’ religion. The ‘Abrahamic’ religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are not unremittingly monolithic any more than ‘Hinduism’ or ‘paganism’ are infinitely pluralistic. It is easy to see how simplification can lead to reification. Returning to Kashmir and the Āgamadambara once more, it is clear from the suppression of the _ ‘Black Blankets’ that there were limits on religious expression in medieval India. However, it would be wilful misrepresentation to deny that the religions of India often bracketed as ‘Hinduism’ shared, borrowed, and co-opted, in a way that blurs any lines we might wish to draw.64 And if it is 62 63

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J. Z. Smith, Map is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden, 1978). G. G. Burford, ‘Asymmetry, Essentialism, and Covert Cultural Imperialism: Should Buddhists and Christians do Theoretical Work Together?’ Buddhist-Christian Studies 31 (2011) 147–57 offers a reflective series of comments on this problem from the perspective of Buddhist comparative theology. The ratio of Christian teaching to Buddhist, greater than 38:1, in American graduate studies tends to create essentialist images of Buddhism, to group disparate traditions under single headings, and to construct Buddhism through Christian concepts and terminology (149ff.). S. Pollock, ‘The Alternative Classicism of Classical India’, Seminar 671 (2015), www.columbia.edu/cu/mesaas/faculty/directory/pollock_pub/ (September 2015) recently pointed to this as a significant difference between the intellectual traditions of ancient Greece and India. From a more specialist perspective Sanderson (‘The Impact of Inscriptions’, 215) says the sources ‘disclose very little about the prevalence of the practices and beliefs that they advocate, of where and when they originated, of where and when they spread, or of the institutional infrastructure and patronage that enabled and sustained these developments’.

‘Hindu’ Art and the Primordial Śiva

harder to draw a line, if it is harder to see beginnings, the subject of study is itself undivided – as Kramrisch says of Śiva, ‘time beyond time’. In identifying elements of the problems that lie in our methods of analysis or, as in other chapters, in the politics of living traditions, we should not forget that some of the problems are in the subject itself. None of this is intended to suggest that there is not good work on first millennium South Asian religion or art; there clearly is. Nor is it to suggest that historians are unaware of an issue they have been actively discussing since the early twentieth century, and especially since the 1970s.65 In this respect the second part of this chapter, which explored a very specific problem about the identification of iconography in the early centuries , was a necessary juxtaposition. Much good work, by excellent scholars, has been done on that problem, but the tendency to project modern notions of Hinduism backwards has shaped the discussion in subtle and important ways. These vignettes suggest the degree to which the use of the term Hindu, its inappropriateness as a member of the Western conceptual class religions (at least so far as that term is generally used in this volume), the nature of the sources, their claims to timelessness, the legacy of colonial scholarship, trends in South Asian historiography, and institutional practices in the Western academy, have collectively served to underpin ideas which make a comparative project that incorporates South Asia very difficult.66 The more detailed example of a particular debate over the identity of Wesho shows how difficult it is to entirely disentangle the scholarly exercise from these theoretical problems. Knowing that there is a problem is not the same as avoiding that problem. And though the details are specific to South Asia and Hinduism, different but equally problematic enmeshing of religious, political or academic narratives are to be found in other chapters of this book. The existence of such distinct and complex problems in each subject raises the question of whether the different scholarly enterprises discussed in this volume are commensurable, or if their competing internal narratives pose too much of a barrier to comparison.

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For a recent interesting discussion with references, see A. Murphy, ‘Dissent and Diversity in South Asian Religion’, in S. Chambers and P. Nosco (eds.), Dissent on Core Beliefs: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Cambridge, 2015) 158–85, esp. 160–8. There is a political thread that feeds into this as well which is touched upon in Chapter 12.

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Post-Colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies

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Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State (1948)    ś 

1.

A Cipher for Christian Origins

The traditional view of late antique Jewish art is that there was none. Or, insofar as there was some, it ought not to have existed.1 This represents a deep cultural reflex about ‘Jewish aniconism’ whose origins in Judaic Scripture itself were replicated in ancient Graeco-Roman accounts of the Jews.2 In this sense both within antiquity and also in modernity, Judaism has been associated with a resistance to images by contrast with the aesthetically paradigmatic heritage of Hellenism. In terms of the complex of difficulties about, and reluctances to, images experienced by the religions which emerged in part in the wake of Judaism – namely Christianity and Islam – the idealized model of a prior Jewish aniconism and of simple worship, scripturally informed, by contrast with the risks of pagan idolatry that many Christians and Muslims long suspected to lie in art, has been a powerful factor in shaping religious ideology throughout late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the era of the Reformation and into modernity.3 In the modern era, when art history itself was formed as a discipline, the Protestant legacy of reading back the history of post-Reformation idealism 1

2

3

On the idea of Jewish ‘aniconism’ in late antiquity, see S. Fine, Art and Judaism in the GrecoRoman World (Cambridge, 2005) 47–59, 69–81, 95–7, 110–23 and L. Levine, ‘Figural Art in Ancient Judaism’, Ars Judaica 1 (2005) 9–26. For the modern historiography of Jewish aniconism, see K. Bland, The Artless Jew (Princeton, 2000) 13–36 on the German origins of the model in the nineteenth century, 37–58 for ‘Anglo-American variations’, 59–70 on the ‘premodern consensus’. On the still more anti-iconic theme of iconoclasm in late antique Judaism, see S. Fine, ‘Iconoclasm and the Art of Late Antique Palestinian Synagogues’, in L. Levine and Z. Weiss (eds.), From Dura to Sepphoris (Portsmouth, RI, 2000) 183–94 and A. Wharton, ‘Erasure: Eliminating the Space of Late Antique Judaism’, 195–214 in the same volume. For instance Strabo 16.35: ‘People should leave off image-carving and . . . worship God without an image . . .’; on the very complex case of Josephus, see now J. Ehrenkrook, Sculpting Idolatry in Flavian Rome: (An)Iconic Rhetoric in the Writings of Flavius Josephus (Atlanta, GA, 2011) with e.g. the interesting conclusion: ‘A rather stark polarity between eikon and Ioudaios does indeed emerge in the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’ (173). For the Hebrew tradition of aniconism as underlying iconoclasm, defined as the destruction of the idols of foreign religion, as central to Reformist ideology in the Anglo-American context, see J. Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford, 2010) esp. 5–9.

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about an essential and authentic ancient Christianity, which was purely scriptural and aniconic, into its supposed Jewish origins, was coupled with a powerful Calvinist identification with the Jews. Such views are founded on a literalist reading of Scripture as if it were factual – most notably of the second of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me . . . (Exodus 20:4–6)

This text could be supplemented by further biblical commentary,4 notably including imprecations against idolatry,5 and the idealism would be translated into canonical forms of philosophical aesthetics in the Enlightenment, for instance by Immanuel Kant: Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, nor any likeness either of that which is in heaven, or on the earth, or yet under the earth, etc. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people felt in its civilized period for its religion when it compared itself with other peoples, or the pride that Mohammedanism inspired.6

The fact that the texts chosen were highly selective and tendentious, ignoring plenty of passages from the same Scripture, which extolled images (notably the complex instructions for making the Ark of the Covenant in Exodus 25, which include golden statues of Cherubim at verses 18–22), was irrelevant to their impact in the long history of Christian reflections on images, and especially in an intensely Protestant nineteenth-century dispensation both for theology and for art history. For – in this discourse – Jewish aniconism was the necessary precursor of

4 5

6

Cf Leviticus 26:1 and Deuteronomy 4:15–18; 5:8; 27:15; Isaiah 40:18–21. E.g. Exodus 23:24; 34:13–14; Deuteronomy 4:23–8; Deuteronomy 7:5; Psalm 115:2–8; Isaiah 2:8; Isaiah 44:9–20; Isaiah 46:1–7; Ezekiel 6:4–6. For a subtle account of idolatry in Judaism and beyond, including issues of representation and religious practice, see M. Halbertal and A. Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA, 1992). I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge, 2000) 156, with some discussion by Bland, The Artless Jew, 15–16. For an interesting discussion of the ways ‘the Enlightenment attitude to art is intimately responsive to, and shaped by, iconoclasm’ as well as being ‘itself an iconoclastic movement’ see Simpson, Under the Hammer, 11, 116–54 (quote from 116).

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

primitive Christianity, before the Church’s (Catholic) corruption by various forms of Graeco-Roman idolatry, imported into Christian life through adaptation to lay desires or syncretism with Roman practices. This Protestant story, with a number of variations and apologetics added over the years, has been fundamentally formative of most attitudes to Jewish image-making in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, wrapped up as it was with profound cultural ideals about what is, or ought to be desirable, in terms of the uses of art in religion. The story was even largely true in factual terms, so long as no one had dug up any of what has turned out to be copious archaeological evidence for ancient decorated synagogues in Palestine, a process that only began in earnest in the early twentieth century.7 In tandem with the Protestant account of the lack of ancient Jewish art, including in late antiquity, there was a Roman Catholic story of Jewish art, constructed in Rome.8 Here, as early as 1602, catacomb remains and paintings had been discovered which were interpreted as the work of Jews and for Jews – a form of Jewish art.9 That is, Jewish art was discovered as part of the Counter-Reformation archaeological project in Rome to counteract Protestant anti-imagism with evidence of the use of images by the earliest Christians, as material-cultural proof of the continuity and validity of Roman tradition.10 The archaeological narrative of the arts of the Jewish community in Rome depends on a number of old and very problematic

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For the early Zionist archaeology, see E. Meyers, ‘Ancient Synagogues: An Archaeological Introduction’, in S. Fine (ed.), Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World (New York, 1996) 3–10. The first survey, which reports on a serious excavation effort and in essence founded the field, is H. Kohl and C. Wattzinger, Antike Synagogen in Galilaea (Leipzig, 1916) followed by S. Krauss, Synagogale Altertümer (Berlin, 1922). The next survey, and the first to frame the archaeological discoveries in an explicitly Zionist framework, is E. L. Sukenik, Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece (London, 1934). For a brief account of earlier discussions – notably the travel texts of Edward Robinson and the epigraphy of Ernst Renan in the nineteenth century, see D. Milson, Art and Architecture of the Synagogue in Late Antique Palestine: In the Shadow of the Church (Leiden, 2007) 20–4. For standard accounts of Jewish art in Rome, see L. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome (Leiden, 1995); R. Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora (Leiden, 1998) 263–310; L. Levine, Visual Judaism in Late Antiquity (New Haven, 2012) 91–5, 141–65. On Antonio Bosio and the Monteverde Catacomb (which he discovered in 1602), see Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome, 8–10; S. Fine, ‘Jewish Art and Biblical Exegesis in the GrecoRoman World’, in J. Spier (ed.), Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (Fort Worth, TX, 2007) 25–49, esp. 25. The ideological forces were powerful. For some discussion in respect of the reuse of early Christian sarcophagi as altars, see J. Elsner, ‘The Christian Museum in Southern France: Antiquity, Display and Liturgy from the Counter-Reformation to the Aftermath of Vatican I’, Oxford Art Journal 31/2 (2009) 181–204.

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assumptions. First there is a virtually ubiquitous assumption that we can determine now what was and was not Jewish iconography and that there was a firm and mutually exclusive distinction between Jews, Pagans and Christians in late antiquity, with the result that what we identify as ‘Jewish art’ is in some essential, religiously exclusive and ethnic sense ‘Jewish’. Arguably both these premises are untenable and we cannot know a great deal of what scholars of Jewish art assume we do know.11 For instance, we have fourth-century gold glasses from the Catacombs in Rome (but not better provenanced than this – so we usually do not know from which catacomb or the specific circumstances and context of deposition) that depict subjects like the Menorah or the Temple, which are symbols, not aniconic in themselves but that nonetheless avoid the human figure (Figure 11.1).12 These are always interpreted as ‘Jewish’.13 We have, in addition, gold glasses also from the Catacombs of Rome (perhaps indeed products of the same workshops and employed for the same functions, perhaps from the very same Catacombs as the ‘Jewish’ glasses) that depict narratives from the Hebrew Bible like the story of Jonah (Figure 11.2).

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For further discussion, see J. Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and Agendas: Jewish and Early Christian Art in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 83 (2003) 114–28. ‘Jewish’ gold glasses: E. R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman World (Princeton, 1953) vol. 2, 108–20; Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome, 81–5. So the example in Figure 11.1 is interesting. It is no. 6700 in the Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst at Berlin to which it arrived in 1912 as an anonymous gift. The online catalogue of the Museum describes it as ‘vermutlich Vigna Randanini’, i.e. ‘presumably (from the Jewish catacomb in Rome known as the) Vigna Randanini’. See www.smb-digital.de/eMuseumPlus?service=direct/1/ResultLightboxView/result.t1.collection_ lightbox.$TspTitleImageLink.link&sp=10&sp=Scollection&sp=SfieldValue&sp=0&sp=1&sp= 3&sp=Slightbox_3x4&sp=0&sp=Sdetail&sp=0&sp=F&sp=T&sp=6. This assumption of provenance, for which there is no evidence whatsoever, is dependent on the presumption that Jewish-modulated iconography certainly indicates Jewish patronage, something entirely unprovable for this period. It becomes a firm fact in the website of the picture provider Art Resource, from which we purchased the image, which states it is from the ‘Vigna Rondanini’. See www.artres.com/C.aspx?VP3=ViewBox_VPage&VBID=2UN365BGK9PB2&IT= ZoomImageTemplate01_VForm&IID=2UNTWAKIGIGI&PN=5&CT=Search&SF=0. Now in fact the inscription (transcribed as SALBO DOMINO VITALE | CVM COIVGE ET FILIOS | IPSORV FELIX BENER | I | V | S), difficult to interpret and certainly full of errors in its Latin, is likely to be a general farewell in death invocation to a lord, Vitalis, and his family and certainly offers no specific Jewish implications: see Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, vol. 2, 118. This, combined with the lack of provenance and the banqueting iconography at the lower part (which is perfectly normal in Pagan and in Christian as well as Jewish circles in Rome in the period), makes it impossible to be certain whether this object was made for and used by Jews, relatively assimilated to Roman culture, or was made for non-Jewish Romans appropriating the ‘good luck’ connotations of a Jewish-themed iconography at the upper tier of the image.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

Figure 11.1 Gold glass base probably from Rome. Diameter 10.5 cm. Fourth century . The upper tier shows a torah shrine, two menorahs and other Jewish symbols (lulab and ethrog to the right, amphora and shofar to the left), the lower tier a banqueting table with a fish platter and cushions for seating. The inscription is a funerary invocation to a family. Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Art Resource, NY (ART191276). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Figure 11.2 Gold glass base probably from Rome. Diameter 11 cm. Fourth century . Jonah being flung into the mouth of the Sea Monster (ketos). Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais, Art Resource, NY (ART150761). A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

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These are always interpreted as ‘Christian’.14 Now it is certainly true that the Jonah narrative is frequent in early Christian art (on lamps, sarcophagi, mural paintings) as a type for the death and resurrection of Jesus, and that it appears in this form in what are very likely to be Christian gold glasses, such as the fourth-century fragmentary bowl from Cologne in the British Museum.15 But on what basis, given the paucity of contextual data, can we certainly say that the figural representations of the Jonah narrative (or indeed of other Old Testament stories such as Moses striking the rock or Adam and Eve) are certainly Christian and certainly not Jewish? And on what basis can we say that the Menorah was only and ever exclusively ‘Jewish’ with no potential purchase on the affections of Christian or Pagan viewers? The only grounds are the assumption that Jews were committed to aniconism and opposed to figural representation – a pure primitivism of cult which was seen as positive (that is, to be emulated) by Protestants and as something negative (that is, to be surpassed) by Catholics. Of course the assumption of Jewish aniconism, based on the tendentious reading of Scripture, has been shown to be incorrect, at least as far as the materialcultural remains of late antiquity are concerned – but that has made no difference to the interpretation of surviving materials from Rome as ‘Jewish’ and ‘Christian’. And conversely, when we do find ‘Jewish’ gold glasses in ‘Christian’ catacombs, how come we do not ask the obvious question about whether our categories of classification are not in fact flawed?16 Of course what has been said here about gold glasses may be extended to other kinds of artefacts such as lamps, gems and wall paintings. In addition to the essentialist assumption that we can determine some kind of Christian or Jewish identity as it existed nearly two millennia ago from the iconographies of objects, as interpreted by us using modern

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15

16

For instance, Spier Picturing the Bible, 186 for an example in the Louvre and A. Grabar, The Beginnings of Christian Art, 200–395 (London, 1967) 23 for an example in the Vatican. The St Severin bowl (BEP 1881.0624.1): see D. Harden (ed.), Glass of the Caesars (London, 1988) 277–9; Spier, Picturing the Bible, 184–5; D. Howells, A Catalogue of the Late Antique Glass in the British Museum (London, 2015) no. 16, 90–101, with discussion of Jonah at 98–100. Actually, even in this object, which has no inscriptions, if the figure with a wand is an Old Testament character (e.g. Moses) and not Jesus, and the female between trees is Susannah and not Agnes, then there is no definitively Christian iconography and a great deal of Old Testament imagery: the Cologne piece too could be ‘Jewish’. See Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and Agendas’, 115–19. For a response to this that attempts to justify the ‘typical attitude of a religious or ethnic group’ in relation to the Menorah and other symbols, see R. Talgam, Mosaics of Faith: Floors of Pagans, Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy Land (Jerusalem, 2014) 498, n. 52.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

instincts, goes the further and near-universal claim that what have been characterized as ‘the Jewish Catacombs’ – simpler and more primitive than the Christian ones – preceded the latter and influenced them.17 Here Protestant and Catholic historiographies unite, with a primitive aniconic Judaism as the precursor for Christianity, either as a positive ideal of pure simplicity that was corrupted by the idolatries of the Roman Church, or as a simpler past that served as precursor to and was redeemed by the Catholic dispensation. Again all these stories are necessarily invested in a scripturally-derived fantasy of Jewish aniconism as a necessary prelude to the Christian narrative. They are effectively the foundation of an assumption deeply prevalent in the discipline of art history that the influence of Jewish art – whether malign or positive – is essential to the story of early Christian art; an assumption that effectively relegates Jewish art to being little more than a cipher for contesting the problems (themselves really more theological than art historical) about whether Christian art is a good thing and whether it was seen that way in late antiquity.18 Hence, ancient Judaism – as essentially aniconic but occasionally slipping toward images (and hence idolatry) – is the counterpart to Hellenism as the artistic ideal in the collective dream-work of European origins. Judaism speaks for a tradition of religious purity, but also a pre-artistic, pre-cultural primitivism; Hellenism speaks for the high point of art, the dawn of civilization but also the risks of idolatry. These models have relatively little provable reality to them, but a great deal of cultural weight, and have significantly governed attitudes to the past, to cultural heritage and to modern artistic values in the European tradition. Notably in the colonial world of the European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hellenism in particular was a means for judging (and often dismissing or at least denigrating) the artistic products of non-European cultures – for instance Buddhist art in Gandhara (as a kind

17

18

See Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome, 40; L. Rutgers, The Hidden Heritage of Diaspora Judaism (Leuven, 1998) 49 (much of this in fact repeats his 1995 book and some was written earlier) and Levine, Visual Judaism, 145. For a history of the influence argument, see Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome, 30–49; in that study Rutgers believed that in fact Jewish and Christian catacombs were simultaneous but entirely independent phenomena (92–3), despite his commitment to shared workshops (e.g. 73–89; cf. Rutgers, Hidden Heritage, 76–8). But his later work with radiocarbon dating has now committed him to the view that the Jewish Catacombs (taken as an essentialist and religious-ethnic category) are earlier: see L. Rutgers, A. de Jong and K. van der Borg, ‘Radiocarbon Dates for the Jewish Catacombs of Rome’, Radiocarbon 44 (2002) 541–7 and L. Rutgers, K. van der Borg, A. de Jong and I. Poole, ‘Jewish Inspiration of Christian Catacombs’, Nature 436 (21 July 2005) 339. See the Chapter 1 in this volume footnote 15 for the argument about Christian art.

299

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of degenerate inheritor of Greek styles).19 Similarly the fantasy of aniconic Judaism was a means of tracing the ancestry of other arts (whether ‘aniconic’ Islam or the non-figurative strand in Christian art). The terms were deployed so as to give central place to a dominant narrative of modern European identification with Hellenism as a superior civilization as evidenced through its art. One of the (highly problematic) differences between Hellenism and Judaism as ancestral models is that one could never interrogate a real and living ancient Greek; but – especially with the advent of widespread Jewish assimilation into European culture through the nineteenth century – there were real Jews, who themselves took on the idealized models which they received from Christian culture and ran with them in somewhat unexpected directions.

2.

A Jewish Art History

The story of Jewish art in the twentieth century is exemplary of what happens when the cultural truths founded on (and supportive of ) a nineteenth-century colonial and imperial status quo are challenged by a new and newly independent ruling group, about whom the old stories had been told. In India after 1947 an anti-Hellenist and exceptionalist art history and archaeology arose in the context of a new, non-British, state.20 In the case of the Jews, in the run-up to and aftermath of the declaration of an independent Jewish state in Israel, in 1948, similar exceptionalist narratives of Jewish art – supported by a wealth of very active archaeological work – created a radically new narrative that made much of the independence of ancient Jewish art (arguably perhaps too much) in the context and needs of a modern cultural politics. In both India and Israel, the postimperial stories were about the special relation of the citizens of the new state to their newly autonomous territory through an ancient inheritance that was religiously as well as ethnically founded (Hindu, Jewish) and could be established through archaeology and its interpretation. That modern story, which had elements of construction against others with claims on the same territory – Muslims especially in Northern India, Arabs (both Muslim and Christian) in Palestine – who were seen as having arrived later than the original inhabitants now restored to hegemony and so as upstarts. Late antiquity is essential in these kinds of stories because it represents 19 20

On Gandhara, see R. Bracey’s Chapter 2 in this volume and the bibliography given there. See R. Bracey in Chapter 12 of this volume.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

both a fundamental evidential base (a key period for the birth of Buddhist, ‘Hindu’ and Jewish art) and a signal historical period for the formation of religious identities. Where India and Israel fundamentally differ is that resistance to British rule in the subcontinent was largely from the galvanizing of an indigenous population (including members of all its many religions), whereas Zionism was the product of a secularizing Jewish nationalist movement in Europe combined with the mass immigration of Jews especially from Europe to Palestine (whether under Ottoman or under British control) in the early twentieth century. In the context of art history, the late imperial era that found its demise in the wreckage of the First World War saw the rise of Jews to significant positions in German academia and the explosion of modern art by Jewish artists, whether within established idioms – relatively traditionalist, like Leonid Pasternak and Isaac Levitan in Moscow, impressionist as in the cases of Max Liebermann in Berlin or Camille Pissarro in Paris, and avantgarde, like Chaim Soutine or Amedeo Modigliani in Paris) – or with an overt Jewish identity (for instance, Marc Chagall).21 If Jewish art had been a cipher for Christian theological debates, in the hands of Jewish scholars it was – from the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards – just as much a coded discussion of what being ‘Jewish’ actually meant.22 Secularity, endemic anti-Semitism,23 the rising power of the Jewish Reform movement, assimilationism, Bundism (or Jewish socialism), and above all, Zionism,24 were shaking the foundations of Jewish identity in the West in the wake of increasing emancipation. As the Zionist movement transformed the religious-philanthropic Hibat Tzion movement into a political enterprise in Palestine, the stakes for categorizing archaeological objects as evidence for Jewish cultural production grew ever higher. The material remnants of Jewish life in antiquity came to be construed as a tangible link 21

22

23

24

For Jewish art history, see the essays in C. Soussloff, Jewish Identity in Modern Art (Berkeley, 1999) and M. Olin, The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln, NE, 2001) 127–56 (on the rise of Jewish art history). The First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, at which the World Zionist Organization was founded, and we may take it as a general marker for the beginning of political Zionism. On the origins of Zionism, see e.g. W. Laqueur, A History of Zionism (London, 1972); H. Sachar, A History of Israel (Oxford, 1977); D. Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford, 1975) 354–70 on the First Congress. For instance, S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009) 292–332; I. Stenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought in France (Chicago, 2002) 95–131 (on Dreyfuss). For the place of art in general in the rise of Zionism, see M. Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge, 1993) 119–43 and The Jewish SelfImage: American and British Perspectives, 1881–1939 (London, 2000).

301

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   ś 

to the Land of Israel and as a kind of ‘title deed’ to the ownership of that land buried in the soil of Palestine.25 In effect, the historiography of Jewish art generally, and Jewish art in late antiquity most specifically, cannot but be understood as inextricably linked to the history and aims of Zionism. The absolutely fundamental claim of Jewish rights to the land of Zion – on which the state of Israel is founded – cannot be separated from the repeated urge to prove that claim archaeologically by demonstrating Jewish occupation of the land in antiquity.26 The history of what we may (a touch anachronistically) call the Israeli account of Jewish art needs to be divided into at least three distinct periods. First, there were the early days of what one might call romantic Zionism from the last years of the Ottoman Empire through the British Mandate into the late 1930s; second, there is the period between the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany in 1933 and the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948 – in which the rising catastrophe of European Jewry and then the knowledge of its extent cannot be separated from how scholarship, and especially Palestinian Jewish scholarship, came to regard ancient Jewish material culture or claims to the land; finally, there is the radically transformed political situation of an independent Jewish state – although obviously this has been far from a static entity in terms of its political leanings or archaeological commitments. Let us take each of these moments in turn.

Romantic Zionism Discovering ancient Jewish art was vital for early Zionism,27 partly because a national art was a central component of a modern national identity (along with a shared language and a shared land, both of which Zionists 25 26

27

Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World, 23. The critical literature on this topic is rich. See e.g. N. Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917 (New York, 1982) on the prehistory of these issues before the fall of the Ottoman Empire; N. Silberman, Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East (New York, 1989) 87–136; N. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial SelfFashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, 2001) 21–98 on the history of political interest in archaeology before the found of the state of Israel, 99–281 on archaeology and statehood between 1948 and the Intifada; Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World, 22–34 on the Zionist narrative in archaeology; R. Kletter, Just Past? The Making of Israeli Archaeology (London, 2006) especially on the early years of Israel. For aspects of the cultural context of early Zionism, see M. Berkowitz, Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914–1933 (Cambridge, 1997) esp. 136–8 on archaeology and tourism.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

were working hard to realize), and partly because archaeological presence ‘proved’ entitlement to the land. When Jewish art historians, archaeologists and artists asked, ‘what is Jewish art?’ (as they did regularly, in journals and books, throughout the first half of the twentieth century),28 they were also asking, what does Judaism mean as a nationality in a modern, secular sense?29 Surprisingly similar issues arose in relation to ancient Hinduism and the creation of an independent, secular, modern India: to address the indigenous monumental and archaeological heritage was to think through the question of modern indigenous cultural autonomy in the new state. When Zionists argued against traditional conceptions of Judaism as aniconic, they were also consciously and actively working to define what Judaism meant as a (secular) culture, rather than a religion. One understood what ‘German art’ meant, or ‘Italian art’ – was the predicate ‘Jewish’ to be understood as directly equivalent? This an absolutely key issue because the terminology of ‘Jewish art’, which one might argue ought properly to be seen as a religious category of material culture, came to be seen as a national, racial and ethnic category – a visible proof for qualities and characteristics that define one group as separate and distinct from others. When the Soviet Constructivist artist El Lissitzky pondered the existence of a Jewish national style in the Hebrew journal Rimon in 1923, published in Berlin, he concluded that it did not exist as a continuing and essential quality rooted in the past. The question, for him, was ‘what should our art be’, future tense.30 Modern Zionist artists were to create a new, secular culture that would serve to constitute the Jewish people as a modern nation, unfettered by what they had or had not produced in the past. Such modern artistic production is the ‘contemporary marker of a cultured people’ and would prove to all doubters that the Jews were a modern nation like any other.31 Looking to the past, Lissitzky warned, offered only the promise of historicist pastiche as a Jewish national style. His Zionism, like that of many, was as much committed to a modernist break with the

28

29

30 31

The issue would remain controversial for decades: see for instance K. Schwarz, Modern Jewish Art in Palestine (Jerusalem, 1941) [Hebrew]; F. Landsberger, A History of Jewish Art (Cincinnati, 1946); H. Rosenau, A Short History of Jewish Art (London, 1948); C. Roth (ed.), Jewish Art (Ramat Gan, 1961); B. Narkiss, ‘Does Jewish Art Exist?, Hauniversita 11 (1965) 31–40 [Hebrew]; H. Rosenberg, ‘Is There Jewish Art?’, Commentary (July 1966) 57–60. For a range of original sources see A. Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York, 1959). El Lissitzky, ‘The Synagogue at Mohilev: Remembrances’, Rimon 3 (1923) 9 [Hebrew]. Ibid., 12.

303

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   ś 

past as it was to reviving it. Lissitzky’s willingness to forgo the task of historicizing the concept of Jewish art seems not to have been shared by the art editor of Rimon, Rachel Wischnitzer (1885–1989), who would become a veritable matriarch of Jewish art historians in the post-war era. That same year, among poems by pioneers of modern Hebrew literature, such as Agnon, Bialik, Tchernichovsky, and articles on avant-garde Jewish sculpture, Rimon published essays on ancient Jewish glasswork and iconography, as well as an article on the ‘Ancient Synagogues of Palestine’, by Eleazar Lipa Sukenik (1889–1953, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1911), anchoring the construction of a modern Jewish art, that Lissitzky called for, firmly in late antiquity.32 In 1923, Sukenik, who would come to be known as the father of Jewish archaeology, had yet to command a dig. His interest in antique synagogues was founded on their potency as a marker of contemporary Jewish claims to the land. In Rimon, he presents them as symbols of Jewish sovereignty, not religion, opening his essay with: ‘The ruins of ancient synagogues stand as mute memorials (matzevot) in the Land of Israel. Dispersed mostly around the Sea of Galilee (yam kineret), they mark the place where, for a few hundred years after the destruction of the Second Temple, a remnant of our people’s statehood (sarid medini le amenu) survived in the form of a [Jewish] autonomy (nesiut) in the lower Galilee, in the upper Galilee and eastward of the Jordan valley.’33 These synagogues were imagined by Sukenik as the social hubs of vibrant Jewish communities, the centres of common peoples’ daily life. If the Jewish past had till then been recorded as rabbinic lore, the archaeology that Sukenik pioneered looked to the masses, offering material evidence of the daily life of the independent Jewish public that Zionism was attempting to ‘restore’. Militantly secular, Sukenik was interested in writing a cultural history of Am Yisrael, the ‘Nation of Israel’, not of Judaism. One fundamental job for the new Zionist art history was to provide the unifying formal logic to describe the styles and appearances of visual representations so that they could serve as evidence of a shared ethnic character. It may be said that this in turn assumes the model of a shared Judaism, which is in some sense unified over space (the many spaces of the diaspora) and over time, an entirely untenable proposition in historical

32

33

E. Sukenik, ‘Ancient Synagogues in Palestine’, Rimon 3 (1923) 18–23 [Hebrew]. This essay introduces the basics of his research into ancient synagogues, which would become the topic of his doctoral dissertation and his later book of 1934. Sukenik, ‘Ancient Synagogues in Palestine’, 18.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

terms,34 but with obvious ideological attraction for much of the twentieth century (and paralleled by narratives of the timeless continuity of Hinduism).35 In order to join ancient objects of religious ritual and modern paintings made by secular Jews – a corpus spread over disparate continents, over centuries, indeed millennia – into a coherent category, the fundamental character of a Jewish style needed to be identified. The idea of a Jewish style was necessarily anchored in essentializing concepts of inherent ethnic character: it drew inevitably on the conceptual frame of a racially-determined art history which had first been formulated with explicit anti-Semitism by the likes of the Viennese art historian, Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941).36 In the hands of Jewish scholars, Strzygowski’s historical narrative, and all the formalist analytic terminologies in which it was founded, were divested of their negative charge and put to work for Zionist ends.37 They kept the narrative framework that offered the category of Jewish art, but shifted the story, turning Strzygowski’s anti-Semitic model of a real and essential Jewish art (that helped to precipitate the corruption of Hellenistic canons in late antique Europe) into a Zionist model of a real and essential Jewish art that helped to established the existence of a Palestinian

34

35 36 37

See for instance Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora, 459: ‘What has . . . become manifest is that the Jews used local traditions and fashions when constructing their religious edifices, or when burying their dead, but with the addition of Jewish symbols, or by the presentation of the art in a way that expressed their religious convictions. Uniform worship did not require a uniform scheme in architectural elements and decorative forms.’ The fantasy of a uniformity of worship goes alongside the claim in the same book’s foreword (xix) that ‘the Jews of late antiquity, both in the land of Israel and in the diaspora, were usually in accord as to their self-identity and their relationship with their non-Jewish neighbours’. What evidence there is for this kind of harmony and monolithic unity is difficult to imagine. On timelessness in Hinduism and Hindu art, see Robert Bracey in Chapter 10 in this volume. See e.g. Olin, The Nation Without Art, 18–24. For example, in Ancient Synagogues (given as lectures in 1930 and published in 1934), Sukenik gives a gloss of Strzygowski’s thesis in Orient oder Rom (1901). He writes: ‘According to [Strzygowski], the early Church, whose gospel was preached in Jewish synagogues and professed by men of Jewish race, took over the art of the synagogue along with its liturgy. He accordingly predicted that should any remains of ancient Jewish art come to light again they would confirm his hypothesis. This prediction has been partially fulfilled by the mosaics of the synagogues that have since been unearthed, but it must be added that the question can only be settled when earlier remains are found; for the Palestinian mosaics in question are rather later than the catacomb frescos. But at any rate, we are now nearer a solution of this problem’ (67). In the 1930s, not only did Sukenik accept Strzygowski’s racial theories as legitimate tools of art history, the ‘founder of Jewish archeology’ even presented his own research as a continuation of Strzygowski’s project. On the use of Strzygowski by Jewish art historians, see M. Olin, ‘“Early Christian Synagogues” and “Jewish Art Historians”: The Discovery of the Synagogue of DuraEuropos’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000) 7–28.

305

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   ś 

community with a direct ancestral lineage to the present and implicitly an entitlement to the same territories.38 Sukenik explicitly aligned the Jews with Hellenic antiquity rather than with Oriental decadence, as Strzygowski had, in his 1930s book on Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece.39 Michael Avi-Yonah (1904–74) claimed ‘as far as the visual arts are concerned, Judaism was integrated (within certain limits) into the Greco-Roman world from the death of Rabbi Judah I to the completion of the Palestinian Gemara (third to fourth centuries A.D.)’.40 After that, ‘[t]he Arab conquest severed the remaining links with the West. Separated from its center on the Golden Horn, Greek culture in Palestine lingered on for a century and then leisurely expired’ – to be revived by the descendants of the exiled proto-Israelis, the Zionist pioneers.41

In the Wake of the Third Reich While Strzygowski gave Jewish art historians the basis for a theory of Jewish style, founding the history of Jewish art on the theories of a notorious Nazi, particularly after the Second World War, was not a simple thing. Avi-Yonah’s essays on ‘Oriental Elements in the Art of Palestine’ written in the 1940s and his revision of them in his book Oriental Art in Palestine in 1961 combine an almost slavish recitation of the formal categories of Strzygowskian Oriental style,42 the insistence that this is the antithesis of Hellenistic stylistic evolution (Avi-Yonah, 1961, 10), and a presentation of the Jews as the ‘Westernmost of Oriental nations which was able to resist Greco-Roman culture’ (1961, 13). For Avi-Yonah ‘centres of resistance to Western influence remained in temples, the humble 38

39

40

41

42

The writings of Sukenik (e.g. Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece, 67) and M. AviYonah are examples. See e.g. M. Avi-Yonah, ‘Oriental Elements in the Art of Palestine in the Roman and Byzantine Periods’, Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 14 (1950) 49–80, esp. 78 [= M. Avi-Yonah, Art in Ancient Palestine: Selected Studies (Jerusalem, 1981) 115] and M. Avi-Yonah, Oriental Art in Roman Palestine (Rome, 1961) 79 (further references are given parenthetically in the text). Sukenik, Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece, 1 for Egypt, Greece and Palestine; 2 for the synagogue as ancestral to church and mosque; 37 for synagogues in relation to the Hellenistic world. M. Avi-Yonah, ‘The Leda Sarcophagus from Beth Shearim’, Scripta Hierosolymita 24 (1972) 9–21, at 21 (= 1981, 269). M. Avi-Yonah, ‘Oriental Elements in the Art of Palestine in the Roman and Byzantine Periods’, Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine 10 (1942) 105–31, esp. 107 (= 1981, 3) (further references are given parenthetically in the text). E.g. Avi-Yonah 1950, 76–80 (= 1981, 113–117) and Avi-Yonah 1961, 42, 66–95 (esp. on frontality). Note that the tradition is still firmly in place: R. Hachlili, Ancient Synagogues: Archaeology and Art (Leiden, 2013) 614 remains a fine Strzygowskian stylistic synopsis.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

dwellings of the poor and in the courts and castles of the border states . . . The core of the Oriental spirit, its religious experience, evaded entirely the grip of the invading culture’ (Avi-Yonah, 1942, 106 = 1981, 2). Late antiquity mattered in this story because ‘from the third century onwards Hellenism began at last to recede; and in the fourth and fifth centuries its gradual retreat became a rout . . . [in which] the Orientalizing tendencies of the dissident minorities, the Jews and the Samaritans, were also strengthened’ (1942, 107 = 1981, 3). Effectively, in the wake of Nazism, and in a necessary retaliation to the long history of German cultural alignment with Hellenism,43 Zionist art history in response to the Third Reich found itself espousing not Hellenism but the Orientalism of the Jews as a positive quality of the people – perhaps ‘crude and rustic’ but also ‘impressive and full of vigour’ (1942, 109 = 1981, 5). ‘A submerged current of art’ which represented ‘the core of Oriental imagination’, resisting the assimilation to Graeco-Roman models of mimetic imitation, could be disentangled ‘from the Greek trappings’ (1942, 110 = 1981, 6). In the fraught conditions of the 1940s, Jewish resistance to external control – whether to assimilation in a tyrannical Germany (it is a real question as to when it was completely clear that such assimilation had come to mean genocide)44 or to the opponents of a Jewish state in Palestine (both the colonial powers and the emerging local Arab states) – was a project articulated in part through the symbolic language of art history. The specific importance of ancient Jewish art to a Zionism increasingly urgent in its push for statehood, lay in the ability of those writing its history to see in the Judean kingdoms of the past a pre-figuration of their own national sovereignty in modern Palestine. If most remnants of ancient Jewish material culture revealed – or helped construct – a ‘native’ Jewish style, coins and carved seals were particularly valuable as evidence of selfgovernance in the ‘first’ Jewish ‘state’. The Jewish owners of seals (mainly from the ancient period of the Jewish kingdoms) were anachronistically labelled ‘officers’, ‘officials, ‘functionaries’ and even members of the ‘civil service’,45 and their seals were meticulously catalogued as evidence of an

43

44

45

E.g. E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge, 1935); Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1996); Constanze Güthenke, Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770–1840 (Oxford, 2008). Y. Gorny, The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939–1945 (Cambridge, 2012) 105 dates ‘semiauthoritative reports’ as arriving from the summer of 1942. N. Avigad, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals, ed. Benjamin Sass (Jerusalem, 1997) esp. 28–30 for all these terms.

307

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   ś 

independently administered economic system and an enlightened rule of law. Roman coins over-stamped by Jewish symbols during the Bar Kochva revolt of 132–5  were heralded as stirring proof of national autonomy. Adolf Reifenberg’s preface to the Hebrew version of his book The Coins of the Jews (1947) begins by instructing readers on how to interpret the antique coins: ‘The Jewish coins (matbeout hayehudim) are a tangible remnant of our past and important testimony to our history. These modest proofs of Jewish life in this Land (haAretz) are abundant and tie us to the hopes and disappointments of past generations. It is in this spirit that one is to understand the treatise before us.’46 Just six months before the UN ratified the Partition Plan for Palestine, a book that identifies itself as addressing part of the ‘development of Jewish art’,47 sees it role as educating Jews who had immigrated to Palestine (‘returned’ in the Zionist parlance of revival) to see archaeological materials as tools in their quest for self-rule.48 On the first banknotes designed for the Altneuland, the old and the new were, literally, flipsides. The 500 Pruta bill, issued first in 1955, featured a picturesque sketch of the late antique synagogue at Bir’im, of ruins. The bill’s back featured a dynamic modernist abstraction (Figure 11.3).49 Two decades after Reifenberg’s publication, the Bank of Israel printed a similar survey on coinage, prefaced with an explanation that made clear that Reifenberg’s command had been taken quite literally: The [National] Bank of Israel, in its founding years, decided to assemble a collection of . . . the coins of Eretz-Yisrael, the coins of the Jews of Biblical times (Yemei Kedem). This decision largely stemmed from the policy (mediniyut) adopted when the minting of coins in the independent State of Israel began: The coins of the state are to be a direct continuation of the minting of coins in Biblical times (Yemei Kedem), and the motifs 46

47 48

49

A. Reifenberg, Matbeot HaYehudim (Jerusalem, 1947) [Hebrew], unpaginated preface. These comments do not appear in the more sober English edition (from the same publisher, Rubin Mass), Ancient Jewish Coins (Jerusalem 1947). But note the strong closing claim made there in relation to the coinage of the Bar Kochva revolt, p. 38: ‘Always showing a character sui generis at times of revolt, Jewish coinage reaches its highest standard or workmanship at the very time when the last serious rising was brutally crushed . . .’. See also A. Reifenberg, Israel’s History in Coins (Palestine, 1953). See Reifenberg, Matbeot HaYehudim, unpaginated preface to the first edition. The fact that this treatise was ideologically invested in educating future citizens of a Jewish state in Palestine – rather than, say, numismatists, art historians or diaspora Jews – is suggested by the fact that the preface to the English version of the same book, published by the same press, the same year, merely includes technical remarks on illustrations and such. No guidelines for properly political interpretation of the contents are present. On Bir’im, see Sukenik, Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece, 24–6.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

Figure 11.3 500 Pruta bill: obverse and reverse, issued by the State of Israel, 1955. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

cast in our early coins will now come into their full expression (bitui meirabi). Thus, the coins produced by the Bank of Israel express (megalmim), on one side [historical] continuation, and on the other, the modernity of our era.50

Revival of antiquity had become, quite literally, state policy. The urgency towards statehood in the Palestine of the British Mandate was underpinned by an agony of impotence in relation to what was happening in Europe in the 1940s. The dedication of Sukenik’s Hebrew volume, The Synagogue of Dura-Europos and its Frescos, reads: ‘In memory of the fallen among the Jewish nation and in memory of my family and the people of Bialystok, city of my birth, felled by enemy hands’.51 Ideologically, Sukenik offered an evocation of the holocaust of European Jewry through his own native city but also of rare military resistance to the Nazis, since the Bialystok Ghetto was the site of a famous uprising in August 1943. Of the town’s 60,000 Jews, only a few hundred survived the ‘Final Solution’, making the town – and its invocation by Sukenik – a particularly charged symbol of both devastation and resistance. Ghetto uprisings were a crucial element of the Zionist self-fashioning as the ‘New Hebrew’ – a form of Jew crucially 50

51

A. Kindler, MatBeʻot Erets Yiśraʼel: Osef Bank Yiśraʼel: KatAlog [‫ אוסףבנקישראל‬: ‫מטבעותארץישראל‬ _ _ _ _ ‫ קטלוג‬:] (Jerusalem, 1971) 1. E. L. Sukenik, Bet-Ha-Keneset Shel Dura-Avropos VE-Tsiyurav (Mosad Beyalik, 1947) _ _ _ [Hebrew], v.

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   ś 

distinct from the weak, religious Diaspora Jews who succumbed to persecution. Effectively, the volume offers the Nazis, Zionist Nationalist politics and intimations of nation building, all in play even before one opens the first page of an apparently art-historical study. What Sukenik is doing in his account of Dura is, first of all, to align Judaism – at an ideologically charged moment in which Judaic presence in Palestine could be archaeologically proven – with the politically crucial run-up to the creation of the new state. Sukenik uses Dura to argue that Judaism was never monolithic but heterogeneous and evolving – useful to a scholar invested in redefining (indeed remaking) Judaism as an ethnic, cultural and adamantly secular identity that responds to the character of its historical moment, in post-Enlightenment modernism.

After Independence Sukenik was particularly adept at presenting archaeological finds in a light that highlighted their value to Zionist mythology and politics. Often weaving pioneering stories of settlement-building, desert hardship and battles into his reports, he presented archaeological excavation as itself a form of ‘working the land’, labour akin to that of ‘greening the desert’. Charged with safeguarding Jewish heritage, the archaeologist’s work, as he described it, was inseparable from the military enterprise that was a necessary part of the quest for national independence. The new Jewish archaeologist was thus linked by association to the two types of labour that Zionism put forward as paradigms of the territorially-bound ‘New Hebrew’, the farmer and the soldier. The linkage between archaeology and military was not just rhetorical. It would become realized in the form of Sukenik’s son, Yigael Yadin, who was trained as an archaeologist by his father and would go on to be the commander-in-chief of the Israel Defence Force, as well as an influential scholar who popularized archaeology, developing it into the Israeli ‘national hobby’.52 Section after section of Avi-Yonah’s report on ancient synagogues begins with mention of the wars that brought given sites into Israeli territory from the War of Independence to the Six Day War; every discovery of material remains of Jewish

52

Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 1. Yadin published a series of wildly popular books for a general audience, laden with political metaphors as well as explicit references to current day Israel. See for instance Y. Yadin, Metsadah (Jerusalem, 1965) [Hebrew] or Hazor; Rosh Kol HaMam-Lachot Ha-Eleh (Tel Aviv, 1975) [Hebrew].

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

presence in late antiquity is presented as another proof of the legitimacy of land conquest in the twentieth century.53 From their birth, Israeli archaeology and art history have played a practical part not only in setting the historical tone of the country’s national ethos but also in shaping its geography and demography. A powerful example is the first archaeological excavation undertaken after the 1948 war. Sukenik’s report, published in December 1949, details the discovery and excavation of an ancient Samaritan synagogue, with a mosaic floor. Sukenik writes: In that summer [1948] the Defense Force of Israel occupied the [Palestinian] village of Salbit, which is situated about 3 km east of el Qubab, a village on the Jerusalem-Ramleh highway. It occupies a hillock overlooking the valley of Aijalon, about 31/2 km north of the village of Imwas . . . A soldier of a garrison stationed in the village . . . accidentally discovered part of a mosaic in the courtyard of a deserted house in the village center. . . . the Department of Antiquities of the newly-founded state took charge immediately of the preservation of these fragments. It was our desire to make use at once of such an outstanding find, by carrying out a systematic investigation of the site, and this was fortunately made possible by the Louis M. Rabinowitz Fund . . . The army also gave us invaluable help in the essential tasks of transporting labor, tools and drinking water to the abandoned village. . . . The work was handicapped by the fact that a large part of the area to be cleared was covered by modern Arab houses.54

Whatever one’s interpretation of the events of 1948, the inseparability of archaeology from the military and political infrastructure of state-building is apparent here with a bluntness that would quickly be tempered in the archaeological writings of the years to come. In 1953, a Canadian newspaper dramatically recounted the story of the synagogue’s discovery ‘purely by accident’, as told by the chairman of the American Fund for Israel Institutions. ‘Near Salbit, a Haganah solider, digging a foxhole under enemy fire during the Israel War for Independence’, suddenly hit stone and ‘there, jutting from below many feet of dry

53

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M. Avi-Yonah, ‘Ancient Synagogues’, Ariel 32 (1973) 31–43 (= 1981, 271–81). Also E. Sukenik, ‘The Present State of Ancient Synagogue Studies’, Bulletin of the Louis M. Rabinowitz Fund for the Exploration of Ancient Synagogues 1 (1949) 8–30, 22 and 26. For archaeology and the 1948 war, see Kletter, Just Past?, 1–81. Sukenik, ‘The Present State of Ancient Synagogue Studies’, esp. 26–7.

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   ś 

Judean soil, lay the corner of an ages old mosaic’.55 Seeing the representation of a menorah, the story goes, the soldier instinctively recognized the historical value of the site and left the safety of the trenches to report his find to military command, after which he ‘returned to his battle station where he was later wounded’.56 In this dramatic version, the discovery of a collectivity rooted in a shared ancient Jewish culture and archaeology’s legitimization of Jewish ties to the land itself become quite literally part of the battle for ‘revived’ Jewish sovereignty.57

3.

Missing Elements of the Story

The immense ideological freighting of Jewish art history, both within the story of Zionism and in relation to Christian-centred projections, makes the field – today no less than in the past – a very complex play of apologetics and polemics. It is worth briefly asking what is unbalanced in existing approaches. The fundamental impasse between art-historical languages of aesthetics and theologically-inflected discourses of religion in Western culture maps, in the study of Jewish art, on to a specific emphasis – borrowed by Zionism from racist pre-war art history – on ‘Jewish’ as meaning not ‘characteristic of a religion’, but ‘belonging to an ethnicity and a state with a national character’. Whatever we may think of this, the underplay of religion against national identity is at the very least unbalanced; while the assumption that formalism, style and aesthetics can in some way cash out as essential characteristics of a unified ethnicity (admittedly a position that has been widely assumed in art history) remains to be proved. The most fundamental effect of Zionist art history – both the powerful emphasis on the existence of an independent ancient Jewish art and the huge investment of resources in its archaeology in the new state – has been to create a self-contained academic field. Within the broad space of the multifarious and multi-religious production of art in late antiquity, a powerful discipline has arisen that emphasizes a specific, exceptionalist

55

56 57

‘Ancient Mosaic in Exhibition Was Found by Haganah Soldier’, The Canadian Jewish Review, 21 August 1953, 10. Stable URL: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1902&dat= 19530821&id=bVcfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=P9IEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3759,2545822. Ibid. Kletter briefly discusses the mosaic at Salbit (spelled Selbit). See Kletter, Just Past?, 20–1.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

and exclusive Jewish art.58 Even in non-exclusivist accounts, Jewish art has come to occupy a significant place of its own.59 In one sense, this is appropriate since it is certainly the case that Jews produced and used art in late antiquity. In another, when Jewish art is represented as independent and autonomous, a case – effectively one not immune from a significant stake in modern politics – is implicitly made that is at least potentially controversial. The traditional line of the influence of Jewish art on early Christian iconography,60 has ramified into a number of models – mutual influence,61 broadly Christian influence with the Jews following,62 Jewish priority.63 58

59

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62 63

One might cite the many works of Rachel Hachlili, Lee Levine or Steven Fine: R. Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art in the Land of Israel (Leiden, 1988); Hachili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora; R. Hachlili, The Menorah, the Ancient Seven-Armed Candelabrum (Leiden, 2001); Hachlili, Ancient Synagogues; L. Levine (ed.), Ancient Synagogues Revisited (Jerusalem, 1981); L. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, 2005); Levine, Visual Judaism; Fine (ed.), Sacred Realm; Fine, Art and Judaism in the GrecoRoman World; S. Fine, Art, History and Historiography of Judaism in Roman Antiquity (Leiden, 2014). Note Hachlili, Ancient Synagogues, 284: The ‘challenge to Judaism’s independence was even stronger from the fourth century CE on, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. At this time especially, the Jews needed to assert their own identity, and turned therefore to symbolism. They chose specific symbols which Jewish communities as well as individuals felt could express their national faith, and could represent religious ideas with which they could identify’. The guiding terms in this passage – ‘Judaism’s independence’, assertion of identity, ‘national faith’ – can only be meaningful for late antiquity as a heavily Zionist-inflected interpretive reading of the historical past which is at the very least tendentious. For instance R. Hachlili, Ancient Mosaic Pavements (Leiden, 2009) or Talgam, Mosaics of Faith, 257–332, 405–9. For the influence school, which has been strong particularly in Diaspora and non-Israeli scholarship, see e.g. C. Roth, ‘Jewish Antecedents of Christian Art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953) 24–44; C. Kraeling, The Excavations at Dura-Europos. Final Report VIIII: The Synagogue (New Haven, 1956) 398–402; K. Weitzmann, ‘Zur Frage des Einflusses judischer Bilderquellen auf die Illustration des Alten Testaments’, in A. Stuiber and A. Hermann (eds.), Mullus: Festschrift Theodor Klauser, JAC Erg. I (Münster, 1964), 401–15; E. R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (Princeton, 1965) vol. 12, p. 1; C. Kraeling, The Excavations at Dura-Europos. Final Report VIII.II: The Christian Building (New Haven, 1967) 216; K. Weitzmann and H. Kessler, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art (Washington, DC, 1990). E.g. H. Kessler, ‘The Sepphoris Mosaic and Christian Art’, in Levine and Weiss (eds.), From Dura to Sepphoris, 65–72, esp. p. 65 (for a subtle argument about mutual influence); Milson, Art and Architecture of the Synagogue, esp. 234–42, effectively endorsing a mutual influence and competition model; Talgam, Mosaics of Faith, 258–9: a ‘dialogue . . . profound and multidimensional’. See Levine, Visual Judaism, 206–21. E. Kitzinger, Israeli Mosaics of the Byzantine Period (New York, 1965) 12–13; J. Magness, ‘Heaven on Earth: Helios and the Zodiac Cycle in Ancient Palestinian Synagogues’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 59 (2005) 1–52, esp. 13–21 and 45–6 (carefully worded to be sure but cf. ‘Christian attempts to appropriate the Jewish heritage’, p. 20); Hachlili, Ancient Mosaic Pavements, 219: ‘The church, following the synagogue . . .’ and 241: ‘figurative themes and subjects [in

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   ś 

But, one might ask whether the assertive frame of Jewish ethnic and national identity as defined through art (underlying both the Strzygowskian racist accounts and the Zionist/Israeli archaeological literature) allows enough flexibility for a more intermixed and assimilated interpretation of late antique actualities.64 There is at least an option – hardly exercised in any of the existing magisterial accounts – for a longue-durée model of subaltern identities whose religion played out in visual and architectural terms against changing hegemonic cultures (Pagan Roman, Christian, Islamic) not only within the Middle East but also in diaspora contexts like the Sardis and Ostia synagogues.65 This would offer changing patterns of influence over time, different geographic and linguistic contexts at single moments, changing claims about religious identity as articulated in late antique sacred buildings, their decorations and the ritual implements used therein, and varieties of Jewish viewers from the relatively more assimilated to the strongly segregated, from the relatively less religious to the strongly Orthodox and the mystical, not to speak of potential non-Jewish visitors.66 It would be a parallel story to the hardly told narrative of the development of subaltern Christian art in and from late antiquity in the East, in contexts where there was never Christian hegemony – the Persian world, India, China . . . The focus on issues of identity, ethnicity and nationalism has left almost no space for other interpretive lines. There has been very little by way of liturgical accounts of the late antique synagogue (by obvious contrast with early churches for instance).67 There remains little by way of critical historiography on Jewish art history.68 There has been a very striking

64

65

66

67

68

synagogues] . . . earlier than . . . churches’; L. Rutgers, ‘Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go from Here?’ Journal of Roman Archaeology 27 (2014) 875–9, esp. 877–8. For example on the model of the historical accounts of S. Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE–640 CE (Princeton, 2001), with some telling comments on iconography at 133–61 and 243–63, or his Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? (Princeton, 2010). On diaspora synagogues in general, see Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, 250–309. On Sardis, see Levine, Visual Judaism, 294–314 (with earlier bibliography) and on Ostia, see B. Olsson, D. Mitternacht and O. Brandt, The Synagogue of Ancient Ostia and the Jews of Rome (Jonsered, 2001). See for instance the fascinating evidence of Sasanian visitors to the Dura synagogue (who left graffiti there): T. Daryaee, ‘To Learn and Remember from Others: Persians Visiting the DuraEuropos Synagogue’, Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia 8 (2010) 29–37. A significant exception is S. Fine, ‘Liturgy and the Art of the Dura Europos Synagogue’, in R. Langer and S. Fine (eds.), Liturgy in the Life of the Synagogue (Winona Lake, IN, 2005) 41–72. Even Fine, however, when considering issues of sanctity in the synagogue, finds the comparison of images and texts to offer ‘striking evidence’ of ‘common Judaism’, whatever that means (cf. n. 33). Note S. Sabar, ‘The Development of the Study of Jewish Art’ Mahanaim 11 (1995) 264–75 [Hebrew] and Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World, 22–52.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

absence of creativity in reading late antique Jewish texts from Palestine against or in relation to the imagery of surviving synagogue mosaics. Take one of the most powerful and repeated motifs in the mosaic floors of Palestinian synagogues from Hammath Tiberias in the fourth century to Beth Alpha in the sixth (Figure 11.4). These floors generally show a panel with the image of the Temple or the Ark of the Covenant between characteristically Jewish implements of ritual at the top, a narrative scene of with biblical implications at the bottom and a zodiac with a central medallion showing a chariot in the middle. There are variations and also issues of survival – the Hammath Tiberias floor has a panel with inscription and lions (not a narrative scene) at the base; the Sepphoris floor, which has a small cycle of Abraham and Isaac imagery at the base, offers several panels between the zodiac and the Temple utensils including Aaron’s consecration of the Temple; the Na‘aran synagogue incorporates the image of Daniel into the Temple scene and has a geometric carpet design with animals below the zodiac.69 The chariot is almost always interpreted as Helios, or the Sun, in an appropriation of Graeco-Roman Sol Invictus iconography.70 The question for this material is simple. Given the incredibly rich Jewish mystical literature of precisely the late ancient period,71 whose focus is strongly on the vision of a chariot and which includes revelation texts, rich exegesis and plenty of hymnic liturgy,72 why did it take till 2005 for a single article (which remains an outrider in the 69

70

71

72

The literature is vast. Specific studies of the sites include E. Sukenik, The Ancient Synagogue of Beth Alpha: An Account of the Excavations Conducted on Behalf of the Hebrew University Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 1932); M. Dothan, Hammath Tiberias: Early Synagogues and the Hellenistic and Roman Remains (Jerusalem, 1983); Z. Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message through Its Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts (Jerusalem, 2005). Recent synoptic overviews with much further bibliography include Hachlili, Ancient Synagogues, 256–65 and Talgam, Mosaics of Faith, 257–332. Of course there have been exceptions: Morton Smith suggested the figure represented a celestial angel (using a mystical treatise) in ‘Helios in Palestine’, Eretz-Israel 16 (1982) 199–214 and Martin Goodman has asked whether it might not represent God himself: ‘The Jewish Image of God in Late Antiquity’, in R. Kalmin and S. Schwartz (eds.), Jewish Culture and Society under the Christian Roman Empire (Leuven, 2003) 133–45. Neither writes from within Israel. N. Janowitz, The Poetics of Ascent: Theories of Language in a Rabbinic Ascent Text (Albany, 1989), 23–4 dates the Maaseh Merkbah to between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, but the specific dates of these texts are very difficult to determine since they represent recensions in a rich and evolving mystical tradition. See e.g. D. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature (New Haven, 1980) and The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Tübingen, 1988); P. Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen, 2009) esp. 34–85 on Ezekiel and Enoch; C. Rowland and C. R. A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (Leiden, 2009) 219–64 on Merkava mysticism in Rabbinic and Hekhalot contexts (esp. 240–2 on hymns).

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   ś 

Figure 11.4 The mosaic floor, Beth Alpha Synagogue, sixth century , excavated 1929. Photo: The Picture Art Collection, Alamy Stock Photo. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

literature), largely ignored, to attempt an analysis of the potential viability of such mystical meanings in the imagery of buildings that were (after all) engines for the worship of the deity and for elevating the worshipper to a state of being able to commune with the deity?73 The fact that art is for viewing and that the mystical texts are themselves a range of visions focused around ascending and descending chariots is at least food for thought.74 The quite extraordinary blinkeredness of most existing scholarly approaches, grounded though they are in an impressive depth of learning and evidential command, is the result of a frame constructed by the Zionist academic tradition both in its obsession with secularist models of meaning and in the political-identity claims that unite archaeology with an investment in the land. Such approaches have prevented a vast range of possible lines of interpretation in response to the vibrant world of late ancient Jewish religious practice and in comparison to the visual and religious practices of the multi-ethnic and diverse communities that occupied the kinds of territories (urban centres in the Roman and Sasanian empires, which became the Christian and Islamic worlds, as well as the area of Syria Palestine) where Jews tended to live.75 What is striking is that they have hardly been tried.

4.

Conclusion

In the discipline of behavioural psychology, the making of judgements under conditions of uncertainty (a good description of the scholar’s predicament in making interpretive decisions from empirical data) has been shown to be founded in what has been called ‘anchoring’, that is, the dependence on often arbitrary ‘initial values’ or starting points that determine the ‘cognitive biases that stem from the reliance on judgmental 73 74

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The exception is Magness, ‘Heaven on Earth’. For Rabbinic visuality as a theme of study, see R. Neis, The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture (Cambridge, 2013) and for the ways it might, as the product of a subaltern culture, shadow or ventriloquize hegemonic Christian models of visuality, see R. Neis, ‘Embracing Icons: The Face of Jacob on the Throne of God’, Images 1 (2007) 36–54. Only in the case of Dura Europos, significantly sited in what Zionists define as ‘the diaspora’ although it is in Syria (so e.g. it appears in Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora on Jewish art in the diaspora), have there been attempts to explore the relations of the art of the synagogue with those of its close neighbours in the local environment – see e.g. A. Wharton, Refiguring the Postclassical City: Dura Europos, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge, 1995) and J. Elsner, ‘Cultural Resistance and the Visual Image: The Case of Dura Europos’, Classical Philology 96 (2001) 269–304.

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   ś 

hermeneutics’.76 The history of the study of Jewish art has revealed three distinct, fundamental and incompatible sets of ‘initial values’ that determine three forms of anchoring: the positive identification of a Jewish resistance to idolatry with a Calvinist one, which underpinned the aniconic model of Jewish art; the negative picture of Oriental decadence that perfectly coincided with anti-Semitism and philhellenic idealism in matters of figural art in the later nineteenth century and the years up to 1945 (especially in Germany); the focus on Palestine in the course of the twentieth century, which cannot be separated from Zionism and Israeli state-formation. As with all forms of anchoring, it is well worth asking what might be being missed. One theme, shared by all three anchors, is a persistent Eurocentrism in which Jewish art looks no further east than Palestine and is always in play with comparisons from the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. Yet we know perfectly well that there was a large and lively Jewish community in the Sasanian world, long established in Iran from Achaemenid and into Parthian times, whose scholarly creativity gave rise for instance to the Babylonian Talmud.77 There is little doubt, despite a distinctive disciplinary antipathy to the uses of archaeology in the study of Iranian Jewry,78 and the abysmal lack of historical information about Sasanian Jews,79 that this community possessed a rich material culture – attested for instance in the magical incantation bowls used by Jews but also Mandaeans, polytheists and Manichees in Sasanian Mesopotamia.80 The uses of figural

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Ironically, from the point of view of this chapter, the fundamental work was done at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the 1970s. See A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, ‘Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’, Science 185 (1974) 1124–31, quote from p. 1131. Among numerous later summaries, see e.g. R. Hastie and R. Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (London, 2010) 71–85. See e.g. J. Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 5 vols. (Leiden, 1965–70); J. Neusner, Talmudic Judaism in Sasanian Babylonia (Leiden, 1976); R. Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (Oxford, 2006); G. Herman, A Prince Without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era (Tübingen, 2012); J. Mokhtarian, Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (Berkeley, 2015). See e.g. Neusner, Talmudic Judaism, 13–24. See e.g. S. Schwartz, ‘The Political Geography of Rabbinic Texts’, in C. Fonrobert and M. Jaffee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, 2007) 75–98, esp. 89–93. See e.g. J. Segal, Catalogue of the Aramaic and Mandaic Incantation Bowls in the British Museum (London, 2000); D. Levene, A Corpus of Magical Bowls (New York, 2003); G. Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic (Cambridge, 2008) 183–93; S. Shaked, J. Ford and S. Bhayro, Aramaic Bowl Spells: Jewish Babylonian Aramaic bowls, vol. 1 (Leiden, 2013); D. Levene, Jewish Aramaic Curse Texts from Late-Antique Mesopotamia (Leiden, 2014); M. Moriggi, A Corpus of Syriac Incantation Bowls (Leiden, 2014); Mokhtarian, Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests, 125–43.

Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State

representations in the incantation bowls parallel those of figural imagery in gems and amulets among Jews in Roman and Byzantine Palestine.81 There is ample evidence of communication between the Jewish communities of Sasanian Babylonia and Roman-Byzantine Palestine, not least in the parallel development of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds,82 and much evidence of Jewish embeddedness within a multicultural and multireligious environment in Sasanian Iran,83 including one might hazard the world of visual culture. Despite there being hardly a whisper on such issues in the copious art-historical and archaeological literature, anchored as it is in Eurocentric and Zionist assumptions, is it really inconceivable that such monuments as the Dura Europos synagogue (whose Middle Iranian inscriptions are well attested)84 might not reflect the influence of artistic traditions (even the workmanship of artists) from the Sasanian empire, whose Jewish monuments are unattested because the archaeology has not been done?85

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See N. Vilozny, ‘The Art of Aramaic Incantation Bowls’, in Shaked et al., Aramaic Bowl Spells, 29–38 with bibliography. Interestingly the bowls themselves are not found outside Mesopotamia, see Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 191. See e.g. C. Hezser, Jewish Travel in Antiquity (Tübingen, 2011) 311–64; C. Hezser, ‘Crossing Enemy Lines: Network Connections between Palestinian and Babylonian Sages in Late Antiquity’, Journal for the Study of Judaism 46 (2015) 224–50. See C. Bakhos and M. Shayegan (eds.), The Talmud in its Iranian Context (Tübingen, 2010); S. Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Sasanian Context (Philadelphia, 2014); Y. Kiel, Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud: Christian and Sasanian Contexts in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2016), esp. 9. For multiculturalism in general in Sasanian Persia, see R. Payne, A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2015). See B. Geiger, ‘The Middle Iranian Texts’, in C. H. Kraeling, The Synagogue, The Excavations at Dura-Europos, Final Report 8/1 (New Haven, 1956) 283–317 and Daryayee, ‘To Learn and Remember from Others’. For an interesting attempt to tie the Dura Synagogue to patterns of picture-making evoked also by Mani’s Picture Book, one of the sacred scriptures of the Manichaean religion, painted as a result of revelation in third century Persia and then much copied, see Z. Gulácsi, Mani’s Pictures (Leiden, 2015) 10–12.

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Whose History Is It Anyway? Contests for India’s Past in the Twentieth Century  

Postcolonial studies have been pre-occupied with matters of voice. The question of who speaks, whether for the subaltern, the colonized, or the postcolonial subject, is a recurring analytical trope.1 Is it our responsibility to train the public and communities to see/understand history/archaeology the way we do or are we there to learn from them how to see it through their eyes?2 It is time for the native to talk back in his own terms and be prepared to face the charge of ‘essentialism.’ Such talking back is imperative if we are to evolve towards a multipolar world in which the present-day West becomes one of the provinces but not the centre.3

1.

Introduction

If you believe that the past cannot be owned, you are simultaneously correct, idealistic, and naïve. Ownership of the past – both of the material things which survive from it and act as public signifiers for our reconstructions, and the right to tell stories about those things – is frequently contested, as different people seek to own that which cannot be owned. The range of participants and the distance between their positions in Indian, and by extension South Asian, history is perhaps greater than any other field, excepting perhaps the history of Judaism. For India this is complicated because a substantial minority of South Asian historians are employed in, or citizens of, a country, the United Kingdom, which was the colonial occupier of India for about a century. The establishment of British direct rule in the nineteenth century placed British citizens in a position of economic and intellectual privilege directly dependent on military power. This privilege enabled them not only to 1 2

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D. Arnold, ‘Nehruvian Science and Postcolonial India’, Isis 104 (2013) 360–70, 361. U. Z. Rizvi, ‘Accounting for Multiple Desires: Decolonizing Methodologies, Archaeology, and the Public Interest’, India Review 5 (2006) 394–416, 412. R. Malhotra, ‘Author’s Response: The Question of Dharmic Coherence’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 16 (2012) 369–408, 371.

Contests for India’s Past in the Twentieth Century

dictate the terms in which India’s past was represented but often to take possession of the physical remains. Indian independence altered that relationship but academics in Indian institutions remain a minority in the study of their country.4 Calls to rectify that, often by giving Indian voices the same monopoly once enjoyed by the British, persist in debates about the field. In this chapter, I will trace some of the disputes that have occurred in the public sphere about India’s history since the late nineteenth century, and particularly disputes in the post-colonial era. In the process I will offer my understanding of the clashes between professional historians and those who claim to speak for political or public notions of history with as much nuance as I can manage (since none of these represent monolithic groups). I will argue that these disputes reflect a debate over who speaks for the past, particularly pasts which form part of the identity of modern communities. That this is my opinion ought to go without saying; it is surely obvious that all of the chapters in the current volume reflect the opinions of the people who wrote them. However, I raise it here because some critical readers of earlier versions chose to read the sentence that ‘all history is politically inflected’ (two paragraphs from now) as written to mean everyone except me. Academic presentations have a way of doing that, of implicitly asserting objectivity, and may appear to authorize readings entirely contrary to the ‘all’ of the text. Less apparent, at least before you have read the chapter, is that I can claim no expertise on this subject. To the degree that I can claim to be fully conversant with the sources for a particular moment it would be for the early centuries  in the northwest of South Asia (modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northwest India). But I do not write about the first millennium in some idyllic isolation, I do so within various contexts, and the context of which I am most aware as I write is the historiography discussed in this chapter, though I am ill-positioned to assess if it is the most significant. Stakes are important in this discussion, as are objectives. Public violence, particularly after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, has become a turning point of such magnitude that it would be legitimate to ask if a paper discussing how the politics of South Asia impacts the writing of history is not a tad recondite. That is, however, the question which flows logically from Chapters 2 and 10, and broadly frames the approach here. 4

This is complicated when citizenship, ethnicity, or descent are considered but I am not aware of any reliable studies of any of these factors in knowledge production for India.

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It is emphatically not the contention of this chapter that Indian politics has a direct impact on the study of first millennium art. Most research occurs without direct political involvement and is rarely noticed outside of the small community of specialists; the disputes discussed here are the exception rather than the rule. Even where politics is involved, politically motivated history – the deliberate distortion to serve political ends – is quite rare, much rarer than most participants believe it to be. When history is politically charged this is often not consciously sought or intended by the author. And while all history is politically inflected, these effects are subtle, shaping what areas might be of interest, tone, and the framing of broad questions, rather than involving deliberate misrepresentation. Though much of what is discussed concerns contemporary debates whose reference points are in the second millennium, it creates a context within which the study of first millennium art operates. Specific examples of how historically and in contemporary practice this impact can be seen were offered in Chapters 2 and 10, so they are avoided here. Offering more examples would complicate an already involved subject, so I will limit myself to general reflections in relation to two principal case studies – the Ashokan pillars and Didarganj Yakshi.

2.

A Caricature of Indian Historiography

It will be useful to start with broad-brush picture, arguably a caricature, of the development of Indian historiography over the last two centuries. The field can broadly be divided into four periods; the colonial/pandit phase from 1784 to 1947, the nationalist phase from 1947 to 1958, the Marxist phase from 1958 to the 1990s and the subsequent post-colonial period.5 The earliest phase here starts from the foundation of the Asiatic Society and the beginning of systematic research by English and German academics. The phase is characterized by a tendency to see historical consciousness as absent from India,6 its rural life as an unchanging continuity and, 5

6

For other characterizations of Indian historiography see G. Prakash, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (1990) 383–408 and P. Heehs, ‘Studies of Orientalism: Paradoxes and Problems in Indian Historiography’, History and Theory 42 (2003) 169–95. See R. Mantena, ‘The Question of History in Precolonial India’, History and Theory 46 (2007) 396–408 and R. Inden, ‘From Philogical to Dialogical Texts’, in R. Inden, J. Walters and D. Ali (eds.), Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia (Oxford, 2000), 3–28, esp. 19.

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without acknowledgement of the contradiction, its religious and artistic culture as a story of decay from a golden past. I have chosen to term it colonial/pandit to reflect the prominent role played by native Indians throughout. Though frequently relegated to subordinate roles as helper or informant, for which the term pandit was often used, to think of this period purely in terms of the colonial aspects would fail to recognize that European scholars would have found it impossible to do their work without the active cooperation of native Indian scholars. Conflicts over historical interpretation did play out in the period but they were generally disputes amongst intellectuals such as Ananda K. Coomeraswamy and Alfred Foucher (discussed in Chapter 2), James Fergusson and Rajendralal Mitra, or among Bengali historians over the validity of traditional narratives such as the kulagranthas.7 Which is not to deny that historical and archaeological work was politically charged or inflected. Archaeology was funded (particularly the Archaeological Survey of India) precisely because it served the interests of the colonial state, but the blurring of boundaries between ‘academic’ and ‘public’ understandings of the past which will be discussed later were much less pronounced than they have become in the early twenty-first century. The most significant shift in academic history came with Indian independence in 1947. A generation of Indian scholars had been trained under British rule and were familiar with European intellectual history but had been denied full rein to speak for the history of India. As the history written in the colonial/pandit phase was shaped by and served the interests of the colonial project, so nationalist history was shaped by the concerns of a newly created nation state; there are clear parallels here with Jewish history in the wake of the creation of the independent Jewish state. As discussed in Chapter 2 this was primarily achieved in the Indian context by adopting a positive frame for what the colonial/pandit phase saw negatively and by marginalizing periods of foreign influence in favour of those conceived as ancestral to modern India, such as the Gupta era ( 319–500). However, the notion of a singular Hinduism with a glorious antiquity was as valuable to nationalists as similar, but less positive, descriptions had been to the colonial project.

7

On the dispute over kulagranthas see K. Chatterjee, ‘The King of Controversy: History and Nation-Making in Late Colonial India’, American Historical Review 110 (2005) 1454–75 and T. Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York, 2004) 106–11.

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Individual historians have been more or less influenced by nationalism but the period of its dominance was short-lived. That ended with the rise of Marxist historiography, dated here from the publication of R. S. Sharma’s ‘The Origins of Feudalism in India’ in 1958.8 This period is principally characterized by increasing sophistication in the use of sources, less collation and translation and more interpretation, rather than a preponderance of Marxist theory, though that remains a widely used label. This phase saw swings away from political history, an increasing emphasis on the colonial period, and a much greater awareness of the value of history for the present: R.S. Sharma was foremost among the Indian intellectuals who wanted historians to realise that the discipline of history was not just about what happened in the past but what its lessons were for imaginatively and intelligently responding to the challenges of the present.9

Though the colonial/pandit and nationalist phases were equally (un)engaged with the present, the Marxist period showed greater self-reflection. It is particularly characterized by an awareness that what you said about a community in the past meant something in contemporary India, the problem of communalism which will be explored below.10 The post-colonial phase, lumbered here with the awkward prefix ‘post-’ in part as an admission that it is defined more by its position after the period of ‘nationalist’ and ‘Marxist’ ascendancy than for any clear coherence of approach, is principally characterized by a self-reflective tendency and a fragmentation of theoretical positions.11 Some of this relates to wider international trends in historiography, particularly the impact of postmodernism and the literary turn in the 1990s. Other elements, such as

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R. S. Sharma, ‘The Origins of Feudalism in India (c. AD 400–650)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1958) 297–328. P. C. Joshi, ‘Remembering R. S. Sharma: Some Reflection’, Mainstream 49/38 (10 September 2011), www.mainstreamweekly.net/article2994.html. The publication of Communalism and the Writing of Indian History could equally have been taken as a marker for the period, and Romila Thapar is probably more important a thread in it than Sharma: R. Thapar, H. Mukhia and B. Chandra, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (New Delhi, 1969). What I am calling the post-colonial moment may be taken to begin with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, but it is also apparent in the careers of individuals such as Dilip K. Chakrabarti, whose turn towards a reflective historiography can be dated between his publications in 1988 and 1997: D. K. Chakrabarti, A History of Indian Archaeology from the beginning to 1947 (Delhi, 1988) and Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past (Delhi, 1997).

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politicization of the field after the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in 1992, discussed below, are specific to South Asian studies. This caricature should not suggest that historians are a monolithic group, though they are undoubtedly as vulnerable to peer pressure, group-think, and the subtle play of a shared sense of identity, as any other section of society. The picture is easily complicated. For example, Indraji Bhagwanlal published articles in his own name at a time when many fellow Indians with linguistic expertise were relegated to the role of informants,12 two Indians served as heads of the Archaeological Survey of India before 1948, and an Englishman over the period of partition.13

3.

1947 and Two Positions on Indian Identity

The fight for Indian independence (Swaraj), which culminated in the creation of the Republics of India and Pakistan, was not a homogeneous movement, and history was appropriated by the different strands in very different ways. Two responses are instructive – the first part of the Congress party’s attempts to forge national symbols and the second from the writing of the nationalist, V. D. Savarkar.

The Spinning Wheel and the Dharma Wheel The national flag of India derives from a proposal made by Gandhi in the 1920s. Gandhi’s flag consisted of a tricolour which represented Islam (green), Hinduism (red), and other religions (white), with a spinning wheel, charkha, in the centre. The flag’s symbolism was entirely concerned with the present. When Congress adopted the flag in 1931 the party substituted saffron for red, and officially the colours came to symbolize more abstract values of hope, sacrifice and purity (Figure 12.1).14 On 22 July 1947 Nehru presented a final design which was adopted as the national flag of India (Figure 12.2). The only change, and an interesting one, was the replacement of the spinning wheel, charkha, with the wheel depicted on the capital of the pillar of the third century  king Ashoka at Sarnath, a 12

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For Bhagwanlal’s complex status see V. Dharamaśī, Bhagwanlal Indraji – The First Indian Archaeologist: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Study of the Past (New Delhi, 2012). These were: Daya Ram Sahni (1931–5), Kashinath Narayan Dikshit (1937–44) and Mortimer Wheeler (1944–8). For a good account see S. Roy, ‘“A Symbol of Freedom”: The Indian Flag and the Transformation of Nationalism, 1906–2002’, The Journal of Asian Studies 65 (2006) 495–527.

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Figure 12.1 Flag adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1931, with the spinning wheel (charkha). Photograph: Creative Commons Licence, Wikipedia. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Figure 12.2 Flag adopted at Independence as the national flag of India, 1947, with the wheel (chakra) adapted from Ashoka’s lion capital now in Sarnath Museum. Photograph: Creative Commons Licence, Wikipedia. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

chakra. The whole of that same lion capital also became the badge of India. It was an interesting decision which replaced a generic current symbol of political struggle with a specific ancient symbol of imperial rule. The change can be linked to several symbolic resonances. There is the popular perception, derived from colonial historiography, that Ashoka was a Buddhist king who ruled all of India and abstained from violence. Buddhism was safe, in a way Hindu or Muslim symbols were not (the reason the colour to religion link was dropped), precisely because there were no surviving Buddhists in India, the religion having largely died out in the eleventh to twelfth centuries.15 The age of the symbol also makes a 15

See H. P. Ray, The Return of the Buddha: Ancient Symbols for a New Nation (London, 2014), for a discussion of the colonial historiography on the Buddha and the subsequent importance the material played as neutral but spiritual symbolism in forging a national identity postindependence.

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claim to the great antiquity of the concept of the Indian state, a point Nehru emphasized. There is a common thread in Indian historical consciousness that connects antiquity with national pride, particularly noticeable in the study of historical astronomy.16

Pitribhu and Punyabhu This concern with a glorious, international and spiritual (but not specifically Hindu, Muslim or Christian) historical identity represented one strand in anti-colonial thinking. Another is usually represented by the book Hindutva, written from prison by the nationalist revolutionary V. D. Savarkar (originally titled Essentials of Hindutva in 1923, and retitled Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? in 1928).17 In Hindutva, Savarkar sought a way to define being Indian/Hindu. This was not a problem that he faced alone. Since Independence, Indian law makers have wrestled with defining ‘Hindu’, faced as they are with law codes whose application depends on religious adherence.18 Savarkar’s solution was elegant and is summarized as ‘their Fatherland (Pitribhu) as well as their Holyland (Punyabhu)’. He argued that what Hindus shared in common was that their religion originated in India as well as being citizens, so that their loyalties were undivided. This identity was termed ‘Hindutva’, to distinguish it from the Hindu religion. By all means Hindus possess Hindutva, the essence of being Indian, but so do Jains, Sikhs, and even the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita.19

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For example B. N. Narahari Achar, ‘In Search of Naksastra-s in the “Rgveda”’, Annals of the _ _ Bhandarkar Oriental Institute 83 (2002) 183–93, seeks to demonstrate the presence of a particular astronomical idea earlier than it is directly attested while P. Mahajani, M. N. Vahia, M. Apte and A. P. Jamkhedkar, ‘Dating of Rohinī-Śakata-Bheda’, Annals of the Bhandarkar _ _ Oriental Research Institute 87 (2006) 135–51 attempt to demonstrate the memory of prehistoric climate change in historical Indian texts. See V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva (1927) (New Delhi, 2005). The constitution sidesteps the issue, covering it only in article 25, for which the second explanatory note specifies that Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists are to be included. Much of this has actually been played out with respect to the remit of the Hindu Law codes, four bills passed from 1952 to 1956. On this see J. Derrett, Hindu Law Past and Present (Calcutta, 1957); R. V. Williams, ‘Hindu Law as Personal Law: State and Identity in the Hindu Code Bills Debates, 1952–1956’, in T. Lubin, D. R. Davis and J. K. Krishnan (eds.), Hinduism and Law: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2010) 105–20; and particularly R. Sen, Defining Religion: The Indian Supreme Court and Hinduism. Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, Working Paper 29 (Heidelberg, 2006) which provides insightful commentary on how the Indian Supreme Court has subsequently wrestled with competing definitions. Savarkar, Hindutva, 129–31.

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Savarkar is often seen as the intellectual father of a broad nationalist movement that rejected Gandhian notions of tolerance, or Nehruvian secular ideals. However Savarkar did not create this movement,20 though he presents the earliest and most cogent analysis of its central theme, what it is to be Indian, given that before 1947 there had never been a single political entity encompassing the subcontinent, despite the way Ashoka (whose chakra appears on the flag) is often presented.21 That diffuse movement is variously referred to as Hindu nationalism, Hindu fundamentalism, Hindutva, or by the name of organizations that advocated its ideas such as the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh founded in 1925), BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party founded in the 1980s and the current governing party of India) or as the Sangh Parivar.22 A large part of Savarkar’s text is dedicated to a historical survey aiming to demonstrate the deep antiquity of Hindutva. This assumed, unsurprisingly since colonial/pandit historians had also assumed it, that Hinduism had deep antiquity. It also, importantly, has two exclusions, Christianity and Islam, the latter of which acted as the other to Savarkar’s sense of Indian identity, with Muslims as the paradigmatic non-Indians. This drew on contemporary history which would culminate in the separation of a Muslim from a Hindu state at Independence, but it was also a recognition on Savarkar’s part of the importance of identifying ‘the other’ in forming any identity. The early eleventh century loomed large in this: . . . when Mohammad [sic] of Ghazni crossed the Indus, the frontier line of Sindhusthan and invaded her. That day the conflict of life and death began. Nothing makes Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self. Nothing can weld a people into a nation and nations into a state as the pressure of a common foe.23

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M. Bhagavan, ‘Princely States and the Hindu Imaginary: Exploring the Cartography of Hindu Nationalism in Colonial India’, The Journal of Asian Studies 67 (2008) 881–915 traces many of these ideas back to ‘constructions of princely India, including their view of these regions as portals to a pure, ancient past’ (891). Savarkar was not alone; contemporaries like Sri Aurobindo were also seeking a sense of Indian/ Hindu identity in historical study. In doing so they were beginning to create new historical discourses, or to fossilize older colonial ones, see Heehs, ‘Studies of Orientalism’. The RSS deny that they use Hindu in a religious sense or that they exclude Christians or Muslims, the line also taken by Savarkar though this is a doubtful claim, see www.rss.org//Encyc/2012/10/23/BasicFAQ-on-RSS.aspx (September 2015). Often translated as ‘National Volunteer Organisation’, ‘Indian People’s Party’, and ‘Family of Organisations’, though generally the organizations do not usually translate their names despite often communicating in English. Savarkar, Hindutva, 43.

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Mahmud of Ghazni is certainly intended here, and Savarkar, reflecting both colonial/pandit and nationalist historians, framed him as engaged in a holy war aimed at the forced conversion of Hindus and the systematic destruction of their places of worship. His looting of the temple of Somnath in  1025/6 is often taken as the definitive event in this reconstruction. At the same time Savarkar embedded Mahmud in a longer series of conflicts from Muhammad bin Qasim, in the eighth century, to the thirteenth-century Muhammad of Ghor (possibly the source of the name confusion in the passage above). This suggested that these campaigns were conducted by people bound by a common identity (Muslims) for a common cause (Islam). Entirely by chance Mahmud’s first victory, at the battle of Peshawar, coincides with the new millennium of the Western calendar, in  1001, likely lending his reign the trappings of a turning point it does not deserve. This notion of an ‘Islamic conquest’ has been heavily criticized, since Mahmud of Ghazni’s armies incorporated non-Muslim troops, were often opposed by Muslims, and the sources used exaggerated temple destruction for rhetorical effect. It has also been pointed out that the many conflicts which intervened between Muhammad bin Qasim’s campaign in Sind ( 714) and the establishment of the Delhi sultanate in the thirteenth century were conducted by ethnically and politically diverse groups, for a wide variety of reasons. The differing positions on Islamic invasion have come to carry political connotations in modern India and to mark fault lines between academic and popular histories, but particularly in relation to the textbook controversies of 1977 to 1979 and the discourse around the destruction of the Babri-Masjid mosque in 1991.

4.

Is There a Hindutva Historiography?

As will become clear, I am doubtful about the way the term Hindutva is used to refer to a very broad range of individuals and groups. It seems problematic as a category to conflate moderate well-educated Hindu practitioners in the United States, the elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and a variety of religious groups, with those responsible for violent acts in Gujurat, or those who destroyed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Even if there are deep links and a sharing of ideas, individuals, and objectives, between them, these social and political movements are too diverse and

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amorphous to be viewed as a homogeneous whole.24 Despite this, I believe a particular historiographical position can be labelled Hindutva, as long as it is understood that those who hold to it have nothing necessarily in common beyond certain elements of historical interpretation.25 At least four themes seem common to most Hindutva historiography. The first is ‘primordial modernism’,26 a tendency to project the experience of the modern world back into deep time, particularly the nation state and Hinduism, but also some aspects of modern technology. This is particularly apparent in the debate over the prehistory of India. In that debate Hindutva positions have tried to project modern conceptions of Indian identity – gods such as Vishnu or Śiva, or the use of Sanskrit – back on to the earliest urban civilizations in the subcontinent.27 The second theme is a tendency to conflate myth and history, or to present accounts of what others perceive to be myths in the manner of academic history.28 The third and fourth are the treatment of Muslim and colonial rule as coherent histories of injustice (rather than contingent ad hoc historical events) that continue into the present. The way in which disparate military campaigns were conflated as a single ‘Muslim conquest’ has been touched on already. In the case of the colonial experience the most important element of Hindutva historiography is that it sees distortions in colonial/pandit historiography as deliberate and enjoying a clear continuity with modern academic practice – there is little difference in this view between the history

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Ludden also wonders that ‘Hindutva may not be one singular thing at all’, see D. Ludden (ed.), Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India (New Delhi, 1996), preface to second edition (2005) xiv. Many specialists have taken the opposite view, that the historiography, violence, diaspora, and diverse political parties are deeply intertwined (certainly true), and therefore constitute a single movement (doubtful). The literature is vast, but see particularly for the Indian context N. Misra, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India since the Great Rebellion (London, 2007) and for the diaspora P. A. Kurien, ‘Multiculturalism and “American” Religion: The Case of Hindu Indian Americans’, Social Forces 85 (2006) 723–41 and his book A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism (New Brunswick, 2007). Some accounts have gone further framing Hindutva as a form of fascism, though insofar as such a distinction can be maintained these tend to be journalistic rather than academic accounts, see for example I. K. Shukla, Hindutva: An Autopsy of Fascism as a Theoterrorist Cult and Other Essays (Delhi, 2003); C. Krishna, Fascism in India: Faces, Fangs and Facts (Delhi, 2003); K. Iliaiah, Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism (Delhi, 2004). K. Singh, ‘Temple of Eternal Return: The Swānārāyan Akshardhām Complex in Delhi’, Artibus Asiae 70 (2010) 47–76. M. Witzel and S. Farmer, ‘Horseplay in Harappa: The Indus Valley Decipherment’, Frontline (13 October 2000) 4–15. S. Guichard, The Construction of History and Nationalism in India: Textbooks, Controversies and Politics (Abingdon, 2010) 109–15.

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writing of British colonial officials in the nineteenth century and American professional academics in the twenty-first. From the perspective of academic history these are very different sorts of claims. Some, that military campaigns were religiously motivated and followed a coherent grand strategy of a rapacious nature, were at one time historical orthodoxy. Others, that the Aryan writers of the Vedas were indigenous, or that modern technologies had ancient antecedents, or that modern Western scholars are part of systematic politically-motivated movements to distort Indian history, are clearly fantasies.29 ‘Fantasy’ may seem a strong term, but it is preferable to the alternative use of ‘pseudo history’. The terms ‘pseudo history’ or ‘pseudoarchaeology’ have increasingly been deployed to try and demarcate certain historical reconstructions from those of the academy. Notable applications in recent times, outside the context of India, have included Gavin Menzies’ 1421 (the claim that Chinese sailors reached America before Columbus)30 and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (a revisionist take on the role of Africans in the classical and Hellenistic world).31 In general the analysis has been deployed when debates have tumbled out of academic circles into the public sphere, and are used to imply that writers who lack professional qualifications are not merely wrong but dishonest. This terminology has been adopted to describe Hindutva historiography, but the problem with the concept of this ‘pseudo history’ is that it rests almost entirely on motivation;32 what else can distinguish a historian who is bad at his or her job from someone who is merely pretending to be a historian? Terms like ‘nonsense’, ‘fantasy’ or ‘myth’, are strong but they are assessments of the work itself, and as such are epistemologically more defensible than assessments of motivation. Even if it is accepted that some

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The last is also a conspiracy theory – and often ridiculed as such. See G. Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London, 2002). On Menzies see in particular H. Lysa and J. Huang, ‘Portable Histories in Mobile City Singapore: The (Lack)Lustre of Admiral Zheng He’, South East Asia Research 17 (2009) 287–309, and R. Finlay, ‘How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America’, Journal of World History 15 (2004) 229–42. Lysa and Huang (‘Portable Histories’) 299, in particular discuss how attacks on Menzies tipped over from accusations of bad scholarship to dishonesty. An interesting account of the debate around this publication is offered in M. Levin, ‘Review Article: The Marginalization of Martin Bernal’, Classical Philology 93 (1998) 345–63. Broadly Levin argues that the creation of a false ‘amateurism’ vs. ‘professionalism’ (361) dichotomy impoverishes the historical field by excluding these voices. C. Humes, ‘Hindutva, Mythistory, and Pseudoarchaeology’, Numen 59 (2012) 178–201 gives a set of criteria of which her points 2 and 4 rest solely on the author’s motivation.

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practitioners are dishonest, the concept remains unhelpful. If historical work is accessible to critical evaluation then bad work and dishonest work can both be dismissed on their merits, without recourse to motivation. Appeals to motivation carry the risk of dismissing lines of historiographic approach because of a dislike for their advocates, rather than on the merits of their arguments. This matters because Hindutva historiography differs most markedly from other broadly defined historiographic positions, in that its practitioners are frequently outsiders to formal academia. Most Hindutva advocates are not employed in conventional research positions and the approach is sustained in large part by a public discourse that happens entirely outside the academy. In this sense Hindutva positions are not just a confrontation with existing historical narratives, but a challenge to the privileged position of historians to speak for the past. The influential Marxist historian Romila Thapar has raised this issue specifically, partly as a critique of Hindutva positions: There is no recognition of the technical training required of historians and archaeologists or of the foundations of social science essential to historical explanation. Engineers, computer experts, journalists-turned-politicians, foreign journalists posing as scholars of Indology, and what have you, assume infallibility, and pronounce on archaeology and history.33

One of the most prominent Hindutva writers outside India is Rajiv Malhotra, a retired engineer who founded a charitable organization, The Infinity Foundation,34 in 1995 to provide grants for a wide variety of work on Indian history. In 2012 the International Journal of Hindu Studies published seven responses from academics employed in Western institutions,35 to Rajiv Malhotra’s book Being Different,36 and a further piece by Malhotra himself responding to the comments. Malhotra’s response critiques the tendency of the West to fragment and digest, without 33

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R. Thapar, ‘Hindutva And History: Why Do Hindutva Ideologues Keep Flogging a Dead Horse?’ Frontline (13 October 2000) 15–16, esp. 16. P. Joglekar, ‘Review of Harappan Architecture and Civil Engineering, Marvels of Indian Iron through the Ages, and History of Iron Technology in India’, Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute 66/7 (2006–7) 461–5. The foundation funds work on various subjects. Three funded works on ancient iron technology and civil engineering published in 2008 were positively reviewed in the Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute. The challenges to foreign diffusion models (463) and ‘hints at modern possible modern applications of the past technology’ (464) show where such work could fit in a Hindutva conception, whatever the merits of the individual contributions. The respondents are a diverse group including various ethnicities, genders, and specialisms. R. Malhotra, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (New Delhi, 2011).

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acknowledgement, Indian ideas, and challenges the ability of Western scholarship to speak for India.37 At several points Malhotra makes clear that native or ethnic Indians trained in Western techniques lack ‘adequate knowledge or sympathy’ to think from an Indian point of view.38 A central part of Malhotra’s claim in response to his interlocutors is that India has an intellectual tradition equally valid and sufficiently robust to return the gaze of Western Academies. The implication is that this tradition is better qualified to understand India sympathetically, so when one interlocutor supports an argument against his position on the basis of ‘modern linguistic science’ and ‘western philosophy’, Malhotra dismisses this, and the edifice of Western knowledge, as no more than the ‘confident acceptance of received doctrine’.39 Implicit in Malhotra’s argument is that it is not individual Western scholars who are lacking knowledge or unsympathetic, or even outright hostile, but the training itself and its underlying axioms which are the problem.40 It is a telling and rhetorically powerful claim (at least in some quarters) that the problem lies precisely in the ‘technical training’ which Thapar values so highly, and from which Malhotra distances himself as a self-proclaimed outsider to the academy.41 That possession of historical training, at least in its ‘Western’, ‘Marxist’ or ‘European’, form disqualifies an individual from speaking authoritatively on India. This element is only occasionally articulated but in many of the public debates that will be discussed in this chapter it underpins the opposition.

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Malhotra, ‘Author’s Response: The Question of Dharmic Coherence’, esp. 386–92 and 403. See Malhotra, Being Different, 373, but also in his comments on the economist Amartya Sen (born in Bangladesh) and the novelist V. S. Naipaul (born to Indian émigrés in Trinidad): ‘Their critique of the West tends to be largely the West’s own self-critique replicated through brown-skinned luminaries’ (400). Compare Malhotra, ‘Author’s Response: The Question of Dharmic Coherence’, 383–4 with R. A. Yelle, ‘Comparative Religion as Cultural Combat: Occidentalism and Relativism in Rajiv Malhotra’s “Being Different”’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 16 (2012) 335–48, esp. 342–3. Malhotra presents the issue in question as about the non-translatability of terms, but Yelle actually appears to be discussing concepts of natural language. It is hard to tell if this apparent talking past each other is deliberate obfuscation or an inability to conceive radically alternative viewpoints. It is worth noting that this argument is quite common amongst ‘alternative histories’. A central part of Gavin Menzies’ claims in the controversial 1421: The Year China Discovered the World is that his training in the Royal Navy better equipped him to interpret ancient maps than the training of conventional historians. This can be contrasted with Thapar’s belief that only historians are qualified to assess historical arguments (p. 134 of the interview between Romila Thapar, Kunal Chakrabarti and Geeti Sen, ‘Interpretation of Indian History’, India International Centre Quarterly 20 (1993) 115–36). Malhotra, ‘Author’s Response: The Question of Dharmic Coherence’, 374.

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On one side, participants believe their technical training or long study is a prerequisite to expertise and thus justification for a privileged position in public discourse, while the other side makes the same claim for a privileged position on the basis of insider status. Some have tried to blame the loss of academic authority on ‘the various criticisms of the possibility of a nondistorting knowledge of other cultures that have emerged since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism’ which ‘have created the space in which a voice like Malhotra’s could emerge’, but I suspect this greatly overstates the importance of the academy.42 The audibility of such voices is not a response to the self-reflective turn of the academy in the 1970s, but the result of previously silent groups that already held, or were predisposed towards, these views, having acquired the economic and political power, or technical capability, to make their voices heard. That process did begin in the 1970s but owed more (in the context of the subcontinent) to the weakened authority of India’s Congress party than to Said’s 1978 publication.

5.

The Textbook Controversy

The Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) was founded in 1972 as an autonomous branch of the Ministry of Education. It was given control of a substantial budget for scholarly activities and the appointment of R. S. Sharma as its first chairman marked the pre-eminence of Marxist historians at the time. One of the early decisions the ICHR had to make was in relation to the translation of The History and Culture of the Indian People (HCIP), volume one of which had been published in 1951, and volume eight of which would be published in 1977. It had been created as a nationalist response to the Cambridge History of India (CHI), published in 1922 and 1937. The CHI had excluded Indian authors while the HCIP in response selected its contributors exclusively from Indian authors (Indian both by birth and employment). The government proposed translating the volumes into native languages but Sharma quietly shelved the idea. In early volumes the ICHR simply followed the general nationalist historiographic trend to re-valorize colonial/pandit history but in the later volumes – particularly with regard to the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni and the conquests of Muhammad of Ghor – the volumes took on an 42

Yelle, ‘Comparative Religion as Cultural Combat’, 338 on E. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). See also Guichard, The Construction of History and Nationalism, 89–90 on similar blame levelled at the subaltern group and other Indian historiographical trends.

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anti-Muslim character, denigrating the invaders in a manner that drew a firm link between religion and action. The volumes envisaged a systematic Muslim conquest, rapacious in nature, with attempts to convert India forcibly, which was vigorously but ultimately unsuccessfully resisted between Muhammad Qasim’s siege of Deybul in  713 and the second battle of Terain in  1192.43 The Marxist period had reframed this history, seeing the various Muslim raids as ad hoc and unconnected, frequently driven by political expediency or a desire for loot, rather than religious expansion. Furthermore it was seen as actively dangerous, connected to the beliefs of militant Hindutva groups like the RSS, and likely to lead to violence between Hindu and Muslim communities, to present history in religious expansionist terms. The threat of communalism, the term used in India for ideologies perceived to promote inter-communal violence, coloured responses to the nationalist presentation of India’s medieval history. It was an entirely different thing to portray Alexander and the Greeks in negative terms, than to do so with the Muslims; no one had to live with Alexander’s descendants. However in 1977 the political climate changed. Deeply unpopular after the imposition of emergency powers, Indira Gandhi’s Congress party lost the general election to an alliance of alternate parties known as the Janata. A new chair of the ICHR, A. R. Kulkarni, was appointed and the translation project revived.44 In addition, the Ministry of Education attempted to have several textbooks discontinued.45 This was done in part because of a belief that Marxist historians were politically motivated in their reevaluation of Muslim invaders. Politicians did not understand how historians could read sources against the overt narrative they presented: 43

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Interestingly Pakistani historiography passes through a similar, longer, national phase that seeks to show Muhammad Qasim in particular as a paradigm of the tolerant Muslim and accommodate Mahmud of Ghazni as a national hero that further complicates this. The second volume of the history of Sind series by M. H. Pathan, Sind: Arab Period, History of Sind Series Vol. II (Hyderabad, 1978) is illustrative of this writing. I am inclined to think that Kulkarni was more enthusiastic for the translation project than Sharma not as a result of nationalist sympathies but because of his personal history of publishing in Marathi, see M. A. Nayeem, A. Ray and K. S. Mathew (eds.), Prof. A.R. KULKARNI – In Memoriam. Studies in History of the Deccan: Medieval and Modern (Professor A. R. Kulkarni Felicitation Volume, 2002), https://gloriainacselsis.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/ prof-a-r-kulkarni-in-memoriam/. Aligarh Historians Group, ‘The RSS Coup in the ICHR: Its First Fruits’, Social Scientist 7/11 (1979) 56–60, M. H. Siddiqui, ‘History Writing in India’, History Workshop Journal 10 (1986) 184–90, and for a particularly good account L. Rudolph and S. Rudolph, ‘Genesis and Implications of the Textbook Controversy, 1977–79’, Pacific Affairs 56 (1983) 15–37.

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For example, Mahmud Ghazni’s [sic] destroying of Hindu temples has been justified on the ground that he wanted to plunder them. His proud claim as breaker of idols has been almost ignored.46

This remark was directed by a contemporary politician at Marxist historian Romila Thapar.47 Contrasted with the quote by Thapar on the lack of understanding of professional practices above, it helps to throw into relief the debate that has focused on Mahmud’s raids. The overtone of the debate, that the other side is at the very least grossly incompetent, and possibly deeply dishonest, is itself a pressure to take a side.48 There is no question that in  1025–6 Mahmud campaigned deep into India and that this involved the looting of a temple at Somnath on the west coast, or that some sources present his motivation in religious terms. Subsequent scholarship has complicated this, both in terms of the heterogeneity of Mahmud’s army,49 which contained many non-Muslims, but also by much more detailed study of Somnath itself.50 However, the conclusions drawn, that temple destruction was a religiously motivated campaign of conversion, or that it was opportunistic plundering or localized political acts,51 are both problematic and both depend on synecdochal reasoning,

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Quoted in Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Genesis and Implications of the Textbook Controversy’, 27. It comes from a memorandum by V. Shankar, principal secretary to the new Janata Prime Minister Moraji Desai, sent to the Minister for Education, P. C. Chunder, in May 1977 about textbooks ‘whose controversial and biased material’ led ‘to a prejudiced view of Indian history’: see Rudolph and Rudolph, ‘Genesis and Implications of the Textbook Controversy’, 15–16, 25–7. Criticism of Marxist positions has not been entirely from outside the academy. D. K. Chakrabarti, Archaeology in the Third World: A History of Indian Archaeology since 1947 (New Delhi, 2003) 203–4 in part referencing his earlier work, is vitriolic in denouncing what he terms ‘progressives’ when he associates them with the ‘factors behind the decline of ethics and the rise of criminality in their respective subjects’ (203). All accounts of military matters derive from C. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran 994–1040 (Edinburgh, 1963) particularly 98–128. Though this work ably explores the composition and organization of the Ghaznavid army it largely ignores questions of military campaigning, which is an underdeveloped field in South Asian historiography. See particularly R. Thapar, ‘Somanātha: Narratives of a History’, in S. Kumar (ed.), Demolishing Myths or Mosques and Temples? Readings on History and Temple Desecration in Medieval India (Gurgaon, 2008) 65–92. Following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 academic attention has particularly focused on temple destruction and one influential and compelling argument, initially developed in R. Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States’, Journal of Islamic Studies 11 (2000) 283–319, has been that those temples destroyed were politically active sites, and that Muslim rulers were actually adopting a non-Muslim practice with deep roots in South Asia. However, these arguments are not usually applied to Mahmud with these authors still framing Somnath in terms of loot.

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whereby the whole of a phenomenon is inferred from analysis of only some of its parts. That is, they take the particular campaign at Somnath to stand for Mahmud’s ‘Indian’ campaigns as a whole, the inference of his motivations to stand for the motivations of the constituents of his army, and those conclusions to stand for other Muslim rulers, and ultimately all the conflicts which straddle the shift from the first to the second millennium. Problematically the focus on Somnath and the loot hypothesis has led revisionists subtly to reinforce, even while trying to challenge, the Muslim/ Indian binary. For example, Eaton describes Ghaznavid strategy in these general terms: the earlier Ghaznavid rulers raided and looted Indian cities, including their richly endowed temples loaded with moveable wealth with a view to financing their larger political objectives far to the west, in Khurasan.52

In other words Mahmud looted the ‘Indian’ non-Muslim world to fund very different sorts of campaigns in the ‘Muslim’ world of Khurasan. This ignores that Somnath was a very odd campaign, undertaken by Mahmud over a much greater distance than usual, and made possible only by final victory, after several decades of conflict, over the Shahi kings at the battle of Tausi.53 Elevating this exceptional campaign as the key to understanding Mahmud’s activity is not fundamentally ahistorical. As a discipline, history depends on synecdochal reasoning, taking the parts (for example extant sources) for wholes (the events themselves). However, the tendency to present the revisionist looting hypothesis as ‘history’ and the religious motivation hypothesis as ahistorical is a problem.54 Both are debatable, and for essentially the same reasons, which are basic methodological issues in historical

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Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States’, 288. _ nī, a chronicle of the history of The battle of Tausi is known primarily from the Rājatarangi _ Kashmir whose soldiers supported the last Shahi king at the battle and which subsequently gave shelter to the exiled military elite, but despite its importance remains largely unstudied. See _ nī: A Chronicle of the Kings of Kaśmīr (London, 1900) VII, M. Stein, Kalhana’s Rājatarangi _ _ 47–62. This is not the place to develop an alternative thesis on Ghaznavid campaigns, but the current author finds it far more plausible that Mahmud was seeking exactly the same objective to the south, to assert his independence from his nominal overlords, the non-Muslim Shahis, as he was in the west, against the Muslim Samanids, and that the bulk of his campaigns were in fact chevauchees; that is, plunder was not the objective but a device to draw his enemies to battle or demonstrate their inability to defend their allies. Though this hypothesis is not represented in print, probably in part because South Asian history has an underdeveloped military historiography, other South Asian historians, with whom the author has discussed it, have independently drawn similar conclusions. See M. Shokoohy, ‘The Legacy of Islam in Somnath’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 75/2 (2012) 297–335, particularly 301 for precisely such a framing.

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practice. The current understanding of Mahmud’s campaigns will likely be displaced by a future revision, and that probably by another. If these represent progress, then they will necessarily represent deeper and more nuanced understandings, exactly as the position of Romila Thapar and her associates is a deeper and more nuanced reading than its colonial/nationalist predecessor. But that also carries with it the risk that the deeper and more nuanced an argument is, the harder it is for a non-specialist to follow. After the collapse of the Janata in the 1980 Indian general election, those members who had ties to the nationalist RSS formed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won just two seats in the 1984 elections. The BJP has subsequently grown to be one of the largest parties in Indian politics. It joined a very short-lived coalition to form a government in 1996 and in 1998 won 183 seats enabling it to form a government coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, of which it was the largest party.55 This led to fresh controversy over textbooks.56 The new government began a programme to replace the textbooks currently recommended for state use. This began with amendments to existing books and moved to the commissioning of new books to replace the existing recommended text.57 In practice implementation of educational changes is always patchy in India as state governments have considerable power. So states such as West Bengal, with its large Muslim population and left wing government, have consistently deviated from central policy, regardless of who was in power,58 while Gujurat under BJP rule had already made moves to implement similar changes before the national books were introduced.

6.

The California Textbook Case

The political disputes around textbooks in India have been mirrored in the United States. The USA, with a similarly politicized educational system in 55

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S. Schlensog, ‘Hinduism and Politics: On the Role of Religious Antagonism in Indian History and Politics’, Die Friedens-Warts 82 (2007) 159–72, esp. 168–72, offers a schematic account of the BJP’s policies and some bibliography on related issues. For a lengthier discussion than that offered here see Guichard, The Construction of History and Nationalism, 32–52. See Schlensog, ‘Hinduism and Politics’, and M. Gottlob, ‘Changing Concepts of Identity in the Indian Textbook Controversy’, Internationale Schulbuchforshung 29 (2007) 341–53. B. K. Banerjee, ‘West Bengal History Textbooks and the Indian Textbook Controversy’, Internationale Schulbuchforshung 29 (2007) 355–74 offers an interesting account of the debates in West Bengal. It is hard to assess his perspective but worth noting that he inaccurately refers to the looting of the Somnath temple ‘11 times’ (370).

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which identity politics can be played out through advocacy over the syllabus, developed an increasingly large and affluent Hindu community in the later twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The most highprofile contest occurred between 2005 and 2009 in California. The California textbook case began when Hindu advocacy groups proposed edits to textbooks which were to be used for religious studies in California schools.59 Hindu groups had already been successful in making changes to school textbooks in Virginia and the changes proposed for California were initially approved by the board of education. The debate was conducted through similar techniques to those used in other high-profile controversies around academic publications, that is – petitions, open letters and court cases. The California Department of Education appointed a reviewer for the changes, who largely approved them, but there were objections from academics that the reviewer had close affiliations with the Hindu American Foundation (HAF, one of the original advocacy groups). The State Board of Education then appointed a threeperson committee, including the philologist Michael Witzel, a professor at Harvard. This committee accepted some proposed changes, but rejected others. Two court cases followed in which the HAF and an organization calling itself the California Parents for the Equalization of Educational Materials (CAPEEM) attempted to have all or parts of the decision overturned. Though the cases were directed at the two educational boards involved they were also perceived as personal attacks and harassments of the scholars, particularly Michael Witzel. Both Witzel and Steve Farmer 59

Most of the parties to these various events are internet savvy and Wikipedia has helpful introductions to the issue. In the textbook case an interesting perspective is provided by a Western Hindutva scholar Koenradd Elst: www.hinduhumanrights.info/hindu-month-incalifornia-and-the-lessons-from-the-textbook-controversey/ (August 2015), which gives his opinion on why the changes failed. Both Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer have spoken on the final cases in moderated discussion lists: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Indo-Eurasian_ research/conversations/messages/12606 (August 2015) and Witzel has contributed to a joint article: V. Kamala, M. Witzel, D. B. Manjrenkar and U. Chakravarti, ‘The Hindutva View of History: Rewriting Textbooks in India and the United States’, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 10 (2009) 101–12 (consulted http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3: HUL.InstRepos:9887609). S. Padmanabhan, ‘Debate on Indian History: Revising Textbooks in California’ Economic and Political Weekly 41/18 (2006) 1761–3 is an editorial written at the time, which largely associates the controversy with a reified Hinduism practiced by expatriate Indians. P. Bose, ‘Hindutva Abroad: The California Textbook Controversy’, The Global South 2 (2008) 11–34 offers an analysis of the connection between groups involved and Hindutva thought in India, while Kurien (‘Multiculturalism and “American” Religion’) connects it with immigrant experience. Guichard (The Construction of History and Nationalism, 82–4) offers a short discussion in the wider context of Indian debates over textbooks.

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presented very much this narrative on the moderated discussion list IndoEurasia during the period of the events. Witzel subsequently co-authored a paper in which the events in California were connected to attempts to rewrite school textbooks in India, particularly in Gujurat.60 The most important area of overlap between the textbook revisions in India and those in California was the ideological effort to make ‘Aryans’ the progenitors of the Indus Valley civilization, thereby establishing them as the indigenous originators of a ‘Hindu’ India and rendering Christians and Muslims as ‘foreigners’.61

The projection of modern Hinduism back onto India’s earliest archaeologically-attested urban centres (actually substantially in Pakistan) can be made to serve a political purpose, but it can also be simply an expression of pride. Antiquity enjoys an association with authority, and Indian culture is not exceptional in that. As foreign origins, also at stake in this exchange, have been employed to diminish Indian culture in the past, this undoubtedly contributed to the ideological polemic around the question. Tensions over how to negotiate this are particularly clear on two issues which Witzel and his colleagues identify as a common thread in many ‘Hindutva’ revisionist discourses – gender and caste. Claims that gender and caste were not used as the basis for discrimination, often resting on discourses of difference but not inequality, are relatively common in Hindutva influenced circles. That these claims are false does not explain why so much emphasis has been placed on gender (in particular suttee, the practice of widow immolation) and caste in polemics against Hindutva positions. In the premodern world, extreme gender discrimination was ubiquitous, and economic exploitation based on social division can hardly be described as absent from the world today. It is legitimate to ask why these topics feature more prominently in accounts of Hinduism, than Buddhism, Christianity, Islam or Judaism. Or at least why some Americans of Indian heritage might perceive Hinduism as unfairly targeted through accusations of antiquated and discriminatory attitudes in these matters by contrast with other (hardly less innocent) religions.62 Revisionism might be deployed in militant or nationalist contexts, but revisionism is not 60 61 62

Kamala et al., ‘The Hindutva View of History’. Ibid., 107. Though not all. It is notable that Dalit (a blanket term for those traditionally disadvantaged by caste or jati systems) groups, consisting of Americans of Indian heritage, did mobilize against HAF and CAPEEM: see Guichard, The Construction of History and Nationalism, 83.

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automatically militant or nationalist, though Witzel and associates have generally drawn a direct line between American Hindus and nationalist inspired violence in India: We will argue that these textbook edits attempt to manufacture a majoritarian view of society in which the cultural and political space for minorities will progressively shrink. The ongoing violence against Muslims in Gujurat, where the Sangh Parivar’s political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first came into office in the mid-1990s, and elsewhere in India, suggests that such a curriculum creates a setting in which social intolerance and injustices against minorities can be justified.63

The California textbook case highlighted how vocal expatriate advocacy groups like the HAF had become, the importance of the internet in helping to mobilize much wider communities to engage with local incidents, and also the increasing politicization of a section of the academic community, particularly American, which works on South Asia.64 At the same time, as noted by Kurien,65 the controversy was partly driven by the desire of Hindu Indian Americans to find a place for their growing community within a multicultural society, especially in the changed political situation after the Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in 2001.66 In doing so they modelled their efforts on other successful minority communities: One strategy that Hindu community leaders have been following for a long time is to emulate the model of Jewish Americans. As a highly successful group that is integrated into mainstream American society while maintaining its religious and cultural distinctness, close community ties and connections with the home country . . .67 63 64

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Kamala et al., ‘The Hindutva View of History’, 101. The most recent example is an open letter by many academics protesting a visit by Prime Minister Modi to Silicon Valley in the USA: http://academeblog.org/2015/08/27/facultystatement-on-modi-visit-to-silicon-valley/ (August 2015) which led to subsequent claims that signatories had been harassed by members of HAF: http://academeblog.org/2015/09/15/facultyresponse-to-harssment-by-hindu-nationalist-organizations/ (August 2015), in a post that also gives a lengthy bibliography on Hindu nationalism. Kurien, ‘Multiculturalism and “American” Religion’. Kurien is a good example of how complex and deep the emic/etic debate is. Like many academics who work on South Asia she was born and educated in India but works in the United States (Kurien, A Place at the Table, ix–x). Only two reviews appear on Amazon for her 2007 book on the Hindu diaspora (www.amazon.co.uk/ Place-Multicultural-Table-Development-American/dp/0813540569/, July 2016) and one of those consists solely of a single point: ‘. . . readers should keep in mind that the author is an Indian Christian, not a Hindu . . .’, that she is an outsider. Kurien, ‘Multiculturalism and “American” Religion’, 723–4. Ibid., 730.

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It is easy to see why a Hindutva historiography, with its sharp distinction of Hinduism from Islam, might be politically useful in such a context. On the other hand many of the changes demanded of the textbooks were made because they would be uncontroversial cases of incorrect pictures or simple confusions (Brahman for Brahmin for example).68 So though different sides in the controversy attempted to make it about a particular narrative, nationalist historical fantasies or repressive anti-Hindu sentiment, it was actually much more complex. And it remains clear that there are issues, such as caste,69 which it is still very difficult to present without negative stereotypes. Nor was it likely lost on participants that academics were quick to mobilize against HAF but had not acted over errors they accepted needed correction in the initial textbooks. Undoubtedly that allowed elements of this debate to feed into more direct controversies around academic writing to which we will return below.

7.

Cultural Heritage, Restitution and Ayodhya

Before returning to textbooks, it is important to talk about material culture – another context where scholarly and popular interpretations of the past intersect through museums or religious sites. The question of who speaks for the past, that is overt in a textbook, is intimately linked to the question of who owns the past, that is overt in a material object. In the early twentieth century villagers from Didarganj, on the Ganges in the North Indian state of Bihar, discovered a stone sculpture (Figure 12.3). Though no account by the villagers survives, those of the Indian and colonial archaeologists suggest they were looking for building material, and that when they realized what they had uncovered was a sculpture they installed it at a temporary river-side shrine where appropriate worship could be performed. The Indian archaeologists who first spotted it were alive to this ‘misuse’ and called on the colonial state, in the person of E. H. C. Walsh, President of the new Patna Museum’s Managing Committee, to act to protect the object. This is a reminder that the British archaeological project could only 68

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Some of these are listed on the Wikipedia site covering the controversy and are included in a 126 page document issued by the state board listing corrections linked to that page. See https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_textbook_controversy_over_Hindu_history. E. F. Kent, ‘Representing Caste in the Classroom: Perils, Pitfalls and Insight’, Method & Theory in the Studying of Religion 17 (2005) 231–41.

Contests for India’s Past in the Twentieth Century

Figure 12.3 Didarganj Yakshi, polished sandstone, c. 163 cm high. Third century BC to first century AD. Patna Museum, Bihar, India. Photograph: Shivam Setu on a Creative Commons Licence via Wikipedia. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

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exist through the agency of a section of the native population. D. B. Spooner, noted archaeologist and later director of the Patna Museum, claims to have explained to the local population that this was not a Hindu divinity and, being a decorative element, had in fact never been the subject of worship. Spooner describes the surrender in knowledge terms, though at least one modern commentator is certain that underlying it was a much more significant power relationship: It was their power and authority, the latent ability to impose their will by force if necessary, that enabled Walsh and Spooner to dislodge the Yakshi from her incipient temple and relocate her in their own recently founded institution, the Patna Museum.70

The story of the Didarganj Yakshi replicates an event that has been replayed many times, but the outcome varies. In April 1979 a researcher, D. P. Sharma, doing village to village surveys near Allahabad, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, found a stone being worshipped as a Śiva linga. It was inscribed with Brahmi characters. The Brahmins in the village of Reh explained their intention shortly to install it in a permanent shrine. Within a few days local scholars had visited the site and examined the inscription, which was clearly important.71 As further examination was needed, the villagers were instructed not to move it. By the time the team returned the Brahmins had indeed installed it, taking the precaution to bury the shaft deep in a concrete base making removal impossible. Archaeologists have not been entirely rapacious predators in this regard; and in some places they have not contested a sculpture’s place. At least one Kushan statue from the second century  dynastic shrine at Mathura remains a cult icon today.72 This is often phrased as the difference between ‘live’ and ‘dead’ images, or as that between those that still speak to a current belief and have a long history of contemporary worship as against those which have been re-appropriated by another religion/sect, or which have only recently been discovered. Spooner’s construction of the Didarganj Yakshi placed it firmly in the latter camp. The Kushan sculpture from

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R. H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, 1997) 3–6, 6. G. R. Sharma, Reh Inscription of Menander and the Indo-Greek Invasion of the Ganga Valley (Allahabad, 1980) 5–6. The central icon at the Gokarneshwar Mahadev in Mathura is in fact a seated figure probably originating from Mat, which is usually assumed to depict a Kushan prince. Today, ironically given the disputes over Wesho (see Chapter 10), the figure is worshipped as an image of Śiva, see figs. 11 and 11a of J. Rosenfield, The Dynastic Art of the Kushans (Princeton, 1967).

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Mathura lies at the opposite end of the scale, where no one has contested its status as a ‘live’ image, embodying Śiva. And the Reh pillar discovered by D. P. Sharma falls in between, the Brahmins asserting the object’s ‘live’ status.

8.

The Babri-Masjid and the Ramayana

The site of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, built in 1528–9 on the orders of the Mughal emperor Babur, is an example of this sort of contest played out on a national scale. The earliest accounts of violence relating to the site’s use date to the mid-1850s and led to the creation of separate spaces for worship – for Muslims wishing to use the mosque and for Hindus wishing to worship at what they believed to be the birthplace of the god Rama. In the 1880s requests to build a Hindu temple were rejected. On the night of 22 December 1949 images of Rama and his consort Sita were installed in the mosque. The police guards claimed they had been installed by worshippers; the worshippers claimed a miracle. The local authorities, despite instructions from the national government, refused to remove the images, but the site was closed off. Only very limited access was permitted until the 1980s when campaigners began to demand the reopening of the site for the worship of Rama, which was allowed by the judgment of a district court in 1986 (Figure 12.4).73 The campaign soon extended to an international one demanding the construction of a new Hindu temple.74 At the same time opinions on the history polarized – Hindu groups seeking reconstruction claimed the original mosque had been built over a Hindu temple which was deliberately destroyed, while professional historians claimed such destructions were rare and no temple had existed. What is interesting in this period is the rise in what might be seen as coded interventions by historians in Europe and North America. A. K. Ramanujan, appointed to the University of Chicago in 1983, presented a paper entitled ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’ at a conference on Comparison of Civilizations at the University of 73

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For a basic account and timeline see e.g. S. P. Udayakumar, ‘Historicizing Myth and Mythologizing History: The “Ram Temple” Drama’, Social Scientist 25/7–8 (July–August, 1997) 11–26. Summarized in R. H. Davis, ‘The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot’, in Ludden (ed.), Making India Hindu, 27–54, 36–8.

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Figure 12.4 Babri Masjid, Ayodhya India. Mosque completed 1528-29 AD, supposedly on the site of Rama’s birthplace. Protesters scaling its domes before the building was destroyed in December 1992. Photograph: Pramrod Pushkarma, India Picture/Alamy Stock Photo. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Pittsburgh in February 1987. His essay, highly regarded by subsequent academics, was included in a collection which contained eleven other essays on the variety of the Rama tradition, published in 1991. And in that year this collection was one of two that were published on the same subject.75 Reviewers in general were very positive about Ramanujan’s work, but (as in many of the essays) what is noticeable is the absence of Ayodhya – the material reality of the Rama story for most believers. After the publication of these collections, but before most of the reviews were written, on 6 December 1992 a large demonstration at the site turned into a riot and the Babri Masjid was torn down. One reviewer, J. P. Goldman, comments directly on this:76

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P. Richman (ed.), Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley, 1991); M. Thiel-Horstmann, Rāmāyana and Rāmāyanas (Wiesbaden, 1991). _ Goldman himself would subsequently fall foul of the disconnect between scholarly and popular history after delivering a talk on 25 October 2004. News outlets on the internet conflated his scholarly opinion with that of the medieval commentators he spoke about and concluded he had ‘proved’ the historicity of the Ramayana. See R. P. Goldman, ‘Historicizing the Ramakatha: Valmiki’s Ramayana and Its Medieval Commentators’, India International Centre Quarterly 31/ 4 (2005) 83–97.

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events in India, starting with the broadcasting of Ramanand Sagar’s enormously popular television serialization and culminating in the recent destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and its inevitable tragic aftermath have given reason to believe that serious scholarship on the Ramayana tradition neither is of merely antiquarian interest nor is it restricted to any narrow scholarly discipline.77

It is difficult to believe that more than twenty scholars produced works on the varieties of the Rama tradition in the precise space between the success of the Vishwa Hindu Parashad (VHP) in opening the Babri Masjid to Hindu worshippers and the site’s destruction, while convinced that the topic was just of antiquarian interest. These were coded commentaries on the events, showing the plurality and therefore tolerance of the tradition, its capacity for accommodation and therefore the unnecessary nature of the exclusivist VHP claim both to the site and to the god Rama, while at the same time enacting a discourse of objectivity and detachment. The site was therefore positioned within academic texts as ‘dead’, and not therefore a suitable place for worship, only for historical inquiry. That is not to suggest that some scholars did not respond directly to the events, but those direct responses came only after the destruction of the mosque in 1992. The demolition of the Babri Masjid was an important event. There has been a noticeable trend towards the study of Hindu– Muslim encounters and particularly temple destruction, as well as a fracturing of theoretical positions and politicization of some professional historians, subsequently.78 The court dispute over the site on which the Babri Masjid had stood was resolved by a lengthy ruling in 2010,79 known as the Ayodhya verdict. It was seen by some as a victory for a Hindutva reading of the past, and the 77 78

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R. P. Goldman, ‘Review’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 113 (1993) 605–9, 605. For example C. Talbot, ‘Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995) 692–722, problematizes the categories of Hinduism and Islam, while R. Davis, ‘Indian Art Objects as Loot’, The Journal of Asian Studies 52 (1993) 22–48, looks at first millennium temple looting, and V. Dehejia and R. Davis, ‘Addition, Erasure, and Adaption: Interventions in the Rock-Cut Monuments of Māmallapur’, Archives of Asian Art 60 (2010) 1–16 examine pre-Islamic religious conflict resulting in damage and reuse of religious sites. The judgments are available online: http://elegalix.allahabadhighcourt.in/elegalix/ DisplayAyodhyaBenchLandingPage.do. It would require an entire study to explore the way in which the court engaged with historical works – though the firm distinction that is drawn by Sibghat Ullah Khan in his consolidated judgment (pp. 127–8) between historians and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) report is interesting. The Liberham Report on the event was also published in 2009; several repositories for the text are linked by the relevant Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberhan_Commission (December 2015).

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Archaeological Survey of India of India as politically complicit in the ruling.80 A public statement by prominent Indian historians took a strong position: No proof has been offered even of the fact that a Hindu belief in Lord Rama’s birth-site being the same as the site of the mosque had at all existed before very recent times, let alone since “time immemorial”. Not only is the judgement wrong in accepting the antiquity of this belief, but it is gravely disturbing that such acceptance should then be converted into an argument for deciding property entitlement.81

An interesting question is the degree to which members of the VHP engaged in the contest were aware of academic critiques. The court dispute over the land, development of the internet, and increasingly open commentary after 1992 likely assured that they were.

9.

300 Ramayanas, Five Controversies, and Three ‘Bans’

In this section public attacks on the works of several specialist scholars will be considered. In each case the controversy focused on a particular publication, usually a book, sometimes an article, and led to public expressions of outrage, as well as (ineffective) calls for the author’s work to be banned. In one case actual violence was involved, and several involved legal action or attempts at legal action, though most of the controversy consisted in limited but heated public debate. I will primarily focus on Jeffrey Kripal’s Kali’s Child, James Laine’s Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, A. K. Ramanujan’s article on the Ramayana, and Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, all published between 1995 and 2014, though this is by no means an exhaustive list.82

Kali’s Child The earliest controversy followed the publication of Kali’s Child by Jeffrey Kripal in 1995.83 Kripal was a student of the Sanskrit scholar Wendy 80

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U. Chakravarti, ‘Clinching Archaeological Evidence’, Economic and Political Weekly 45/5 (2010) 27–8, describes the ASI excavation as characterized by ‘wilful sloppiness’. Economic and Political Weekly 45/41 (9–15 October 2010) 4–5. The statement was signed by 61 historians including Romila Thapar. J. J. Kripal, Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago, 1995); J. Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford, 2003); W. Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New Delhi, 2009). J. Hawley, ‘The Damage of Separation: Krishna’s Loves and Kali’s Child’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (2004) 369–93, esp. 371–2 and M. Taylor, ‘Mythology Wars,

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Doniger who was also the subject of the final controversy examined in this section. The book is a study of the late nineteenth-century religious figure Ramakrishna, founding figure of the Ramakrishna Mission in Bengal. The central argument is that Ramakrishna had homosexual desires, that his homosexuality informed (in fact was central to) his mystical experience, and that subsequent followers have suppressed this information about their guru’s sexuality.84 Woven in with this central argument are discussions of tantric practice, sexual abuse,85 Freud, and mysticism. Initial reviews of Kripal’s book were generally positive, but became increasingly polarized as controversy began to envelop the publication. The American Academy of Religion awarded it a prize in 1996 but in 1997 a negative review was published by Narasingha P. Sil in the Statesman,86 an English language paper circulating in Bengal, which provoked a public backlash against the book.87 Lengthy negative reviews followed in academic publications and in 2000 at the American Academy of Religions meeting Swami Tyagananda, a member of the Ramakrishna Mission, distributed a detailed rebuttal accusing Kripal of distortions and incompetence.88 These critiques soon made it on to the internet, for which Rajiv Malhotra (the prominent Hindutva writer discussed earlier) is sometimes credited. Kripal’s

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the Indian Diaspora and Debating the Hindu Past’, Asian Studies Review 35/2 (2011) 149–68 provide accounts that have been draw on here. Interested readers will find a listing of publications on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali’s_Child, and in the online response prepared by Kripal himself, ‘Kali’s Child: From the Heart’: www.ruf.rice.edu/ ~kalischi/ (2003). This is the general reading in reviews, and that of the current author, though a few early reviewers (C. Olson, International Journal of Hindu Studies 1/1 (1997) 201–2; M. McLean, Journal of the American Oriental Society 117/3 (1997) 571–2) read it as arguing for Ramakrishna’s practice of tantra, and in McLean’s case homosexuality is not even mentioned. Kripal, Kālī’s Child, 299–302. The issue for 31 January to 1 February 1997. The author has been unable to consult this since it is not included in the online archive of the newspaper. How widespread the backlash was is unclear and B. Hatcher, ‘Kālī’s Problem Child: Another Look at Jeffrey Kripal’s Study of śrī Rāmakrsna’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 3 (1999) __ _ 165–82, esp. 165–8 suggests it may have been rather more muted and restricted than is often assumed. G. Larson, ‘Polymorphic Sexuality, Homoeroticism, and the Study of Religion. Review of Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna by Jeffrey J. Kripal’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 (1998) 655–65; Svāmī Ātmajñānānanda, ‘Scandals, Cover-Ups, and Other Imagined Occurrences in the Life of Rāmakrsna: An __ _ Examination of Jeffrey Kripal’s Kālī’s Child’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 1 (1997) 401–20; Swami Tyagananda, ‘Kali’s Child Revisited – or – Didn’t Anyone Check the Documentation’, 2000, a long pamphlet of 173 pages available at www.gemstone-av.com/ KCR3b.pdf. See now at length Swami Tyagananda and P. Vrajaprana, Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali’s Child Revisited (Delhi, 2010).

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discussion of the sexuality of a nineteenth-century guru was obviously a sensitive subject for believers, one on which some at least thought an outsider should not speak. However, framing the question in that way is unhelpful as it tends to solidify emic/etic distinctions around the ‘professional scholar’ and the ‘believer’ in ways that are reminiscent of the Hindu/ Muslim binary discussed above.89 Doing so makes it easy to project concepts such as Christian prejudice or homophobia onto one side or the other, when in reality the lines are not so sharply drawn. As just one example, Narasingha P. Sil – who wrote the negative Statesman review which provoked the initial outrage – was an academic who had previously written a book in which he made superficially similar claims about Ramakrishna’s sexuality, and who would later defend Wendy Doniger’s work.90 There are, however, more subtle questions at play. Should, as one critical reviewer suggested,91 Kripal have shown his work to knowledgeable members of the Ramakrishna Mission before publication? Was an insular mindset at work that distorts because it lacks a variety of perspectives? Does it matter whether Kripal was right? It is entirely beyond the current author to offer a judgement on Kali’s Child but the question of whether the quality of a piece of work should or should not be relevant is one that has been subsequently contested by parties in all the public controversies that followed. And finally, there is the issue of why this particular piece of work became the focus of popular anger, and not one of the many other works on Ramakrishna which discuss similar matters. In regard to the last of these questions Taylor offers an argument over the purpose that the public controversy served:

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Hawley (‘The Damage of Separation’) frames two ‘paramount’ questions, the first on homosexuality, the second: ‘if Hindus and Hinduism are the subject, should non-Hindus refrain from speaking?’. I have not been able to consult a copy of the newspaper review, but for an assessment by the same author in an academic context see N. Sil, ‘Is Ramakrishna a Vedanta, a Tantrika or a Vaishnava? An Examination’, Asian Studies Review 21/2–3 (1997) 212–24, esp. 220–1 which suggests errors of both translation and reasoning on Kripal’s part. William Radice, Bulletin of School of Oriental and African Studies 61/1 (1998) 160–1, in reviewing Kripal’s work explicitly draws attention to the fact that Sil had already made claims that Ramakrishna was sexually abused as a child. Though Sil maintains an academia.edu site it does not include the bulk of his work on Ramakrishna, though it does include his review of Doniger’s On Hinduism, in International Journal of Hindu Studies 19 (2015) 337–9. Larson, ‘Polymorphic Sexuality, Homoeroticism, and the Study of Religion’, 663. Kripal did subsequently respond to this review, J. J. Kripal, ‘Mystical Homoeroticism, Reductionism, and the Reality of Censorship: A Response to Gerald James Larson’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66/3 (1998) 627–35 and argued, esp. 630ff., that refusal to engage with the tradition was necessary rather than distorting.

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Attacks on such scholars and their works perform the socially significant function of binding and defining sections of the diasporic faith community, and provide an avenue for the performance of one form of contemporary Hindu identity.92

This undoubtedly makes an important point about what is termed the ‘Mythology Wars’, and it is clear that the diaspora, particularly in the USA, does serve to create particular views of Hinduism.93 However this is not a fully adequate answer to the specific issue of Kali’s Child. It does not explain why the faith community chose this particular book at this particular moment as its target, especially given that Kripal’s work was not the first to suggest Ramakrishna might be productively viewed through what today would probably be called a queer lens. The whole debate creates a false dichotomy by focusing on figures like Swami Tyagananda and Rajiv Malhotra, contrasting worshippers with academics as representatives of two distinct but homogeneous communities, though many academics are also worshippers and many worshippers are also experts; and Kripal at least was heavily criticized by fellow scholars. The problem is that neither diaspora identity politics, nor emic/etic perspectives, nor simply bad (or misleading and offensive) work, provide complete explanations for the controversy. Similar public debates flared around the work of Laine, Dembrowski, and Ramanujan, yet in none of those examples has a serious case been made for distortion or incompetence. In the case of Ramanujan, which will be explored next, the bulk of the public controversy seems to have been voiced in India with its internationalization largely a function of actions by the Western academy, leaving very little role for diaspora politics.94

Ramanujan and the University of Delhi Ramanujan’s paper ‘300 Ramayanas . . .’ has already been discussed in relation to the Ayodhya dispute. It was an uncontroversial part of the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Delhi until 2007 when calls began to have it removed. In 2008 there was a physical attack on the Head 92 93

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Taylor, ‘Mythology Wars’, 165. The extensive work by Kurien (‘Multiculturalism and “American” Religion’ and A Place at the Multicultural Table) traces the issues. This difference is reflected in Kurien (A Place at the Multicultural Table) who gives several pages to Kripal, Doniger and Courtright (not discussed here) at 200–4, but only a short footnote to Laine (at 254).

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of the History faculty, and ultimately court action against the university and the publisher Oxford University Press (OUP).95 Compelled to reconsider the reading list in 2011 the academic committee of the university voted in favour of retaining the essay but were overruled by the Vice Chancellor.96 As a result the essay was withdrawn from the curriculum. The response to the case was a series of open letters and statements to the head of OUP and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Delhi.97 The open letter as a genre is not aimed at the appellants or the courts, which they frequently insult, or those who carry out the physical intimidation, who it seems unlikely would read them. The likely audiences are members of the academic community itself – the circulating of the letters and accumulation of signatories serves as a way of affirming identity, as of course do references to academic freedom. There is also an implicit claim that the scholars writing these letters rather than practitioners are best qualified to determine what and who is Hindu. Publishers, such as Oxford University Press, seem to show more realpolitik in these situations than idealism. The issuing of an apology can in Indian law be deemed sufficient to end such a case, and OUP’s response to this case was remarkably similar to those given for books by Hans Dembrowski in 2001 and Laine (which we shall return to in a moment) in 2003. The promises that there are no plans to reprint the book were clearly disingenuous, as both Laine and Ramanujan’s works remain in print.98

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There is a potential cultural disconnect that cannot be examined here. Readers will notice how frequently these matters ended up in court. Another interesting court ruling (C. Anderson, ‘The Case of Kolkata’ (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05xxc06), 2016 accessed January 2016) was made in 2003 on whether an East India Company employee, Job Charnock, founded the city of Calcutta in 1690. The direction of historical dispute to courts seems odd from a European or North American perspective but might be seen as more normal in India. Public accounts in newspapers are often contradictory over timelines. For example the BBC suggests calls to the remove the essay began in 2008 (www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia15363181) while The Hindu ran an article placing the events in 2012 (www.thehindu.com/ news/national/historians-protest-as-delhi-university-purges-ramayana-essay-from-syllabus/ article2538301.ece). The open letter to OUP drafted by Sheldon Pollock is quoted in a message to the Indo-Eurasian mailing list on 25 November 2011, https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Indo-Eurasian_ research/conversations/messages/15603, and the OUP response in a subsequent message on 9 December 2011, https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Indo-Eurasian_research/ conversations/messages/15632. Some sense of the combative tone of academic discourse can be gleaned from V. Dharwadker, ‘Censoring the “Rāmāyana”’, Proceedings of the Modern _ Language Association 127 (2012) 433–50. ‘The book [Laine’s] was withdrawn from circulation from November 21, 2003. Oxford University Press has no copies of the book with them’ (http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/ oxford-not-to-print-new-copies-of-james-laines-book-on-shivaji/1/105160.html).

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Similar pragmatism, but this time with the legal niceties of Europe in mind, probably motivated OUP subsequently to sue the University of Delhi over the production of study packs which it claimed impacted its profits.99

The Laine Controversy On 5 January 2004, 150 members of a group calling itself the Sambhaji Brigade attacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. The cited provocation was that staff at the institute had cooperated with James Laine in the publication of his book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India.100 In particular an apocryphal joke about Shivaji’s parentage was highlighted. Novetzke characterizes Laine’s work as primarily historiographic: Laine hoped to “rescue” Śivaji’s biography “from the grasp of those who see India as a Hindu nation at war with its Muslim neighbours” [Laine 2003, 6]. This rescue was to be accomplished by providing a nuanced account of how Śivaji became a representative of “Hinduism” in multiple ways, thus providing a counterpoint to a homogenized Hindu Right historiography.101

The book in this sense was a coded attack on the self-identity of groups like the Sambhaji Brigade, and the associated Shiv Sena political party. To understand the central place Shivaji plays in local identity, it is worth remembering that a statue of him faces the most significant colonial monument in Mumbai, the Gateway of India, which stands on a harbour renamed the Chhatrapatī Shivaji Marg just a short walk from the main _ museum, the Chhatrapatī Shivaji Mahārāj Vastu Sangrahālay, and rail station, Chhatrapatī Shivaji Terminus, in a city served by the Chhatrapatī Shivaji Airport.102 Laine apologized, as did OUP, who also claimed they would withdraw the book. Despite this, a legal case was mounted and warrants issued for Laine’s arrest, rapidly overturned by a higher court. In his analysis, Novetzke, a student of Laine’s, seeks to argue that the case has little to 99

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http://oxfordstudent.com/tag/oxford-university-press/ (consulted August 2015), the legal nicety being the loss of copyright if infringement is not contested. See V. Date, ‘Politics of Shivaji: The James Laine Affair’, Economic and Political Weekly 42/20 (2007) 1812–14 and C. L. Novetzke, ‘The Laine Controversy and the Study of Hinduism’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 8 (2004) 181–201. Novetzke, ‘The Laine Controversy and the Study of Hinduism’, 183. Political naming is widespread (www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-mumbai-politics-andthe-art-of-playing-the-rename-game-1932600, November 2015) though the particular prevalence of Shivaji in Mumbai reflects a very specific set of local conditions.

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do with the sort of national politics involved in the destruction of the Babri Masjid and more to do with local caste politics. But at least one similarity, that Laine was held responsible for the sources he quoted, is worth noting. The reflex is easy to ridicule but I doubt those involved do not actually understand what a quotation mark is. Rather, what was at issue was the degree of responsibility taken by a scholar in selecting a quotation. For apologists, the inverted apostrophe is a firm boundary abrogating all scholarly responsibility for what appears within. For the critics, an author is responsible for which quotations he includes. It is easy for scholars to argue that we must take the past as it is, but harder to extend this to a blanket insensitivity to how others view or own the past. This point seems to have been central to the next case.

The Hindus: An Alternative History In 2014 the publication of a book by Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History, was suspended in India by Penguin. The volume had caused protests and led to a challenge in court that it set out to offend religious sensibilities. This was not the first time that Doniger’s publications had been targeted. As discussed by Taylor, Doniger had already become iconic for many of the debates already discussed;103 Rajiv Malhotra had published an essay with the title “Wendy’s Child” as a play on Kripal’s Kali’s Child.104 The general outlines of the game should be clear by now: there were protests and a legal challenge, the publisher offered to withdraw the book, open letters and statements followed portraying this as a question of academic freedom in opposition to religious fundamentalism.105 Online moderate critics deplored ‘book banning’ but still criticized Doniger as a representative of an academy they felt had no understanding of the object it wished to study: Doniger represents what many believe to be a fundamental flaw in the academic study of Hinduism: that Hindu studies is too often the last refuge of idiosyncratic and irreligious academics presenting themselves as “experts” on a faith that they study without the insight, recognition or 103

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See Taylor, ‘Mythology Wars’, and M. Taylor, ‘Hindu Activism and Academic Censorship in India’, South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies 37 (2014) 717–25. http://rajivmalhotra.com/library/articles/risa-lila-1-wendys-child-syndrome/. See for instance www.dnaindia.com/analysis/standpoint-wendy-doniger-s-the-hindus-didthe-penguin-chicken-out-1961467 (February 2014).

Contests for India’s Past in the Twentieth Century reverence of, in this case, a practicing Hindu or even non-Hindu – striving to study Hinduism from the insider’s perspective – would offer.106

The counter-argument presented by Taylor is that the diaspora critics lack the technical training, that: Malhotra, Agarwall and Venkat, like many successful members of the Indian diaspora, have backgrounds in the natural sciences. This perhaps explains their tendency to see the positivist, scientific “fact” as the basic unit of currency in academic discourse. Had their training been in the humanities or social sciences, they might have been more attuned to the nuanced status of ideas and theories that predominate in these disciplines.107

Taylor’s assessment of the critics can be summed up as ignorance and fundamentalism. Such an assessment serves to deprive them of any legitimacy; they need to be either educated or opposed but not listened to. This is not to deny that there is an unhealthy dose of both ignorance and fundamentalism amongst critics, but Taylor’s stance falls into the trap of assuming that a history which aligns with a political position must be inherently dishonest. Taylor’s account, and many other defences mounted of Doniger’s The Hindus, appear to assume the quality of the work itself. No one should suggest that Thapar’s Medieval India, Kripal’s Kali’s Child, Laine’s Shivaji, Ramanujan’s Ramayana, a California textbook, and Doniger’s The Hindus are all academic works of equal value; but academic freedom is a blanket term that is rarely nuanced in protecting the right of some of these to be error-ridden second-rate accounts, while others should be promoted as incisive and original works of scholarship. Part of the issue is that academics are not immune to the pressures Taylor identifies. The attacks, the signing of petitions and open letters, especially given the facility of the internet for communication, can serve the social function of binding and defining an academic community which 106

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‘Whose history is it anyway?’ by Aseem Shukla, www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2010/03/17/ whose-history-is-it-anyways/2430 (March 2014). Taylor, ‘Mythology Wars’, 159. He does briefly offer a more nuanced understanding of opposing values and objectives when he writes ‘Members of the academy see the production of knowledge as bounded only by the rule of law and protected by freedom of inquiry. Attacks on such scholars and their works perform the socially significant function of binding and defining sections of the diasporic faith community, and provide an avenue for the performance of one form of contemporary Hindu identity’ (165). However, he is clearly writing about friends and colleagues and is unable to view the critics of external accounts of Hinduism as either honest or rational, or his fellow academics critically.

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in many ways is as diasporic as its critics. Thus there are just as many political implications in Doniger presenting Hinduism over the last three thousand years through the lens of women, lower castes, and the marginal, as there are in presenting it from a dominant, male, normative, expatriate perspective. The Hindus is a popular book, originally written for an American audience. So the statement in the book that ‘Gandhara and Mathura in the second century CE produced Hindu images that served as paradigms for regional workshops for centuries to follow’ is an understandable simplification.108 After all the book is about Hinduism and it would be wordy and confusing to explain that almost all Gandharan art comes from religious contexts associated with now extinct Buddhist sects or that the Mathura images are better cautiously labelled as Vaishnava and Śaivite (rather than Hindu).109 However, when Doniger subsequently misidentifies two of the gods in the Kushan royal pantheon as the Hindu goddesses Durga and Shri, a line has clearly been crossed from simplification into error. The two goddesses in question are Nana and Ardochsho, the latter of whose images are derived from the Greek Tyche, whose imagery was subsequently incorporated into both Buddhism (as the ogress Hariti) and Hinduism (as Shri).110 Doniger’s error is the result of a political inflection in her work. As discussed above, at various points much of the controversy between different historiographic and public understandings of the past focuses on the second millennium . It is in that period that the encounter between Islam and Hinduism is played out, and it is that encounter which features most prominently in the discourse around communal violence in India

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Doniger, The Hindus, 307. There are many errors in this section, especially the dates and chronological order of dynasties on this and surrounding pages. The problems reflect less on the scholarship of the author than on the mode of its popular discourse and on a frightful lack of proper review and editing probably to be blamed on its publisher. See R. D. Mann, The Rise of Mahāsena: The Transformation of Skanda-Kārttikeya in North India from the Kusāna to Gupta Empires (Leiden, 2012) on Karttikeya’s early development and _ _ A. Couture and C. Schmid, ‘The Harivamśa, the Goddess Ekānamśā, and the Iconography of _ _ the Vrsni Triads’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 121/2 (2001) 173–92, esp. 182–4 on __ _ Vaishnava images. Doniger, The Hindus, 307. For discussions of the coherence of these gods and their Iranian parallels see R. Bracey, ‘Policy, Patronage, and the Shrinking Pantheon of the Kushans’, in V. Jayaswal (ed.), Glory of the Kushans: Recent Discoveries and Interpretations (New Delhi, 2012) 197–217. Doniger, The Hindus, 307, n.16 references R. Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (London, 2002) 223, but there Thapar correctly states that Shri’s image derives from Ardochsho: ‘Indians began to worship deities from across the borders, some of which entered the Indian pantheon, such as the goddess Ardochsho in the form of Shri’.

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today. But to debate a second millennium encounter between Hinduism and Islam requires that there was a Hinduism before the eleventh century, a pristine Hinduism for Islam to encounter. Perhaps there was, or perhaps not: as discussed in Chapter 10 of this volume scholars widely diverge on the date of the origins of Hinduism. Doniger, however, is practically obliged to accept there was a Hinduism before the second millennium in order to enter into the debate at all; it is not possible to write about the encounter (either positively or negatively) if one of the parties did not exist. This is undoubtedly why her text treats the history of Hinduism as 3,000 years old (tracing it back to the Vedas) and why it includes a chapter called ‘50 million to 50,000 BC’. The work is inflected by the assumption, and therefore the politics, of a timeless Hinduism and thus conflates two nonHindu gods with the later Hindu divinities who share or borrow their iconography. This line of thought operates through the book, despite Doniger herself offering a careful analysis of the politics, defining Hinduism, and timelessness in the book itself:111 Like many of the Indian branch of Orientalists, Europeans picked up this assumption of timeless, unified Hinduism from some Hindus and then reinforced it in other Hindus, many of whom today regard Hinduism as timeless, though they differ on the actual dating of this timelessness, which (like Hindu scholars or earlier centuries) they tend to put at 10,000 BCE or earlier, while the British generally used to put it much later. The “eternal and unchanging” approach inspired Orientalist philologists to track back to their earliest lair some concepts that do in fact endure for millennia, but without taking into account the important ways in which those concepts changed or the many other aspects of Hinduism that bear little relationship to them.112

Part of the issue in navigating these debates is trying to reconcile apparently contradictory observations; good scholars can produce bad work, work can be politically inflected without being politically motivated, and while some nationalist public attacks on historians are ignorant and fundamentalist, this does not mean that the work they critique is necessarily sound. Part of all this is recognizing that context does matter. Books, whether popular or scholarly, written with US pop-culture

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Particularly relevant discussions appear under the subtitles ‘History: Available Light’ (pp. 18–22) and ‘Are there such things as Hindus and Hinduism?’ (pp. 24–28). Doniger, The Hindus, 18.

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references or with modern psychoanalytic or gender studies inflections, are not a suitable vehicle for communicating the history of Hinduism to its current adherents (whether in India or abroad) – though they are likely to be an effective way of introducing the topic to their intended audiences.

10.

Conclusion

This chapter has presented a texture of interlinked and overlapping incidents. Identities and politics are contested in ways that intersect with history, both in India and amongst the diasporic Indian community. Professional historians, in the West or India, share that discursive space whether they wish to or not. I have tried throughout to maintain a subtle distinction. Histories serve political agendas – Hindutva historiographies can be pressed to the service of nationalists or diaspora communities in quite different ways, while histories of Dalits or women can be pressed into the service of socially progressive politics – regardless of the intents of their authors. All historians are politically inflected by the necessity of their own experience as human beings living in the world (there are no exceptions to this), but very few are politically motivated in the sense of deliberately distorting data to produce a result they believe to be false. Successfully abiding by objective criteria for the relationship between evidence and conclusion is an impressive technical accomplishment (and an important one) but it does not and cannot render history a-political. At minimum the choices of what to study and which questions to ask, remain inflected by personal politics, themselves shaped by wider culture and identity. The difference between conventional historical practice and the worst excesses of colonial or Hindutva historiographies are of degree rather than type, and I have argued that the discipline is impoverished by a failure to acknowledge this. The effect of this politics in the public sphere is very obvious. The rise of a Hindutva historiography, often propagated outside professional academic circles, reflects shifts in political and economic power since Indian independence, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, and technological shifts in communication and computing. The charges, levelled by some Hindutva practitioners, that Western academics as a group seek to distort a tradition to which they are unsympathetic, are clearly false, but accounts that are distorted or partial continue to be produced despite the selfreflection which has become commonplace in the discipline. One cause

Contests for India’s Past in the Twentieth Century

is the relative academic dominance of voices in Western institutions, and the tendency of much output on Hinduism to be the work of outsiders speaking to other outsiders. Though the field is by no means exclusively dominated by Western institutions – the two most important histories of Ancient India are by Romila Thapar and Upinder Singh – Western voices are certainly over-represented. A more diverse range of emic/etic perspectives would, as suggested by Swami Tyagananda, ‘enliven research, broaden understanding, correct misconceptions and enrich the knowledge of people on both sides’.113 The difficulty of navigating this problem cannot be underestimated. It is not possible for those with technical skill to have a conversation with those who lack it which is not didactic. Nor is there mutual benefit in conversing with those who cannot or will not abide by the ground rules underpinning that conversation. Moments of radical listening are certainly possible – the special issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies responding to Rajiv Malhotra is a good example.114 On the other hand, as much of this involves a direct attack on individual academics, with the very real possibility of actual physical danger for those inside India, there is always a pressure to close ranks, to use simplistic readings of the problem as a way of reinforcing common academic identity. These problems and arguments are not particularly new. They reflect the same issues of representation, insider or outsider status, and how scholars’ position(s) shape their account that have been explored throughout this volume in all the religious and scholarly cultures of Eurasia. What is unusual, but probably not unique, is the way technological, political and economic change since the 1970s have opened historical writing to a much larger and more heterogeneous group of authors far faster than the academic field itself has opened up. That has exacerbated the intersection between history, politics and identity inescapable in Indian history – with the potential for conflict and even violence that this implies. That opening 113 114

Tyagananda, ‘Kali’s Child Revisited’, 1. Yelle, ‘Comparative Religion as Cultural Combat’, 338; N. F. Gier, ‘Overreaching to be Different: A Critique of Rajiv Malhotra’s “Being Different”’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 16 (2012) 259–85; R. M. Gross, ‘Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 16 (2012) 323–34. Interestingly, Rita M. Gross is the most sympathetic of Malhotra’s interlocutors. She is also openly part of a generation of women who entered the history of religion at a point where there was still a resistance to the study of women’s experience in Buddhism. Just as there are interesting parallels to be drawn between Hindutva and Jewish discourses, there are also potential parallels between the social/political shifts that gave women a voice in historical studies and the technological shifts which have given Hindutva advocates a voice in popular history.

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cannot be undone and probably represents the future in other historical fields as well. It demands an engagement by even the most obscure specialism, and it is a substantial obstacle to any intellectual project which seeks to place the reified construct that is India’s first millennium in a comparative frame.

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Acculturated Natives Who Rebel: Revivalist, Ottomanist and Pan-Arabist Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s)  

1.

Introduction

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several writers from Muslim lands produced Orientalist, supra-nationalist and nationalist visions of early Islamic art.1 This chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive review of this period of ‘Muslim’ engagement with the early Islamic past. Intellectual activity at this time, in the Ottoman Empire and the Arab-speaking world, was so complex and varied that no survey could do justice to its sheer diversity. Rather, I will map three intersections between ideology and the historiography of early Islamic art: first, the nineteenth-century Protestant/ Revivalist reconfiguration of Islam as a non-material religion; second, the Ottoman hegemonic discourse that promoted early Islamic heritage in order to preserve the spiritual and temporal power of the Caliphate; third, the subsequent Arab nationalist engagement with early Islamic art and archaeology, focused on Greater Syria and Iraq. The intertwined strands of these discourses complicate the oversimplified binary of Western versus non-Western identities.2 I do not follow the common strategy of challenging the assumptions of the West by positing a wholly alternative Muslim engagement with Islamic art. I think ‘the clash is less one between peoples or cultures, than it is between semiotic ideologies’.3 The larger story would thus be equally about Western constructions of self and other through interaction with the non-West and, conversely, about non-Western constructions of self and other through 1

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At the same time, many Western scholars were engaged in hegemonic and ethnicizing debates that led them to a retrospective search for the unifying essence of Islamic art in its formative stage. S. Vernoit, ‘Islamic Art and Architecture: An Overview of Scholarship and Collecting, 1850–1950’, in S. Vernoit (ed.), Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850–1950 (London, 2000) 1–61; S. Blair and J. Bloom, ‘The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field’, Art Bulletin 85/1 (2003) 152–84. For an exception to this trend, see G. Necipoğlu and S. Bozdoğan, ‘Entangled Discourses: Scrutinizing Orientalist and Nationalist Legacies in the Architectural Historiography of the Land of Rum’, Muqarnas 24 (2007) 1–6. W. Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley, 2007) 12.

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interaction with the West. The interactive nature of this process has often been ignored; this is, to a large extent, because the discourses of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Muslim world – often produced through dialogue with Western knowledge – inevitably fail to meet the requirements of being entirely indigenous. The main actors of the modern engagement with Islamic art in the Muslim world were acculturated natives – from the ‘super Westernized’ and ‘super Ottomanized’ elite – who rebelled. Their engagement with the early Islamic past and art constitutes a prominent feature in response to hegemonic power, be it European or Ottoman.

2.

Between Theological Aniconism and Modernity: The Image’s Loss of Power

Between 1870 and 1900, Muslim intellectuals faced a Europe that had become the adversary as well as the model. European armies were present in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, and European influence was growing throughout the Ottoman Empire. In the Middle East, schools and cities were remade on European models and Christian missionaries were particularly active. In such circumstances, the main task for indigenous scholars was to make Islam compatible with modernity. The movement of Islamic reformism in the nineteenth century, led by such intellectuals as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghāni (1838–79), Muhammed ‘Abduh (1849–1905), Khayr alDīn al-Tūnisī (d. 1890) and Rifā’a al-Tahtāwī (1801–73),4 attempted to legitimize the project of modernization as a return to the fundamental and inherently progressive tenets of Islam.5 One could define the mood of this 4

5

A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789–1839 (Oxford, 1962); E. Kedourie, Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (London, 1997). This period is also illustrated by the Tanzimat (Reform 1839–76) and its Western-oriented changes but also an Islamic colouring of Westernization during the reign of Abdulhamid II (1876–1909). In India, where in 1857 the British had abolished the Muslim Mughal dynasty, the emphasis was again on reforms in the educational field. Indonesia, under Dutch rule, was also active in implementing modern curricula combining religion with modern sciences. For the Ottoman, see K. Karpat and B. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 2002); S. Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London, 1998). For Islamic reformism in India, see C. W. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology (New Delhi, 1978).

Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s)

period as ‘the encounter of two interlocking rhythms of change’, ‘the interaction between the desire for change and the need to reassert local and Islamic identities, each of which influenced by both local and foreign forces’.6 At the end of the nineteenth century, three interdependent movements of religious reform helped to sharpen sectarian consciousness, the cultivation of a new religious discipline that was more internal in orientation, and the shift towards a more strictly scriptural interpretation of religious tradition. The chief hallmark of the new religiosity was its preoccupation with texts.7 Protestant missionaries in the Middle East were aggressive agents of this new religiosity, stamping out old practices and promoting a purer, simpler faith. Religion could be turned into a set of propositions to be held and advocated with unshakeable faith. People were told that without knowledge of the scriptures, they could not understand their religion or attain the rewards it promised. This new religiosity was not only a European export. By the late nineteenth century, Muslim reformers – who did not look upon Christian proselytizing favourably – called for the creation of a ‘truly modern’ Islam, anchored exclusively in Scripture and characterized by aniconic piety. In reorienting religion around textual knowledge, older forms of piety were denounced as superstition. Practices that had once been universal were branded as popular ignorance. One of the most active and influential intellectuals of the Protestant reconfiguration of Islam was religious scholar and jurist Muhammed ‘Abduh (1849–1905). As Grand Mufti of Egypt from 1899 to 1905, ‘Abduh was head of the Islamic legal system and effected a range of reforms. He recognized that Islam had universal potential, was vital to any revival of the Muslim nations, and that European science did not have to contradict Islam. Advocating the compatibility between reason and faith, ‘Abduh emphasized the interpretation of texts through ijtihād – logic and interpretation.8 Today, ‘Abduh is a much-cited figure in the literature on Islamic modernism and on the history of anti-colonial intellectuals more broadly.

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A. Hourani, ‘How Should We Write the History of the Middle East?’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 23/2 (1991) 129. A. al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London, 1993) chapter 6. For a pioneering study of scripturalism in the shaping of religious practice, see C. Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven, 1968). See J. O. Voll, ‘Foundations for Renewal and Reform: Islamic Movements in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in J. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford History of Islam (New York, 1999) 509–48; Z. Badawi, The Reformers of Egypt (London, 1978) 35–95.

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Yet, few have connected his ideas with those of Christian secularists and Protestants, who have long been seen as offering a parallel but ultimately distinct modernist discourse.9 ‘Abduh was not shy, however, about his sympathy for Protestantism: he was a reader of Muqtataf, the journal of the Syrian Protestant College, and of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), whom he had visited in person. More generally, the unspoken assumptions of Protestantism were taken for granted in the milieu within which ‘Abduh developed his thought.10 Indeed, many of the prominent Arabic intellectuals in the late nineteenth century were educated in Protestant mission schools.11 One of ‘Abduh’s most influential legal judgements concerned images and the preservation of artefacts. The legal judgement (fatwā) is entitled ‘al-Suwar wa-l-Tamathil wa Fawa’iduha wa-Hukmuha’ (‘Images and Statues, Their Benefits and Legality’).12 It was issued in 1900, while ‘Abduh was travelling in Europe, visiting museums, botanical gardens, archives and churches in Sicily. His descriptions of this journey and the fatwā were published in al-Manar, one of the most widespread and influential journals of the early twentieth-century Arab world. As rightly pointed by D. Ramadan, the text elaborates an argument in favour of the legality of figural images by emphasizing their educational function, historical and scientific value:13 The portraits and statues have preserved the various aspects of the life of individuals and of societies in many places, what can be called an anthology of societies and of the state of mankind. The preservation of these remains is truly to the benefit of knowledge . . . Perhaps as you read these words the question will occur to you: ‘What is the judgment of Islamic law on these representations (suwar) if they were intended, as has been said, to represent the human form in various emotional states and

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M. Elshakri, Reading Darwin in Arabic (Chicago, 2013) 72–97. ‘Abduh like many others held the view that education in the sciences could be a powerful agent of reform. For him, like for missionary educators, education encouraged right reasoning, proper habits and good morals. ‘Abduh’s concern for education was one reason behind his fascination for Herbert Spencer; ‘Abduh translated his On Education. He attempted to assign education a key role in the cultivation of proper moral subjects and faithful citizens, and emphasized the need for rational management and disciplined routine for the national domestic order. Elshakri, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 72–97; P. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (London, 2011) 1–34. Though tamathil does not consistently refer to statues; in the hadith, it relates to images on textiles. D. A. Ramadan, ‘One of the Best Tools for Learning’, in G. Salami and M. B. Visonà (eds.), A Companion to Modern African Art (Chichester, 2013) 137–53.

Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s)

bodily positions? Is this taboo, permissible, disapproved, deplored, or enjoined?’ I reply to you that portrayal (rasm) has already been practiced and that there is no disputing its usefulness. Any significance of worship or of veneration of statues or representations has disappeared from men’s minds . . . and the purpose of idolatry and deification of statues or pictures has been erased from minds. If you raise the question with a mufti and ask him about the following hadith: ‘The image-makers are the people who will suffer most on Judgement Day’ as is stated in the Sahīh,14 I think that most likely he will say that this hadith originated in the days when paganism was still alive. At that time representations were used for two purposes: pleasure and to gain the blessing of virtuous persons such as those who were portrayed by the representations, for example images of saints. The first reason religion detests and the second Islam came to wipe out.15

From the early 1880s, a number of Orientalists such as Ernest Renan, Gabriel Hanotaux and Lord Cromer had charged that Islam was a fundamental impediment to modern forms of knowledge, philosophy and science, and hence a prime cause of decline.16 Such views attracted rebuttal from Muslim writers. From the mid-nineteenth century, Arabic discussions of the rise and fall of an earlier, ecumenical Islamic civilization gained ground. Notions of civilization and its relation to evolution became a key concern for revivalist religious thinkers such as ‘Abduh.17 The crucial aspect of Abduh’s fatwā is about the Islamic Bilderverbot, a topic that has long captured the Western imagination and more particularly scholarship on Islamic art.18 Contemporary scholars have too often

14 15

16 17

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Sahīh is a collection of authoritative hadiths considered authentic. M. ‘Abduh, ‘al Suwar wa’l tamathil wa fawa’iduha wa hukmuha’, al-Manar 1/7 (1904) 35–9. The text is reprinted in the work of another very influential Muslim reformer R. Rida, Tārīkh al-Ustādh al-Imām al-Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abduh [Biography of Imam Muhammed ‘Abduh] (Cairo, 1926) vol. 2, 499–501. English translations of this text have been published by Ahmad Muhammad ‘Isa, ‘Muslims and Taswir’, Muslim World 45/3 (1955) 263–4 and recently by Ramadan, ‘One of the Best Tools for Learning’, 137–8. A. Hourani, ‘Islam and the Philosophers of History’, Middle Eastern Studies 3/3 (1967) 232. With historians such as Jurjī Zaydān, ‘Abduh reconstructed the history of an ‘Arab civilization’ with a focus on the Arabic classical or ‘Golden Age’. He frequently refers to the grandeur of early Islam as a ‘civilization’ with a taste for science and art, using Gustave Le Bon’s Les Premières Civilisations (1889) that highlights Arab contributions to the progress of humanity. See Elshakri, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 9–11, 182–5. On the Islamic Bilderverbot see C. S. Hurgronje, ‘Kusejr Amra und das Bilderverbot’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 61 (1907) 186–91; K. A. C. Creswell, ‘The Lawfulness of Painting in Early Islam’, Ars Islamica 11–12 (1946) 159–66. A more balanced narrative suggests that the hadiths opposed to images were developed at the same time of Qusayr ‘Amra and were thus not yet effective. For contextualized study on aniconism see

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considered this text a legal judgement written in support of images and the preservation of ancient artefacts. The way this text has been considered as a loosening of Islam’s restriction on images is in line with an Orientalist literature that privileges figurative art over other forms of art and that considers the acceptance of figurative art as an evolutionary step forward in an historical progression. For instance, ‘Abduh has been celebrated as ‘one of the most enlightened men of the Muslim religion and a connoisseur of the arts’.19 In effect, both Western and Egyptian scholars have grounded their interpretations of ‘Abduh’s fatwā in teleological discourses of progress implying the superiority of European figurative art developed by Orientalists but internalized by Arab scholars. Yet the articulation of ‘Abduh’s argument reveals that what has been presented as an emancipation in the Islamic understanding of the visual arts is actually more restrictive than has been acknowledged. What has been generally seen as a plea for the legality of images and their preservation is an attempt to bracket off the object’s power by putting it in its proper place. This should be read in the context of ‘Abduh’s larger project of reform and ‘purification’; it cannot be seen separately from ‘Abduh’s interest in the creation of a ‘rational Islam’.20 His restriction of the use of images belongs in the context of ‘Abduh’s positions on morality, prayer, clothing, economy, education and progress. What makes ‘Abduh’s argument ‘modern’ is not the freeing of art from traditional Islamic legal prescriptions, but the restrictive nature of the text. ‘Abduh’s defence of images is inseparable from two restrictions: the image’s loss of power and its new function as educational tool. ‘Abduh’s restrictions reflect an anxiety which arises at the intersection of Islamic theological aniconism with the founding assumptions of modernity. His ‘defence of images’ actually acts to efface the power of images by establishing a clear boundary between object and agency (divine and human). The fatwā is best understood in the

19 20

P. Crone, ‘Islamic, Judeo-Christian and Byzantine Iconoclasm’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 2 (1980) 59–85; G. R. D. King, ‘Islam, Iconoclasm and the Declaration of Doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48/2 (1985) 267–77; T. Allen, ‘Aniconism and Figural Representation in Islamic Art’, in T. Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art (Sebastopol, 1988) 17–37; D. van Reenen, ‘The Bilderverbot: A New Survey’, Der Islam 67/1 (1990) 27–77; G. Fowden, ‘Late-Antique Art in Syria and Its Umayyad Evolution’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 17 (2004), 296–304; S. Griffith, ‘Christians, Muslims and the Image of the One God: Iconophilia and Iconophobia in the World of Islam in Umayyad and Early Abbasid Times’, in B. Groneberg and W. Spieckermann (eds.), Die Welt der Götterbilder (Berlin, 2007) 347–80. For a recent re-evaluation of this problem, see F. B. Flood, ‘Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm and the Museum’, Art Bulletin 84/4 (2002) 641–59. Ramadan, ‘One of the Best Tools for Learning’, 138. J. Masad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago, 2007) 12.

Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s)

context of what Webb Keane has called a Protestant semiotic ideology of modernity21 or what Bruno Latour called ‘the work of purification’.22 ‘Abduh’s purification project aims at putting things in their places, especially things that threaten the distinction between the divine, humans and inanimate objects. What appears as a defence of images is actually a countermovement of purification. The fact that recent scholarship has elided this aspect suggests both the persistence of Orientalist paradigms and the danger of thinking in terms of binaries that obscure how different parties actually live in the same world. Achieving progress required Islam to assume certain characteristics, which included emphasis on monotheism, interiorized piety, lack of ritual and the notion of moral responsibility toward society. ‘Abduh’s religious reform entailed the transformation of religion in society, characterized in particular by the rationalization of religion, eliminating external mediation between individuals and God. As a result, sacred texts gained importance as the means through which God’s intentions could be understood through human reason. European scholars played seminal roles in determining new canons and positing new categories based on a Christian, Protestant template. ‘Abduh considered the recourse to Quranic interpretations to be inadequate; he called for ijtihād and a return to primary texts that history and previous interpretation had rejected. ‘Abduh thus identified ‘true Islam’ with early Islam, dismissing later texts and traditions as false or deviant. This meant of course that the Islam practised at that time was not ‘true’. Hence, ‘Abduh considered that ‘Muslims today are Muslim only by name’.23 Abduh’s project harked back to the ‘authentic’ Islam of the early Islamic era, and was bent on freeing Muslim heritage from anything that obscured the original simplicity and purity of Islam. In other words, ‘Abduh’s target was first and foremost current nineteenth-century practices seen as mainly ritualistic. By insisting on the image’s loss or lack of power, ‘Abduh denies the efficacy of the rituals practiced by the Sufi orders and magic men of the time, which in his view transgressed the principle of tawhīd (unity of God) central in orthodox Sunni Islam. In 1904, he issued a fatwā against the intercession by prophets and saints (tawassul).24 ‘Abduh initiates a clear compartmentalization between religious or votive images (forbidden) and powerless images (permissible). Therefore,

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Keane, Christian Moderns. B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. C. Porter (New York, 1993). al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 120–4. Elshakri, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 159–67.

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images redefined as objects of scientific or historical knowledge appear less dangerous for religion. This may be compared to early Protestant views of images as acceptable for didactic or scientific purposes. Such limitations served to divest the images of the aura that was a precondition of their cult status.25 ‘Abduh’s strategy tends to portray any alternative to a ‘pure Islam’ as an anachronism. Hence idol worship is presented as belonging to the past. But silencing the images also requires that one confine them to a domain other than religion, a domain that one can respect and preserve. Religious ‘purification’, whether Islamic or Protestant, can claim that religion can easily coexist with science and powerless images may have a place in museums and other places of learning.26 ‘Abduh’s strategy strips pictorial representations of any potential religious status. In the body of the text, ‘Abduh is explicit about the image’s loss of power. The anti-image hadith, he insists, ‘originated in the days when paganism was still alive. At that time representations were used for two purposes: distraction and to gain the blessing of virtuous persons such as those who were portrayed by the representations. The first reason religion detests and the second Islam came to wipe out. The artist in both cases is working against God and is a facilitator of polytheism.’ Likewise, ‘the purpose of idolatry and deification of statues or pictures has been erased from minds’. Here ‘Abduh effectively situates the worship of images in the past and presents their use as anachronistic. The second part of the title (fawa’iduha wa-hukmuha) offers ‘Abduh’s second restriction of images, their utility. The term fawa’id (benefits) has connotations that a moral or useful lesson can be gained. The word features prominently in the text. For instance, ‘If these two obstacles (distraction from God and idolatry) are removed and utility becomes the objective, then the representation of persons is the same as the representation of plants, trees or objects.’ The dual prism of ‘Abduh’s approach to the permissibility of images is thus the image’s loss of power and its new status as scientific tool for ‘useful knowledge’.27

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H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, tr. E. Jephcott (Chicago, 1993) 14–15. On the different strategies of ‘purification’ in the context of the mission encounter in South Asia see Keane, Christian Moderns, 123–6, 200. In 1868, the Society of Knowledge for the Publication of Useful Books was established in Egypt. The model was likely the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge that aimed at teaching the values of self-discipline in England. On this topic see Ramadan, ‘One of the Best Tools for Learning’, 146 and T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, 1991) 90.

Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s)

In sum, ‘Abduh shares with Protestant theologians worries about materiality, mediation, free will and the transcendent character of God. His anticlericalism (seen in his pronounced anti-Sufism and attack on the ignorant ‘ulemas28 of al-Azhar), as well as in the denunciation of the intercession of saints and ceremonialism, also appears broadly Protestant in terms of its anti-Catholicism. His stress on revelation and the divine inspiration of Scripture, the authority of Scripture as opposed to ‘practice’, and the centrality of the individual’s moral responsibility to society was largely shared by Protestant missionaries and scholars. These Protestant attitudes were naturalized by the Muslim reformers who took up the challenge of re-examining their own tradition.29 What makes ‘Abduh’s take on images specifically Protestant is that his narrative tends by implication to link moral progress (knowledge, science and modernity) to practices of detachment from – and re-evaluation of – materiality. However, ‘Abduh goes further than suggesting similarities with Reformed anti-ritualism and iconoclastic piety. He castigated Catholicism for its incompatibility with science and its worship of images; he approves the many reformers who appealed to a ‘return of Christianity to its true state’. He claims, ‘they had called for freedom of thought, the limitation of the clergy’s worldly power, the abolition of confessions and the prohibition of the worship of icons’. It was in this way that ‘science appeared in the West’.30 Stressing the importance of the Reformation for the success of European civilization, he claimed that Luther’s aniconic piety ‘followed the example of Islam’.31 ‘Abduh’s turn to origins is simultaneously an assertion of the universality of modernity and a denial of uniquely Western claims to engendering it. When ‘Abduh recalls that Islam in its early stages eliminated the cult of images and idols, he implies four points: ‘True Islam’ is aniconic, ‘True Islam’ is comparable to Protestantism, ‘True Islam’ in its iconoclastic piety

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An ‘ulema is a scholar and authority in the Islamic religious science. Other religions experienced a comparable refashioning under the influence of Protestantism in the nineteenth century. See for Zoroastrianism, M. Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran (Syracuse, NY, 2011) 30–90 and also Rachel Wood’s Chapter 9 in this volume. For the Ottoman/Turkish world, see the development of ‘Turkish Protestantism’ in 1910–1920s. M. ‘Abduh, al-Islam wa-al-Nasraniya ma’a al-‘Ilm wa al-Madaniya [Science and Civilization in Islam and Christianity] (Cairo, 1905) 48–9. Elshakri, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 122. ‘Abduh shares this view with another reformer, J. alAfghānī, ‘Ra’y fi madhhab al-nushu’ wa-al-irtiqa’ wa-in al-‘arab sabaqhu’ [An Opinion on the School of Evolution and how the Arabs Foresaw It], in Muhammad Makhzumi (ed.), Kathirat Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (Beirut, 1931) 181.

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anticipated the Reform movement in Europe and ‘True Islam’ has always been modern. Abduh’s ways of marking and constraining images tell a typical tale of modernity: progress is a matter of growing self-recognition, as humans cast off their attachment to ‘false, external idols’. This story pertains not only to Islam and Protestantism but supports many projects undertaken in the name of religious reform. One comparison is colonial India’s project to ‘constitute religion by stripping it of what appeared unscientific and irrational’, splitting indigenous culture into religion and magic. The Hindu reformist movement Arya Sanaj founded in 1875, for example, denounced ancestral rituals, priesthoods and idolworship as superstitious corruptions. Once these accretions were stripped away, Hinduism could be revealed to possess a dematerialized spiritual universality like that of Protestantism.32 Similar reform movements elsewhere sought to purify Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.33 They converged on important points: religious reform was in tandem with science and in many cases the paradigm for reform was the ‘anti-ritualism’ of the Protestant Reformation.

3.

The Ottoman Encounter with Early Islamic Art (1876–1923)

Through the nineteenth century, successive sultans exploited the Classical and Byzantine heritage of the Ottoman territories. Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), however, in the decades leading up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, sought to endorse the archaeology, preservation and collection of early Islamic artefacts to emphasize the Caliphate’s spiritual and temporal power. The promotion of Islamic art over more Classical interests can be divided into four categories: the renovation of early Islamic mosques and holy sites (Mecca, Medina, the Great Mosque in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock), the establishment of an Islamic collection in the Ottoman Imperial Museum,34 the acquisition by the Porte – the central Ottoman 32

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Keane, Christian Moderns, 78; G. Prakash, ‘Between Science and Superstition: Religion and the Modern Subject of the Nation in Colonial India’, in B. Meyer and P. Pels (eds.), Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford, CA, 2003) 39–59, at 41. Keane, Christian Moderns, 78. For a detailed study of Ottoman museum practices, see W. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, 2003); W. Shaw, ‘From Mausoleum to Museum, Resurrecting Antiquity for Ottoman Modernity’, in Z. Bahrani, Z. Çelik and E. Eldem (eds.) Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul, 2011) 423–43.

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government – of early Islamic items (especially objects with Arabic inscriptions), and publications about these activities in the popular journal Serveti-Fünun, the equivalent of the London Chronicle. It is here that we see the birth of ‘Islamic art’ in the Ottoman imagination. A comparable process operated in the papacy when, in the decades leading to the unification of Italy in 1870, Pius IX (1846–1878) sought to endorse Christian archaeology as a means of preserving the papacy’s authority. As in the Ottoman case, the promotion of Christian archaeology can be divided into four categories: the renovation of churches, the restoration and excavation of ancient monuments including the catacombs, the establishment of academic institutions and museums, and publication of all of these activities. Both the Ottoman Caliphate and the papacy35 were powers that had retracted and made a renewed use of religion in their fight for survival. The comparison between them can be extended to three other areas. First, both attempted to correct ‘beliefs’ and defend against heresy, including missionary Protestant influence and liberal thought. Pope Pius’s Syllabus of Errors (1864)36 resembles Abdulhamid’s Book of Beliefs (Kitāb ul-‘Aka’id), which is aimed at correcting heterodoxy.37 Second, both emphasized the authority of the supreme spiritual leader – whether Pope or Caliph – over other powers. Finally, both attempted to re-invent the sacred past and use it as an instrument of mystification. The differences remain substantial. The Ottomans did not generate a critical scholarship on the early Islamic material comparable to the works of Wilpert or de Rossi,38 or to the rediscovery of the icon by Kondakov. There was no such thing as a scholarly discourse or discipline focused on Islamic art in the nineteenth-century Muslim world. That is, there was no indigenous literature to examine where and when Islamic art began, where it came from, its essential characteristics, or its stylistic and iconographic evolution. There are other difficulties in the reconstruction of the Ottoman promotion of ‘Islamic art’. First, divergent perspectives on the period make it

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In 1898, the Caliph recognized the Pope who was seen by the West as his opposite. E. E. Y. Hayes, Pio Nono (London, 1954) 255–62. S. Deringil, ‘Legitimacy Structures in the Ottoman State: The Reign of Abdulhamid II (1876–1909)’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23 (1991) 349. J. Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and Agendas: Jewish and Early Christian Art in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 83 (2003) 119; J. B. Erenstoft, ‘Controlling the Sacred Past: Rome, Pius IX and Christian Archaeology’ (PhD thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2008). See also G. Parpulov, ‘De Rossi’s School and Early Christian Iconography’, Journal of Art Historiography 19 (2018) 1–10.

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difficult to attain a balanced view of the late Ottoman engagement with the early Islamic past and Islamic arts. For Europe, the Ottoman world was the ultimate ‘other’, the bastion of bloodthirsty tyrants or, at best, a decadent fleshpot of Oriental despotism and vice. For the contemporary Turkish Right (or Islamic Right), faith in Islam and the organizational genius of the Turks were personified in the figure of the Sultan.39 For secularist Kemalist and left-wing Turkish historians, the late Ottoman period is considered the stagnation of the ancien régime. Moreover, recent studies of Ottoman archaeology pay more attention to the Graeco-Roman past as competition with Europe than to the Ottoman promotion of Islamic art.40 A further difficulty lies in the gap between Ottoman genealogy and the early Islamic, Arab, past. The Ottoman historical fantasy constructed a vision of the past with two ‘golden ages’: one was early Islam and the Caliphate, the other was the age of Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–66). Although they claimed the Caliphate, the Ottomans were Turks, not Arabs. The Arab dimension of ‘the golden age’ of early Islam was a real problem. The Prophet was an Arab who preached to Arabs, in Arabic, and it was the Arabs who made the first conquests and provided the first caliphs. Religious ethnocentrism41 was therefore a problem for the Ottomans. An alternative vision based on the idea of an ‘Arab caliphate’ was widespread in Western scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century and the spectre of a rival Arab caliphate was Abdulhamid’s worst fear.42 This resulted in a confused approach to the early Islamic past and its material culture. One way out was to Ottomanize the sacred and the early Islamic visible past by restoring, preserving and possessing it and from 1910 onwards, by ‘Turkifying’ it.43

The Acquisition of Early Islamic Items and Old Qurans One way of emphasizing Ottoman sacrality was to collect symbolic objects. The Prophet’s sandals were transported from Hakkari to Istanbul in 39 40 41 42 43

Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 4–5. For instance, Bahrani et al. (eds.), Scramble for the Past. A. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986). Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 60–1. In a similar vein, note that Abdulhamid II promoted an ‘Ottomanization’ of the Islamic law (the Shari’a). The new orthodoxy was based on the hanefi madhab. The reason for this choice was that the hanefi school believes a strong and able ruler could be a legitimate sovereign of all Muslims on the condition that he protect Islam even if he is not from the original sacred Arab clan of the Prophet (Quraysh).

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1872 and a ceremony conducted upon their arrival. Another example was the order to buy what was purportedly a copy of the Prophet’s handwriting in a letter written to the ruler of the Ghassanids. This was acquired from a certain Mr Perpinyani in 1875 and placed in the Imperial Treasury. Another case was an item of calligraphy, supposedly in the handwriting of the caliph ‘Ali, which the same Perpinyani presented to the Palace in 1877.44 In 1893, the Palace decreed that 5,000 gold pieces were to be paid for another specimen in the hand of ‘Ali. The order stated: Although its authenticity cannot be discerned, because it has achieved renown as the calligraphy of the Exalted Caliph, its place is in the Treasury where all such relics belong.45

In the same vein, the oldest known manuscripts of the Quran, housed in the Umayyad Mosque at Damascus, were transferred to Istanbul.46 These items were used to bolster Ottoman claims to Islamic leadership, much as icons were thought to bolster the sacrality of the Russian Tsar.

The Restoration of Early Islamic Sites and Its Publicizing in the Popular Press The Islamization of Ottomanism required an appropriation of the Arab and early Islamic past. In 1874, Jerusalem was redesignated the capital of an independent zone, administered directly by Istanbul. Through this gesture the sultan-caliph could control the city’s religious symbols, such as the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque.47 Ottoman control of sacred sites was not new. Abdulhamid’s pan-Islamic activities often revolved around ancient rituals that had been carried out routinely for centuries by governments or privately endowed waqf as acts of piety or religious obligation. What was new was that certain politically 44 45

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Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 37–8. S. Deringil, ‘The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808–1908’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 35/1 (1993) 25. The Treasury in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul houses the Holy Relics of Islam which include: the footprint, sword, bow, cloak and a tooth of the Prophet Muhammed, along with a letter written by him on gazelle skin, the swords of the four orthodox caliphs and the keys of the Ka’aba. S. Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans (London, 2014) xii. F. Déroche, Qur’ans of the Umayyads: A First Overview (Leiden, 2014) 76. They are now housed in the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum in Istanbul (TIEM SE 321). B. Saint Laurent, ‘The Dome of the Rock: Restorations and Significance, 1540–1918’, in S. Auld and R. Hillenbrand (eds.), Ottoman Jerusalem: The Living City, 1517–1917 (London, 2000) 415–24.

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suitable rituals were upgraded in scope and visibility, turning them into grandiose ceremonies to help consolidate Sunnism.48 Aware of the significance of Jerusalem to Ottoman claims of religio-political hegemony over the Muslim world, Abdulhamid in 1876 and 1897–8 initiated successive projects of restoration and refurbishment (the repair of the Dome, the placement of a new crescent on top, the addition of windows to enhance illumination, restoration of the tiles).49 The restoration of the Dome can be seen as a physical expression of Abdulhamid’s policy of Islamization. The same rationale is at work behind his role in the repair of other holy sites. The Hedjaz, the home of the two holy sanctuaries Mecca and Medina and the destination of the Muslim pilgrimage (hajj), was crucial for the Ottoman projection of an Islamic legitimacy. Abdulhamid not only built the Hedjaz railway that facilitated connection between the holy sites, the Middle East and Istanbul, but also undertook major refurbishment of the holy sites. He personally ordered the repair of the Kaaba and the mosques in Medina and Karbala, substantially from his own funds. In Mecca, the draping of the Kaaba yearly in a holy mantle, embroidered with the sultan’s name, took place amid pomp and publicity.50 This valuing of the early Islamic past was visually epitomized in the Sultan’s photograph albums, a vast collection that documented the Ottoman Empire’s diversity and covered all regions from Jerusalem to Mesopotamia and all periods.51 Among these albums, the coverage given to Mecca, Medina, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Damascus and the mosques of Istanbul and Bursa stands out, painting a direct line between the pinnacles of Umayyad art and those of the Ottomans themselves. One of the most publicized restorations was that of the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, damaged in a fire in 1893. An initial project to reconstruct the building ‘entirely in the new style of architecture’ was rejected in favour of fidelity to the original early Islamic structure. It was argued that the extraordinary importance of the mosque required the kind of restoration that would return it to its original state. In 1902, Servet iFünun published the photographs documenting the process. The photographs conveyed the magnificence of the mosque as one of the earliest and greatest works of Islamic architecture. The huge investment in the

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Deringil, ‘The Invention of Tradition as Public Image’. Saint Laurent, ‘The Dome of the Rock’, 415–17. K. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam (Oxford, 2001) 229–32. Z. Çelik, ‘Defining Empire’s Patrimony: Late Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities’, in Bahrani et al. (eds.), Scramble for the Past, 445–77, at 447.

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restoration and the refurbishment of the building on an impressive scale had two political aims: incorporating the early Islamic-‘Arab’ past into the Ottoman identity and ensuring the visibility of the Ottoman Caliphate.52 Public symbolism played a crucial role. Rejecting the practices of his predecessors, who had taken great pains to appear as ‘modern’ monarchs by adopting the European practice of displaying portraits in public places, Abdulhamid II deliberately forbade the display of his portrait and – in an aniconic show of Islamic orthodoxy – replaced the image of the ruler with uniformly embroidered banners bearing the legend ‘long live the Sultan!’.53

Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910) and the Establishment in 1889 of an Islamic Department in the Imperial Museum In 1880, Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910) was hired as the first Muslim director of the Imperial Museum (Figure 13.1).54 In 1889 a directive issue by the Porte set out the organization of the collections as follows: The Imperial Museum is divided into six parts. The first is for Greek, Roman, and Byzantine antiquities. The second is for Assyrian, Caledonian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Hittite, and Himariote antiquities, as well as for works by Asian and African tribes. The third is for works of Islamic fine arts. The fourth is for ancient coins. The fifth is for examples of natural history. The sixth is for examples of natural history. The sixth is for collection, in a library, of books concerning the history and science of antiquities.55

As noted by W. Shaw, the term ‘Islamic fine arts’ (Sanayi-i Nefise-i Islami) was employed in the founding document of the Imperial Museum, before any major European exhibitions or museums had employed the label ‘Islamic art’. Its use in the Ottoman context was a corrective to the term ‘Muhammadan art’, current in Europe, and underscored the broad territorial breadth from which the Imperial Museum had culled its collections. In this way the collection matched the imperial ambitions of Sultan Abdulhamid II, even as the scope of the empire’s territories waned.56 52 53 54 55 56

Ibid., 467–9; for reproduction of the photographs see 475–7. Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 22. The Imperial Museum was first supervised by European scholars such as A. Dethier. Directive issued by the Council of State cited in Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 172. On this see Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 175–6. The earliest use of the term ‘Islamic arts’ appears in a catalogue commissioned by Ottoman bureaucrats and Sultan Abdulaziz for the Vienna international exposition of 1873. See P. Montani and V. Marie de Launay, Usūl-i Mīmārī-i Osmānī / L’architecture Ottomane / Die ottomanische Baukunst (Istanbul, 1873) 40–2.

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Figure 13.1 Portrait of Osman Hamdi. Atelier de photographie Auguste Perichet, Paris, 1865. Edhem Eldem’s personal collection (permission granted)

The establishment of an Islamic section in the Imperial Museum reflects a growing interest in the Islamic past as well as an awareness of the national and supra-national implications of this past. This phenomenon On this foundational volume, see A. Ersoy, ‘Architecture and the Search for Ottoman Origins in the Tanzimat Period’, Muqarnas 24 (2007) 117–39. Another early text that uses the same term is the 1906 essay by the late Ottoman architect Mimar Kemalettin titled ‘Mīmārī-i Islam’ [Architecture of Islam]. This essay criticizes the omission of Turkish monuments in European survey of Islamic architecture that privileges Arab and Persian arts. See G. Necipoğlu, ‘Creation of a National Genius: Sinan and the Historiography of Classical Ottoman Architecture’, Muqarnas 24 (2007) 160–1.

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was not unique to Istanbul: in 1883 the Museum of Arab Art opened in Cairo, and Islamic archaeology emerged with the excavation of Samarqand. However, in Europe, it was only in 1893, with the ‘Exposition d’Art musulman’ in Paris, that this art became identified with religion rather than a region.57 By using the terminology of ‘Islamic art’ as a generalization that eschewed regional and temporal difference, the Ottomans reasserted the affiliation of the Ottoman Empire and Islam and denied the problems of Arab nationalism that plagued its integrity.58 The Islamic arts collection of the Imperial museum is not well documented; it was never published in a catalogue.59 The only early discussion comes from a short section of an 1895 article by the assistant director of the museum and brother of Osman Hamdi Bey, Halil Edhem (1861–1938). His comments on the Islamic collection provide information about the symbolic function of the Imperial Museum’s Islamic division: At one time during the Middle Ages when in Europe and in Asia no trace of civilization remained and knowledge and science had become nearly completely extinct, Islam and the Arabs appeared as a vehicle for the formation of a new civilization. The advancement of knowledge and science and literature and art spread across the world and the Ottomans were the inheritors of this with their acquisition of the caliphate. Since today old Arab works and old Ottoman works are among quite desirable and rare antiquities, these are also now being collected in the Imperial Museum and are being arranged for display in a special hall.60

There are important points to stress here. First, in introducing the collection’s function, Halil Edhem reasserts the affiliation between the Ottomans, Islam and the Caliphate, suggesting that the Islamic collection played a role in fostering a sense of shared Ottoman/Islamic national feeling. Second, Halil Edhem seeks to establish a distinction between ‘old Arab works’ and

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S. Vernoit, ‘The Rise of Islamic Archaeology’, Muqarnas 14 (1997) 3–8. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 33. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, at 176–7 notes: ‘While the Islamic identity of the Ottoman state had been central to Abdulhamid II, it was only during and after the Young Turks revolution of 1908–1910 that concerns about Islamic antiquities began to enter scholarship. In 1908, the Islamic collection left the archeological museum for the Tiled Pavilion and the relation between the Islamic and Greco-Byzantine past of the Ottoman empire was altered. And during World War I, the Islamic collection acquired a nationalist flavor.’ Shaw published a photo of this hall showing that the objects were arranged symmetrically and organized by material. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 176; Shaw (175–6) quotes H. Edhem, ‘Müze-i Hümayun [The Imperial Museum]’, Tercümanı Hakikat /Serveti Fünun [numéro spécial et unique] (1313/1873) 104.

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‘old Ottoman works’,61 applying the Ottoman historical fiction that considers the rule of the early caliphs and the early days of the Ottoman Empire as twin golden ages.

The Repudiation of Mshatta If the early Islamic sites and Graeco-Roman antiquities were crucial to Ottoman self-fashioning, other antiquities did not easily serve the narrative, as they were peripheral to the developing and complex markers of Ottoman identity: Ottomanism, Hellenism, Islam and Turkishness. This is the case of the Mshatta façade. In creating an identity as simultaneously modern and Islamic, the Ottomans needed to create their own ‘other’, their own ‘East’: unorthodox, uncivilized, backward and non-Turkish. The civilized zone was constituted by the urban, orthodox and Turkish elites of Istanbul as opposed to the Arabs of its Middle Eastern provinces, especially ‘those living in the state of nomadism and savagery’ in the Transjordanian desert, where Mshatta was found.62 Abdulhamid’s disowning of the Mshatta façade is a good illustration of ‘Ottoman Orientalism’63 and can be read in terms of Istanbul’s complex relationship with the Arab colonies. The disowning of Mshatta can be compared to attitudes toward non-Graeco-Roman antiquities which did not receive much interest (Hittite, Assyrian, Phoenician and Mesopotamian). When a major non-Graeco-Roman find such as the Ishtar gate of Babylon came to light at the turn of the century, it did not fit with the existing collections of the Imperial Museum that emphasized the GraecoRoman heritage, and so could be given to the Germans.64 Mshatta, like these ancient ‘Eastern’ items emphasized the links between the Ottoman Empire and the East, at a time when many Ottoman statesmen regarded their empire as geographically European. The disowning of Mshatta serves the Ottoman imperial and modernization project while the

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In late nineteenth-century European literature, the notion of an old and medieval ‘Arab art’ was frequently used to define ‘early/medieval Islamic art’ (eighth to eleventh centuries) from Spain to the Levant. This ethnic categorization used to dissociate Arab from Persian and Turk arts was also found in the Ottoman art historical discourse. Other famous Umayyad desert-castles are in the Transjordanian desert: Qusayr ‘Amra, Qasr alKharane and Qasr al-Hallabat. U. Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review 107/3 (2002) 768–96. F. Bohrer, ‘The Times and Spaces of History: Representation, Assyria and the British Museum’, in D. Sherman and I. Rogoff (eds.), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis, 1994) 197–222, at 198.

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Figure 13.2 Mshatta. View of the remains of the façade in situ, Jordan, 743–744. Author’s photo. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

reasons publicly invoked for this disownment allowed Abdulhamid to project his image as an orthodox and aniconic ruler.

Categorizing Mshatta as ‘Non-Islamic’ Mshatta was discovered in 1840 but only attracted interest in 1897–8 when R. E Brunow undertook the first examination and pictures of the site (Figure 13.2). In 1904, the Berlin museum was expected to open and Wilhelm von Bode was appointed director. Bode explains in his biography that Professor Strzygowski in 1902 suggested he acquire the Mshatta’s façade because the Hedjaz railway would soon be built in the region and the ruins would be plundered. Strzygowski believed the façade was the most important monument from the time of transition from early Byzantine to Islamic art. He took the work to be that of Sasanian workmen and persuaded Bode that it would be a worthy pendant to the mosaic from Ravenna in the Christian department.65 Interestingly, the Ottomans took the façade to be neither Islamic, nor Sasanian, but a Byzantine construction undertaken under Justinian and 65

M. H. Cevrioğlu, ‘Culture via Politics and the Acquisition of the Mshatta Façade’ (2012), www.academia.edu/2434207. He quotes W. Von Bode, Mein Leben (Berlin, 1930) 155–6.

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never finished. The sultan gave consent for the façade’s removal in 1903, despite the disapproval of Osman Hamdi Bey.66 Two documents about the Ottomans’ disavowal are of particular interest. In 1903, an order from the Sublime Porte discussed the export of the ruin: The export of some stone from the building known as Mshatta, located in the valley of Balga in the village of Salat in the province of Syria, has been requested by his highness the German emperor for the Frederick Museum which is to open in Berlin. The report of the high council of June 103 concerning this matter requires that it be shown that these stones do not have a religious purpose; and that it become understood that they have various designs. Even if it would be necessary to maintain them as part of the sultan’s privy because of their status as antiquities, and even though it would be good to transport them to the museum in the capital, the most important matter is to make certain that the stones are not religious antiquities.67

Another document from 1903 specifies the reasons why the Mshatta façade was categorized by the Ottoman authorities as ‘non-Islamic’: the transportation of these stones – of the aforementioned ancient building, which don’t have Islamic inscriptions and are laden with archs and pictures – are permitted. As it is decreed by the High Council, and approved by an Irade of the Sultan.68

The two texts raise the question of whether Mshatta was religious and Islamic, implying that religious and Islamic ruins would require careful conservation. Interestingly, these documents define Mshatta as nonIslamic. This categorization is based on at least two criteria: the presence of pictures and the absence of Islamic inscriptions. The focus on these two elements suggests that this declaration justifying the disowning of Mshatta may have been another opportunity for projecting the image of Abdulhamid’s orthodoxy and aniconic piety.

The Arab Periphery Istanbul’s relation to Mshatta can be understood in terms of Ottoman imperial policy in the Arab colonies. Mshatta was found in the Arab lands, 66

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S. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 1997) 204. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 121–2. Cevrioğlu, ‘Culture via Politics and the Acquisition of the Mshatta Façade’.

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and when it was discovered, some scholars argued that it was probably an Arab structure (Ghassanid).69 In 1904, Strzygowski put forward the argument that Mshatta was a pre-Islamic structure built by the Ghassanids. If ‘the East’ is a relative category,70 every nation creates its own Orient and the late Ottoman Empire was no exception. The Mshatta gift depends in part on Ottoman representations of their own Arab periphery as an engagement with, resistance to, but also acceptance of, Western representations of the indolent East. Ottoman reform created a notion of the premodern within the empire in ways comparable to European colonial treatments of their subjects and European attitudes to the Turks themselves as premodern. The modern Ottoman-Islamic-Turkish nation was to lead the empire’s other supposedly stagnant ethnic groups into an inclusive Ottoman modernity. This commonality was implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, framed within a discourse that justified Turkish rule over Muslims and non-Muslims, including Arabs, Armenians, Kurds and Bulgarians. Ottoman modernization was as much a project of power within the empire as it was an act of resistance to Western imperialism. It discredited Western representations of Ottoman indolence by contrasting Ottoman modernity with the unreformed peripheral landscapes of the empire.71 Antiquities played a crucial role in the process of separating a modernizing centre from the rest of the empire, especially through the flow of antiquities from Sidon and Baalbek to the Imperial Museum in Istanbul. While Osman Hamdi Bey reacted negatively to the European theft of antiquities, he removed plenty of local treasures to Istanbul. On the one hand, the Ottomans claimed modernization by saving and displaying antiquities in a new museum to emulate Europe. On the other hand, the relocation of antiquities depended on a distinction between the cultivated modern centre and the ignorant provincial periphery. A plaque erected by Sultan Abdulhamid II to commemorate the German Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Baalbek in 1898 was placed inside the Temple of Bacchus to remind

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J. Strzygowski, ‘Mshatta’, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 25 (1904) 205–373, 205 quoted in T. Leisten, ‘Mshatta, Samarra and al-Hira: Ernst Herzfeld’s Theories Concerning the Development of the Hira-Style Revisited’, in A. Gunter and S. Hauser (eds.), Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies (Leiden, 2005) 371–84, esp. 374. M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997) 58. For an interesting theory that recognizes a gradation of ‘Orients’ as a pattern of reproduction of the original dichotomy upon which Orientalism is founded, see M. Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nestling Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54 (1995) 918. Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, 778–83.

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visitors of a civilized Ottoman sovereignty over the ruins. Significantly, the plaque was inscribed in Ottoman Turkish and German, but not in Arabic. The vast majority of local inhabitants were not considered worthy of understanding the significance of the imperial visit and its reflection of the elevation of the Ottoman Empire on the world stage.72 Hamdi Bey understood his task to be a struggle against the fanaticism and ignorance of the local Arab population and against Western imperialism.73 His interpretation of the Ottoman past dissociated the classical antiquities of Baalbek and Sidon from the primitive and Arabs.74 As put by Makdisi, ‘this dissociation between a noble past and a contemporary decline among the Oriental-Arab inhabitants is comparable to European strategies of Orientalism’.75

Minimizing the Exotic and Downplaying the (Oriental) Ornamental Ottoman efforts to depict themselves as ‘modern’ clashed head on with the West’s relentless quest for an unchanging, exotic and decadent Orient. In the 1893 Chicago World Fair, the Ottoman government sought to avoid objectionable displays of things Oriental, from dancing girls to dervishes to wild Arab Bedouin.76 The same attempt to minimize the exotic is evident in the attempt to downplay the decorative character of Islamic art. In 1873 the Usūl-i Mīmārī-i Osmānī (Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture) was published in Istanbul. The monograph in Turkish, French and German was commissioned by imperial command for the 1873 Vienna International Exposition. Prepared under the supervision of Ibrahim Edhem Pasha, Minister of Public Works, by a cosmopolitan committee of bureaucrats and architects, this work responded indirectly to Orientalist discourses on the extinction of the Arab architectural genius in Egypt under the influence of the Ottoman Turks. According to Ahmet Ersoy, the Usūl marks the emergence of a new form of architectural discourse in the Ottoman realm. It constitutes an example of the Ottoman effort to

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For the account about this plaque and the entrance ticket with an Arabic text exhorting the local Arabs ‘not to steal the antiquities’, see Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, 784–5. O. Hamdî bey and Th. Reinach, Une nécropole royale à Sidon (Paris, 1892) iv. Ibid., 63. Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, 785. Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 157–60. See also H. Edwards, ‘A Million and One Nights: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930’, in H. Edwards (ed.), Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930 (Princeton, 2000) 28–37.

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minimize the exotic.77 The authors promoted a distinct ‘Ottoman architectural style’ as highly evolved and defying negative stereotypes. It was defined as a rational style open to change and within the European art historical canon. The authors rejected Orientalist tropes of decorative versatility and sensuality.78 Yet, the Usūl was not intended to work as a site of resistance to contest the hegemony of Western art history. As suggested by Ersoy, ‘its function was to expand the Eurocentric narrative and the authority of Classicism and accommodate the Ottoman tradition within this. It defies marginality and exoticism by entering the canon; it does not contest the canon itself.’79 The final section of the Usūl reviews the types of ornament in Ottoman architecture. Emphasizing rationality and truthfulness (in terms of material and architectonics), the discussion resonates with prevalent nineteenthcentury debates on ornament.80 Sinan’s architecture is distinguished by ‘the great sobriety and the purity of the ornamentation . . . A style majestic, noble and severe’.81 These images of classical beauty resonate with J. J. Winckelmann’s normative vision of Greek art, based on the precepts of ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’.82 In commenting on the ‘sound proportions’ or the ‘purity and masculine severity’ of Ottoman Islamic architecture, the authors of the Usūl put Ottoman art on equal footing with European ideals.83 The text emphasizes the supplementary role of decoration with respect to the structure of the building and its unconditional subordination to the construction. This is in contrast to the European vision of ‘Oriental architecture’, a category seen as essentially ornamental, two-dimensional and deficient as a system of building.84 Not unlike Western writers, the authors of the Usūl see stylistic confusion or hybridity and overabundance of luxurious ornament as characteristics of artistic

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Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 135–49, 150–65. A. Ersoy, Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary (Aldershot, 2015) 6–7. Ibid., 23. O. Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856); A. Racinet, L’ornement polychrome (Paris, 1869). Montani and de Launay, Usūl-i Mīmārī-i Osmānī / L’architecture Ottomane / Die ottomanische Baukunst, 31–42, quoted in Necipoğlu, ‘Creation of a National Genius’, esp. 145. Montani and de Launay, Usūl-i Mīmārī-i Osmānī / L’architecture Ottomane / Die ottomanische Baukunst, 40–2, quoted in Necipoğlu, ‘Creation of a National Genius’, 145, riffing on Winckelmann’s famous comments on ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ (edle Einfalt und stille Größe) in ‘Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werkein Malerei und Bildhauerkunst’ [Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture] (1755). Necipoğlu, ‘Creation of a National Genius’, 145. Ersoy, Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary, 153–7.

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decadence and as an index of political decline.85 For the Usūl, the principal characteristic of the high Ottoman style is its noble severity, which ‘stands out from its Arab, Persian, and Arabo-Indian counterparts in its restrained richness of ornament’.86 In this intellectual and aesthetic context, the Mshatta façade, with its profusion of ornament, hybridity and location in the Arab desert, could not sit comfortably within Ottoman visual value system.

4.

Arab Nationalism: Early Islamic Art in the Service of Self-Determination in Syria, Jordan and Iraq (1930s)

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War resulted in the partition and occupation of its Arab provinces. Foreign mandates were imposed in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. Not only were old forms of authority destroyed, but the religious ties which had bound the majority of Arabs to the Ottoman caliph were severed by Ataturk’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1923. Arab responses took different directions. Some still believed in an Arab caliphate; others – like Egypt and Lebanon – preferred to develop regional forms of nationalism; others followed the idea of Arab unity in a new secularity. To substitute the caliphate with the concept of a secular nation state was a major innovation. This pan-Arabist option found one of its most important spokesmen in Sati al-Husri, who actively sought to reconcile former Ottoman loyalties with post-war Arabism. In articulating this new identity, he was the first to call for an Arab unity exclusive of Islamic ties.87 Recent studies have argued that Arab nationalist engagements with archaeology have focused on the ancient past (Pharaonic for Egypt, Phoenician for Lebanon, Canaanite for Jordan and Palestine).88 Yet the search for 85 86

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F. Haskell, ‘Gibbon and the History of Art’, Daedalus 105/3 (1976) 217–29, at 223–4. Ersoy, Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary, 153. This idea would be followed up and amplified in later nationalist historiography and especially in Celal Esad Arseven’s works (1875–1971) and his Turkish Arts (Turk Sana’ti) published in 1928. W. L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life of Sati al-Husri (Princeton, 1972) 85. On the role of ancient heritage in the creation of nationalist ideologies in the Middle East, see N. Ben Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison, 1995); D. M. Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, 2002); A. Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia: In Search of Identity in Lebanon (New York, 2004); A. Baram, Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’athist Iraq (New York, 1991).

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Arab nationhood between 1900 and 1930 revolved around three axes: local territorialism, Arab ethnic-linguistic nationalism and identification with the wider Muslim community. The Arab independence-movement scholarship presumed the existence of an Arab nation and a historical identity to go with it.89 The Arabs now subject to European colonialism also claimed ownership of their archaeological past. Pan-Arabist ideology after the First World War divided history into two periods of greatness, the ancient Semitic past and the early Islamic past, and two periods of decline in which alien powers (Aryans and Turco-Mongols) dominated.90 In the Arab provinces under Ottoman rule and later French and British mandates, it was the idea of Arab identity that drew nationalists – both secular and religious, Christian and Muslim – back to a golden age of the Umayyads. The first centuries of Islamic history, deemed ‘purely Arab’, became a basis for unity and the foundation for a common Arab identity. The emphasis was not on Islam as a religion, but on the fact that it was an Arab phenomenon.91

Pan-Arabism and the Dome of the Rock During the British occupation of Palestine and Jordan, 1920s tourism cast the Dome of the Rock as an exclusively Islamic monument, ignoring its links to other Abrahamic religions and mythologies (Figure 13.3). This narrative failed to recognize that the Dome and the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) were part of a shared world with Christianity and Judaism, sitting atop the Second Temple, itself believed to have been constructed on the site where Solomon’s Temple had stood and where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac/Ishaq or Ishmael/Isma’il, depending on Jewish or Islamic tradition. This divorce from the local Christian and Jewish past was scientifically grounded in Nelson Glueck’s work of the 1930s. Glueck was an American Rabbi who revolutionized archaeology in Transjordan and Palestine.92

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R. A. Abou-el-Haj, ‘The Social Uses of the Past: Arab Historiography of Ottoman Rule’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 14/2 (1982) 185–201, esp. 186. E. Dawn, ‘The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 20 (1988) 70. This secular emphasis differentiates Islam’s use from the strictly religious discussed earlier (Ottoman). On Glueck, see M. Brown and L. Kutler, Nelson Glueck: Biblical Archaeologist and President of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (Cincinnati, 2006).

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Figure 13.3 Dome of the Rock. Interior view with mosaic decoration, Jerusalem 691/ 692. Author’s photo. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

His first survey of Transjordan aimed at locating the ancient kingdoms of Edom, Moab and the Nabateans,93 reinforcing Transjordan’s status as a non-Jewish periphery. His archaeological approach enhanced the narrative of a central Holy Land in Palestine, rooted in Judaism, where Transjordan was ‘archaeologically’ distinguished from Palestine, mirroring in antiquity the political framework of the nation state – in ways soon to be enacted in modern actuality. Glueck excavated the Nabatean temple of Khirbat al-Tannur and framed Nabatean religion within the broader framework of Semitic religions. He compared Nabatean shrines to monuments like the Kaaba and the Dome of the Rock.94 He drew parallels between Nabatean art with the decoration of the Umayyad desert-castles: Khirbat al-Mafjar, Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, Mshatta and Qusayr ‘Amra.95 What allowed Glueck to link these sites was an essentialist view of the culture of ‘the nomads of Greater Arabia’, in contrast with the Mediterranean heritage of Jewish Palestine. Glueck’s comprehensive archaeology of Transjordan supported the creation of an Arab state in the Holy Land periphery, as a foil to the Jewish 93 94 95

N. Glueck, The Other Side of Jordan (Jerusalem, 1940). Ibid., 196. N. Glueck, Deities and Dolphins (Jerusalem, 1965) 245–51, 443, 533–6.

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state that was under construction. As an active Zionist Glueck took the archaeological record of the eastern side of the River Jordan to be substantively different from that of the western side, with the exception of the Dome of the Rock which he systematically connected to ancient Nabatean/ Arabian art but not to Hellenistic, or Christian/Abrahamic traditions. It was his silence on issues of Hellenistic, Byzantine and Jewish influence on the art of early Islam that was most telling for his political agenda. Yet Glueck’s association of Nabatean, Semitic and early Islamic art and his insistence on the shared ethnicity of the Arabs, were a precursor of the pan-Arab project. Indeed, many narratives that Glueck enabled have endured in Arab nationalist scholarship.96 Arab intellectuals drew on his sharp distinction between Arab-Islamic and biblical heritage and his disjunction of a ‘Mediterranean Holy Land’ from an Arabian desert periphery to articulate their needs for self-determination during and after the Mandate period. For instance, the ‘Arabness’ of the Dome of the Rock and its relationship to ancient Nabatean monuments was further emphasized in Jordanian narratives. When in the 1930s the Hashemites of Jordan aspired to a large Hashemite Arab kingdom that would include both Damascus and Jerusalem, one of the first steps they took was to appropriate Jerusalem’s Islamic sacredness by interring Sharif Husayn’s body97 next to the alAqsa mosque to link the Hashemite Arab nationalist project and early Islam.98 After Jordan became independent in 1946 and annexed Palestine, the Dome of the Rock was ‘Jordanized’. A stamp of 1952 shows the River Jordan with an image of Petra on one side and an image of the Dome of the Rock on the other.99 96

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Another crucial Western precursor was James Henry Breasted (1865–1935) with his book Ancient Times: A History of the Early World (Chicago, 1917). Breasted presented Arabia as the ancestral home of all Semites who throughout history had given up their original Bedouin ways of life and developed the civilizations of the Middle East. The book was translated into Arabic in 1926, and nourished the Arab nationalist discourse, enhancing the idea that the Arabs had a common origin in the Arabian Peninsula and were not a destructive force. Sharif Husayn (1853–1931) was the emir of Mecca and the last Hashemite who ruled over Mecca and Medina. He is also known for launching the Great Arab Revolt in June 1916 against the Ottoman army. E. D. Corbett, Competitive Archaeology in Jordan (Austin, TX, 2015) 131–42. Yet, as noted by Corbett, it was only in the early days of the 1980s, after the fiscal crisis that drove Jordan to insolvency, that King Hussein of Jordan (like the Ottomans a century before) focused his attention on Islamic heritage. He renovated the shrines and tombs of the Prophet’s companion in Mu’ta, and developed an Islamic tourism centred on Jordan’s baptism sites, where Jesus and John the Baptist were presented as crucial figures/prophets of Islam: Corbett, Competitive Archaeology, 199–200. Ibid., 142. In 1936, the desert-castles of Mshatta and Qasr al-Kharane were included in the first series of Transjordan stamps.

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Insisting on the ‘Arabness’ of monuments like the Dome of the Rock presents Islam and Islamic art as totally unique and doubly alien, alien to the Abrahamic and the Hellenistic pagan pasts of the region. This story fits well with the Arab nationalist reinvention of an ancient Arab past that would surpass the borders imposed by France and Britain.

Muhammed Kurd ‘Ali (1876–1953) and the Invention of Damascus as the Birthplace of Islamic Art In Syria under the French Mandate, the decade following the First World War was the formative period of Arab nationalism.100 An intense production of knowledge about the past was developed alongside new institutions to manage the heritage of the nation.101 Since historical arguments were essential to the political debate, one effect was an upsurge in historical research, including archaeology and museum exhibitions. In 1918, the Arab Academy was founded to be ‘the guardian and innovator of Arabic belles-lettres’ and to revive the medieval greatness of Arabic culture through its scholarly journal Majallat al-Majma’ al-‘Islami al-‘Arabi bi-Dimashq.102 One of the founders was Muhammed Kurd ‘Ali (1876–1953).103 Kurd ‘Ali is best known as the author of a six volumes history and topography of Syria, Khitat al-Shām.104 His career encompassed more than the writing of history: he published in newspapers, edited Arabic manuscripts, wrote biographies of famous Muslims and engaged in public debates with Western scholars who had taken Syria as their field of study.105 In his Islam and Arab Civilization (al-Islam wa-alHadara al-Arabiyya), he attacked Western Orientalists for misrepresenting

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On the French mandate in Syria see Ph. S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton, 1987); N. Meouchy (ed.), France, Syrie et Liban, 1918–1949 (Damascus, 2002). On the link between history writing and nationalism in Syria, see F. X. Tregan, ‘Approche des savoirs de l’Institut Francais de Damas: à la recherche d’un temps mandataire’, in N. Meouchy and P. Slugett (eds.), The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective (Leiden, 2004) 235–47. Journal of the Arab and Muslim Society of Damascus. S. Seikaly, ‘Damascene Intellectual Life in the Opening Years of the Twentieth Century: Muhammed Kurd ‘Ali and al-Muqtabas’, in M. Buheiry (ed.), Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890–1939 (Beirut, 1981) 125–53. M. Kurd ‘Ali, Khitat al-Shām [Topography of Syria] (Damascus, 1925). J. H. Escovitz, ‘Orientalists and Orientalism in the Writing of Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 15/1 (1983) 95–109.

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Islam,106 the Arabs and their civilization.107 As his name indicates, Kurd ‘Ali was not an Arab (his father was Kurdish and his mother Circassian). Being, however, a master of the Arabic language and a champion of ‘Arab Islam’, he insisted that ‘every nation studies its own history to build on the accomplishments of its ancestors and the Islamic nations should do the same’.108 Kurd ‘Ali advocated pan-Arabism and defined Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) through the metaphor of a body, with its heart at Damascus.109 In his Topography of Syria, he presents a nation that has preserved ‘its health’ thanks to regular waves of immigration by Arab tribes. These were not violent invaders but peaceful settlers both before and after Islam. This argument embraces and redeploys the pan-Semitic theory developed both by Arab nationalists and in James Breasted’s Ancient Times. In the same book and in his account of the history of Islam and Arab civilization, the skewed proportions between the long passages devoted to Arab tribes, Arab kings and Islam and the short ones given to other peoples are telling. The Roman, Hellenistic and Byzantine contribution to Syrian culture is passed over in silence or viewed as alien to the land. One of Kurd ‘Ali’s chief emphases was on the greatness of the ArabIslamic history of Syria. To highlight this medieval grandeur, he encouraged conservation work in Damascus: ‘Damascus was the capital of the Umayyads and the centre of Arab-Islamic civilisation.’110 Conservation in the capital targeted early medieval monuments including the Umayyad Mosque as, for ‘Ali, the Umayyads were a Syrian symbol, with Damascus as the seat of the Umayyad caliphate. The famous mosaics were discovered and restored in 1928–9 by Eustache de Lorey, who – during structural repairs at the Great Mosque after the fire of 1893 – had uncovered a panel on the wall of the western portico of the courtyard preserved under a layer of plaster. The discovery of the ‘Barada panel’ was

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As early as 1914, Kurd ‘Ali wrote a critical survey of European Orientalism and as a delegate to the Seventeenth International Congress of Orientalists in Oxford, he spoke on the same topic. See M. Kurd ‘Ali, ‘Muslim Studies in Europe’, Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Orientalists, Oxford, 1928 (London, 1929) 83–89. M. Kurd ‘Ali, al-Islam wa al-Hadara al-‘Arabiyya [Islam and Arab Civilization] (Cairo, 1950) vol. 1, i. Ibid., 45. T. Rooke, ‘Writing the Boundary: Khitat al-Sham by Muhammed Kurd ‘Ali’, in Y. Hiroyuki (ed.), Concept of Territory in Islamic Thought (London, 2000) 165–87, esp. 180–1. Kurd ‘Ali, Khitat al-Shām, vol. 6, 176.

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much reported and recognized as momentous for the history of world art (Figure 13.4).111 These mosaics enabled Western and Arab historians to cast Damascus, the new capital of Syria, as the birthplace of Islamic art and architecture. In this discussion the Ottomans were deemed poor guardians of these glories (they had, after all, plastered over the Umayyad mosaics). Missing from the story, however, are the restorations of the mosque under the Ottoman ruler Abdulhamid II and the construction of a connection between Damascus and Medina through via the Hedjaz railway. Also missing is the link between the Great Mosque and the local Christian and Byzantine architecture and mosaics. The Umayyad Mosque was thus categorized as purely Arab and Islamic. It is here that we see the birth of ‘Islamic art’ as a category, and of the divorce between the disciplines of Classical, Byzantine and Islamic art in the region. Among the most enduring legacies of Orientalism is the idea of Islam as a decisive rupture with the pre-Islamic (especially Graeco-Roman and Byzantine) past. This theme has been recently debated among historians and advocates of the ‘long Late Antiquity’ and Islamicists,112 with archaeology and art as crucial pieces of evidence for continuity or discontinuity.113 The difficulties in comparing late antique and Islamic culture are usually traced back to an Orientalist bias that differentiates and hierarchizes ‘our traditions’ and ‘their traditions’. But the separation was crucial also for Arab nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s when everything Arab and early Islamic needed to be clearly distinguished from

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Among the earliest publications on the mosaics, E. de Lorey and M. G. Van Berchem, ‘Les mosaïques de la mosquée des Omayyades à Damas’, Monuments et mémoires publiés par l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 30 (1929) 111–39; M. Briggs, ‘Newly Discovered Syrian Mosaics’, The Burlington Magazine 58 (1931) 180–3. For a sustained engagement with this issue see G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993) 138–68; G. Fowden, ‘Contextualizing Late Antiquity: The First Millennium’, in J. P. Arnason and K. A. Raaflaub (eds.), The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Chichester, 2011) 148–76; G. Fowden, Before and After Muhammad (Princeton, 2014). Most notably, G. Fowden, Qusayr ‘Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria (Berkeley, 2004); G. Fowden, ‘Late-Antique Art in Syria and Its Umayyad Evolution’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 17 (2004) 282–304; F. B. Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Making of Umayyad Visual Culture (Leiden, 2000); J. MacKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 300 BC–AD 700 (New Haven, 2007) 351–75; N. Rabbat, ‘The Dialogic Dimension of Umayyad Art’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (2003) 78–94; J. Raby, ‘In Vitro Veritas: Glass Pilgrim Vessels from 7th-Century Jerusalem’, in J. Johns (ed.), Bayt alMaqdis: Jerusalem and Early Islam (Oxford, 1999) 113–90.

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Figure 13.4 Great Mosque of Damascus, Damascus (Syria), 715. Students of the school of Damascus and Lucien Cavro surveying the mosaics between October 1928 and September 1929. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France photothèque du Département des Arts de l’Islam. © Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts de l’Islam, archives de Lorey

the Hellenistic, Christian or Ottoman/Turkish ‘other’. It is worth noting here that the Arabs’ desire for an ‘Islamic landscape’ in Syria was contrasted by the French Mandate insistence on over-restoring Frankish/ Crusader monuments such as the Krak des Chevaliers.114 114

N. Meouchi and P. Sluglett, Les mandats francais et anglais dans une perpective comparative (Leiden, 2004).

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Iraq: Arab History and Islamic Archaeology through the Lens of Sati’ Al-Husri In Iraq, Arab nationalism relied heavily on the early Islamic past. In 1932, at the end of the British Mandate, Sati’ al-Husri was appointed the first non-British director of the Iraq Museum. Al-Husri was born to a Syrian mercantile family in Yemen in 1882. He received his education at the Mulkiye Mektebi, a school for Ottoman bureaucrats, then studied philosophy in Paris. In 1919, he joined Faysal’s short-lived administration in Syria where he served as minister of education; two years later, Faysal appointed al-Husri director general of education in Iraq. By this time, al-Husri had already established himself as a leading proponent of Arab nationalism. He believed that the Arabs constituted a nation and ought to be united into a single state. For him, the fundamental criteria of Arabhood were a shared language and history.115 Although the Arab nations were divided into several states, al-Husri stressed that owing to the Arabic language and shared memories of the past, the Arabs possessed all the critical ingredients of single nationhood. Yet his own primary language was Turkish, and he spoke Arabic with a heavy Turkish accent.116 Al-Husri expressed reservations about an emphasis on pre-Islamic history, be it Pharaonic, Phoenician or Babylonian. The ancient civilizations had been ‘buried under the sands of time for thousand years, and any bid to revert to those lost epochs was nothing more than an attempt to revive that which is buried and mummified’.117 Instead, early Islam was the common denominator of the history of Arab nations. Al-Husri devoted funds to the first thorough restoration of Islamic monuments in and around Baghdad.118 The governments between 1932 and 1941 and 1963 and 1968 emphasized archaeology connected to Iraq’s pan-Arab and Islamic past (with a focus on Abbasid Baghdad and Samarra).119

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S. al-Husri, Ara ‘wa-ahadith fi al-wataniyya wa-al-qawmiyya [Concepts and History of the Nation] (Beirut, 1961) 20–1. Records of the department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Iraq, 890g.927/90. Letter from 29 January 1935. Cited in M. T. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation-Building in Modern Iraq (Austin, TX, 2005) 260. Baram, Culture, History and Ideology, 26. S. Lloyd, Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration (London, 1980) 196. It was only between 1979 and 2003, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, that the Babylonian and Sumerian heritage was clearly emphasized at the expense of the early Islamic past, mainly because those ancient powers ruled over the entire Gulf and thus better served Hussein’s expansionist project in the region. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past, 8.

Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s)

As early as 1926, al-Husri was shocked to see how little emphasis was given to Islamic heritage in the Iraq Museum. Of its six rooms, only one small room was devoted to the Islamic period, while the rest were occupied by Sumerian, Babylonian, Hurritic and Assyrian, PostBabylonian (Seleucid, Parthian, Sasanian) artefacts, and a hall of large sculptures.120 Consequently, in his construction of the Iraqi school curriculum in the 1920s–1930s, the museum was excluded from the pedagogical agenda. Al-Husri’s comprehensive educational system emphasized instruction in Arabic and a new national history. In this curriculum, Iraq’s history was Arab history, which supposed to transcend religious and community-level ties. The purpose was to reinforce the unity of the Arab nation and the Arabness of Iraq.121 There was little attention given to the various religious, ethnic and linguistic differences in Iraq, while emphasis was placed on the early Islamic commonality of the histories of Iraq and its Arab neighbours. There was little room for non-Arab or non-Islamic civilizations and the doings of the early caliphs were made to teach modern nationalism. During al-Husri’s tenure as director of general education – a position that enabled him to regulate the activities of the Department of Antiquities in Iraq – all the department’s funds were directed toward the restoration of Islamic monuments. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Museum of Arab Antiquities in 1937, which contained objects solely from Iraq’s Islamic era. Consequently, there were changes in the Iraq Museum. A guide from 1937 shows that instead of displaying items from the Islamic period, room 5 now had a selection of Sasanian objects.122 The Iraq Museum was thus solely dedicated to pre-Islamic Iraq, whereas the Arab museum housed Husri’s vision of Arab and Islamic Iraq. In February 1936, the press announced that the Iraqi Department of Antiquities was about to embark on its first official excavation. The site chosen by al-Husri for this first Iraqi excavation was Wasit, the capital of the Iraqi province in the Umayyad dynasty and an important city during the early Abbasid caliphate. Given al-Husri’s devotion to pan-Arab nationalism, the choice of Wasit made a clear political statement. Another significant initiative was to reclaim Iraqi antiquities from abroad. In 1935, Husri took steps to seek the return of the Samarra 120 121 122

S. al-Husri, Mudhakkirāti fī al-‘irāq [Memoirs of Iraq] (Beirut, 1921–41) vol. 2, 409. Ibid., 239. For Iraqi museum guides, see Dalīl al-Mathaf al-Irāqī (Baghdad, 1937) 74.

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collection. Meanwhile the Iraqi Department of Antiquities also conducted excavations at Samarra.123 Debates about the Samarra antiquities started in the Iraqi media in 1927, and in April 1935 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote to the British ambassador stating that it was wrong for ‘such antiquities discovered in and rightly belonging to Iraq’ to ‘be distributed among various museums in Europe and America to the deprivation of Iraq’.124 Britain accepted to ship a portion of the Samarra finds back to Baghdad. Despite the insignificance of this portion, reclaiming the Samarra antiquities was a major political victory for al-Husri, and the Iraqi press covered the return extensively.

5.

Concluding Thoughts: Conflicted Identities and Ideology

I have looked at Ottoman and Arab engagement with Islamic art and archaeology through the lens of the tortured modern history of the region, exploring the contexts of modernization, imperialism, colonialism and nation-building. Another way to tell the story might have been to focus on the main protagonists’ personal trajectories and conflicted identities. The problem with a post-colonial perspective on the roles of Osman Hamdi Bey, Kurd ‘Ali and Sati’ al-Husri is that by casting them as ‘Easterners’ who spoke back to the West, or by describing their achievements as a post-colonial diatribe avant la lettre, we set a bar between Western and Eastern scholars. It might be more productive instead to understand a blurred boundary. In one way or another all these men were ‘acculturated natives who rebelled’.125 They were ‘cosmopolitan’ intellectuals, disillusioned by the unfulfilled promises of either ‘super-Westernization’ (Hamdi Bey) or ‘super-Ottomanization’ (al-Husri and Kurd ‘Ali). They were descendants of the victims of imperial expansion, be this Ottoman or European. They migrated to the society of the imperialists at university in Paris or Istanbul, and adopted, at least in part, consciously or otherwise, the views of the hegemonic culture. All were ‘hybrids’ who assimilated and internalized at least some of the beliefs and values of the conquerors. This hybridity of view and the impossibility to draw a fine line between Orientalist attitudes and nativist responses, between imperialism and its 123 124 125

See Excavations at Samarra, 1936–1939 (Baghdad, 1940). Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past, 80–1. I borrow this formulation from the late Patricia Crone.

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nationalist resistances, makes the narrative of the non-European historiography of Islamic art particularly difficult to tell in a simple or straightforward story. But it illustrates the immensely fraught and still complex factors that brought a Muslim understanding of the archaeology and visual culture of early Islam into being.

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1.

Early Medieval Identities in the Museum

In his March 2014 review of the British Museum’s revamped Early Medieval gallery, art critic Waldemar Januszczak extolled the workmanship of the art displayed there as an indication that the barbarian peoples were not that uncultured after all: One by one, the other barbarian tribes step up to join the bling fest. The Franks decorated the weapons they used to bang other barbarians on the head with gorgeous silver inlay. The Vandals preferred beefy jewellery made of gold and onyx. The Vikings demanded silver brooches that grew bigger and bigger. The Visigoths were almost as skilled as the AngloSaxons in the working of gold and garnets . . . The exquisite religious wares of the Byzantines give this important cultural rewrite the superb ending it deserves.1

Januszczak saw the artefacts in the new gallery as the autochthonous expression of various ethnic groups – ‘tribes’ – who were naturally differentiated in their artistic styles as in other aspects of their identities. Notably, he attributes religious meaning only to the Byzantine heirs of the Roman Empire; the barbarian arts are typified as the gaudy, ostentatious display of weapons and wealth. His presentation, though Januszczak saw it as a ‘rewrite’, reflects a longheld model of Late Antiquity in the West, characterized by a firm distinction between the Romans of the failing empire, and the barbarian peoples who invaded and established new kingdoms. These peoples – Franks, Vandals, Visigoths, Angles, Saxons, elsewhere Goths and Lombards, and here Vikings as their later counterparts – were identified in the historical record and envisaged as different, internally homogeneous and externally bounded ethnic groups. As Patrick Geary has elucidated, this narrative, reinforced by the association of historically recorded groups with languages and archaeological cultures, proved powerful in underpinning 1

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W. Januszczak, ‘Out of the Darkness Came forth Light: Two Illuminating Shows Take a Fresh Look at German Prints and the Dark Ages’, The Sunday Times (30 March 2014) 12–13.

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nineteenth-century nationalist aims.2 According to the model, as the barbarian peoples established kingdoms in the wreckage of the empire, these kingdoms took on their names and cultures (Francia, England, Lombardy), thereby providing an ancient ethnic past and primordial moment of origin for distinct modern nation states. Early medieval material culture became tied to this model early in the development of its study. With a few notable exceptions (such as the tomb of Childeric I, excavated in 1653),3 it was only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that a significant number of early medieval artefacts were unearthed and correctly identified as dating from this period. In Britain, the first excavations of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries took place in the second half of the eighteenth century, most notably – and prolifically – by the Reverend Bryan Faussett (in Kentish excavations of 1759–73; d. 1776), although he believed them to be the remains of ‘Britons Romanized’ or ‘Romans Britonized’; subsequently, James Douglas used datable coins and comparison of burial assemblages to propose correctly that these were all early Anglo-Saxon graves, but such interpretations were not widely accepted before the publications of Charles Roach Smith and John Yonge Akerman in the 1840s.4 Throughout the nineteenth century, collectors grew to consider such excavations as sources of valuable artefacts. The expansion of railway networks across France and England resulted in the rapid excavation of hundreds of Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, and the subsequent formation of personal collections.5 In some instances, antiquarian interest in the material evidence of the Early Middle Ages was closely linked to a broader medievalism: thus, restoration 2

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P. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002) esp. 15–40. See also W. Pohl, ‘Modern Uses of Early Medieval Ethnic Origins’, in N. Karthaus and K. Lichtenberger (eds.), Gebrauch und Missbrauch des Mittelalters, 19.–21. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2009) 55–70. J.-J. Chifflet, Anastasis Childerici I Francorum regis, sive Thesaurus sepulchralis Tornaci Neruiorum effossus, & commentario illustratus (Antwerp, 1655). B. Faussett, Inventorium Sepulchrale: An Account of Some Antiquities dug up at Gilton, Kingston, Sibertswold, Barfriston, Beakesbourne, Chartham, and Crundale, in the County of Kent, from A.D. 1757 to A.D. 1773, ed. C. R. Smith (London, 1856) 38–9 (with comment from Smith, n. 1); J. Douglas, Nenia Britannica, or A Sepulchral History of Great Britain from the Earliest Period to Its General Conversion to Christianity (London, 1793) v–vi, 122–31; S. C. Hawkes, ‘Bryan Faussett and the Faussett Collection: An Assessment’, in E. Southworth (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: A Reappraisal (Stroud, 1990) 1–24, at 4; M. Rhodes, ‘Faussett Rediscovered: Charles Roach Smith, Joseph Mayer, and the Publication of Inventorium Sepulchrale’, in Southworth (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: A Reappraisal, 25–64, 48–9; S. Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death: Burial Rites in Early England (Stroud, 2000) 8–11. B. Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830–1914 (Oxford, 2012); Lucy, Anglo-Saxon Way of Death, 8.

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of medieval churches in the late Victorian era led to the recovery of a considerable amount of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian stone sculpture.6 The prevailing nineteenth-century historical framework of barbarian invasion and Völkerwanderung encouraged the attribution of ethnic labels to these archaeological discoveries. At first primarily illustrative of this narrative, the work of antiquarians and archaeologists soon began to highlight material culture’s potential for revealing historical cultures and the movements of peoples. Very early in the field’s genesis, identitarian concerns began to motivate the collection and discussion of early medieval material culture.7 Much of the foundational work was carried out by members of local learned societies with antiquarian and archaeological interests. Bonnie Effros’ discussion of the origins of Merovingian archaeology highlights that study of this material first served regional identities; collectors interested in the past of their own provinces felt threatened by the encroachment of national museums.8 In England, on the other hand, the Trustees of the British Museum were reluctant to acquire early medieval material from the British Isles, and suggested regional museums were in fact the best place for these artefacts.9

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8 9

M. Townend, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and His Contemporaries (Kendal, 2009) 133. Although the following discussion concentrates primarily on identity within the British Isles, much is relevant also to American scholarship: Anglo-Saxon history and culture has played a powerful role in the formation of the identity of the USA and its tradition of literary studies. Let it merely be noted here that Thomas Jefferson established the first department of AngloSaxon studies at the University of Virginia in 1825, and planned to place Hengest and Horsa on the Great Seal of the USA. See A. Frantzen, The Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (London, 1990) 15–16; C. Hills, Origins of the English (London, 2003) 34. Since this chapter was first written in 2015, US medievalists have led the way in highlighting the modern racist connotations of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the ongoing use of the period in the service of white supremacy, within and without the academy. See S. Lomuto, ‘White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies’, In the Middle (5 December 2016), http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/12/white-nationalism-andethics-of.html; M. Dockray-Miller, ‘Old English Has a Serious Image Problem’, JStor Daily (3 May 2017), https://daily.jstor.org/old-english-serious-image-problem/; A. Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’, In the Middle (29 July 2017), http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/07/decolonizing-anglo-saxon-studies .html; D. Wilton, ‘What Do We Mean by Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquest to the Present’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (forthcoming 2020), http://wordorigins.org/documents/ Wilton_JEGP_AS_Paper_Pre-Publication_Draft.pdf [all accessed 11 October 2019]. Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past, 27. C. R. Smith, ‘The National Antiquities’, in C. R. Smith, Collectanea Antiqua: Sketchings and Notices of Ancient Remains Illustrative of the Habits, Customs and History of Past Ages, vol. 3 (London, 1854) 266–9, at 268–9. Once there were sympathetic curators, however, the British Museum was able to trump the claims of local museums on occasion, for instance in the case of the Anglo-Saxon Æthelswith ring: D. M. Wilson, The Forgotten Collector: Augustus Wollaston Franks of the British Museum (London, 1984) 30. Regional identities are again playing a significant

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

But gradually, in the mid-nineteenth century, museums in north-west Europe began to create collections of ‘national antiquities’. Since historians identified the migrations of barbarian peoples and establishment of new kingdoms as moments of origin for modern nations, artefacts associated with these movements acquired special significance. In England, members of national and local antiquarian societies emphasized the status of the AngloSaxon era as a period of national origin, which then imbued its art with the ability to reveal natural, innate and typical characteristics of the English people. On this basis, they encouraged the British Museum to acquire early medieval artefacts from the British Isles.10 The formation of national collections was a matter of nineteenthcentury national competition. Curators’ correspondence shows attempts to imitate and surpass one another. Copenhagen was proposed as a model for the British Museum and the Musée des antiquités nationales in SaintGermain-en-Laye (inaugurated 12 May 1867); in 1861, the curator of the Römich-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, Ludwig Lindenschmit, judged that the new French collection would immediately surpass that of the British Museum, where the collection of early medieval artefacts had been resisted.11 Edward Hawkins, Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum from 1826 until 1860, was primarily responsible for persuading the Trustees that ‘national antiquities’ had a place, drawing comparisons with Copenhagen and Edinburgh.12 As a result of the Royal Commission’s report on the subject in 1850, Augustus Wollaston Franks was appointed to be responsible for national antiquities. Franks acquired the fundaments of the Museum’s early medieval holdings, although the Trustees were not easily convinced to devote the funds to this marginalized aspect of the Museum’s collections.13 In 1853, they refused to buy the Faussett collection of artefacts from Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Kent, which was championed

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role in the UK: see, for a recent example, M. Capper and M. Scully, ‘Ancient Objects with Modern Meanings: Museums, Volunteers, and the Anglo-Saxon “Staffordshire Hoard” as a Marker of Twenty-First Century Regional Identity’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39/2 (2016) 181–203. On the disjuncture between antiquarian discoveries and museum collections, see R. McCombe, ‘Anglo-Saxon Artifacts and Nationalist Discourse’, Museum History Journal 4/2 (2011) 139–60. Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past, 267–73. D. M. Wilson, The British Museum: A History (London, 2002) 89–90, 386. Likewise A. W. Franks, ‘On the Additions to the Collection of National Antiquities in the British Museum’, Antiquaries Journal 10 (1853) 1–13, at 13: ‘It is sad, however, to compare our own scanty beginnings with the magnificent series of National Antiquities which the Danish antiquaries have formed’. M. Caygill, ‘“Some recollection of me when I am gone”: Franks and the Early Medieval Archaeology of Britain and Ireland’, in M. Caygill and J. Cherry (eds.), A. W. Franks: Nineteenth-Century Collecting and the British Museum (London, 1997) 160–83, traces the progress of Franks’ acquisitions of early medieval artefacts for the Museum.

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by the antiquary and archaeologist Charles Roach Smith. Smith forcefully expressed his anger at their refusal, arguing that The public voice had long been raised against the unaccountable absence of National Antiquities in the National Museum. Foreigners had long reproached us for the neglect with which we treated the valuable remains of ancient art illustrative of our own history . . . Their patriotism and common sense were shocked at this repudiation; and they asked if the people of England were so destitute of memorials of the races from whom they descended, that even their chief Museum could not afford examples?14

Three aspects of Smith’s invective are particularly revealing. Firstly, he used the language of race to express his belief that early medieval artefacts revealed an essential part of the national story (in an addendum on the subject of their refusal, he consequently rechristened it ‘the Anti-British Museum’).15 Following from this, Smith viewed the museum’s stance as a matter of international competition, invoking foreign visitors to give voice to his dismay.16 His other weapon was ‘the public voice’, always a matter of particular concern for the publicly funded museum, and one which continues to affect interpretations within such institutions. When Roach Smith offered his own collection to the Museum in 1855, Franks argued for its purchase by utilizing similar arguments relating to national pride, as he wrote to Hawkins: The collection would be a great and valuable addition to the British Room and the acquisition of it by the Museum would go far to remove from us the reproach under which we are labouring of neglecting the antiquities of our own Country, while we accumulate those of other lands. I have had many proofs that such a feeling exists and that it has prevented in several cases donations being made to us.17 14

15 16

17

C. R. Smith, ‘The Faussett Collection of National Antiquities’ (repr. from C. R. Smith, Collectanea Antiqua, vol. 3), Archaeological Tracts (London, 1854) 7. See A. MacGregor, ‘Antiquity Inventoried: Museums and “National Antiquities” in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in V. Brand (ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford, 1998) 125–37. Smith, ‘The National Antiquities’, 269. Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past, 23–4, quotes the Danish archaeologist Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae’s advice to the English, which reveals a similar belief in the importance of early medieval archaeology for an understanding of modern nations and international relations: ‘A nation . . . must of necessity direct its attention to bygone times, with the view of enquiring to what stock it belongs, in what relations it stands to other nations, whether it has inhabited the country from primeval times or immigrated thither at a later period, to what fate it has been exposed; so as to ascertain by what means it arrived at its present character and condition’ (The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark, translated and applied to the illustration of similar remains in England by W. J. Thoms (London, 1849)). A. W. Franks (British Museum Officers’ Reports, liv (Jan.–May 1855), 10/2/55), quoted in Wilson, The Forgotten Collector, 24.

Figure 12.1 Flag adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1931, with the spinning wheel (charkha). Photograph: Creative Commons Licence, Wikipedia

Figure 12.2 Flag adopted at Independence as the national flag of India, 1947, with the wheel (chakra) adapted from Ashoka’s lion capital now in Sarnath Museum. Photograph: Creative Commons Licence, Wikipedia

Figure 12.3 Didarganj Yakshi, polished sandstone, c. 163 cm high. Third century  to first century . Patna Museum, Bihar, India. Photograph: Shivam Setu on a Creative Commons Licence via Wikipedia

Figure 12.4 Babri Masjid, Ayodhya India. Mosque completed 1528-29 AD, supposedly on the site of Rama’s birthplace. Protesters scaling its domes before the building was destroyed in December 1992. Photograph: Pramrod Pushkarma, India Picture/Alamy Stock Photo

Figure 13.2 Mshatta. View of the remains of the façade in situ, Jordan, 743–744. Author’s photo

Figure 13.3 Dome of the Rock. Interior view with mosaic decoration, Jerusalem 691/692. Author’s photo

Figure 14.1 Sam Maguire Cup, Ireland. Made by Matthew J. Staunton in Dublin in 1928. Silver. GAA Museum, Croke Park.

Figure 14.2 Shield from the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship burial (fittings original, reconstructed). England. 91.4 cm diameter. Early 7th century AD. British Museum, BM 1939,1010.94, AN35177001. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

Figure 14.3 Great buckle from the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship burial. England. 13.2 cm length, 5.6 cm maximum width, 412.7 grams. Gold with niello inlay. Early 7th century AD. British Museum, BM 1939,1010.1, AN1258506001. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

Perhaps the outcry over their refusal of the Faussett collection (and associated loss of William Wylie’s collection from Fairford)18 had encouraged the Trustees, for they bought Roach Smith’s own collection for a reduced price in 1856. But Franks had to wait until 1866 for his own department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography. The early medieval acquisitions made by Franks over the succeeding years, including the Trewhiddle Hoard containing a very early chalice, and the Franks Casket which now bears his name, reveal the expansion of the collections to include Christian art from Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Britain, rather than only items from the very early period excavated from furnished burials.19 Celtic objects were collected as part of the heritage of the British Isles, although here the status of the British Museum in relation to the more explicitly national museums in Edinburgh and Dublin was unclear.20 Any early medieval artefacts from outside the British Isles – such as the Bähr collection of Baltic grave-goods acquired by Hawkins in 1851–2 – were explicitly described as comparators to the ‘native’ collections.21 Identitarian concerns arising from nineteenth-century nationalism thus shaped the collection, classification and study of early medieval artefacts at a formative moment. Such interest rested on the ascription of ethnic/ national labels to these artefacts and their interpretation within contemporary notions of race. Indeed, ancestral identifications, reinforced by

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Wylie had promised the collection to the Museum, should the Trustees acquire the Faussett collection. Since this did not transpire, the Fairford collection was donated to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. On Wylie and the relationship of his excavations to contemporary intellectual and identitarian trends, see H. Williams, ‘Anglo-Saxonism and Victorian Archaeology: William Wylie’s Fairford Graves’, Early Medieval Europe 16 (2008) 49–88. Wilson, The British Museum: A History, 165. The Trustees refused to buy the Franks Casket in 1858, and so Franks bought it himself, and donated it to the Museum in 1867: Caygill, ‘“Some recollections of me when I am gone”’, 160–2. It is now a celebrated ‘highlight’ object in the Museum’s early medieval gallery. On the rare occasion the British Museum’s acquisition of Celtic objects caused controversy, the potential for competition between the museums was investigated by a parliamentary committee: Celtic Ornaments found in Ireland. Return to an order of the Honourable the House of Commons dated 1 May 1899 (London, 1899). In these investigations, British Museum representatives argued that their collections should fully reflect the heritage of the entire British Empire; Irish and Scottish antiquaries and curators, however, suggested that the British Museum should concentrate on England, and referred to their own roles among contemporary European museums. George Coffrey stated (36, 633) ‘In fact, the idea of a national museum has not been developed at the British Museum in the sense in which the term is applied to the national collections in the museums at, say, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin, and Paris (St. Germain). The museums at Dublin and Edinburgh, on the contrary, have been developed on the lines of the museums mentioned, and fulfil the purpose of national museums for Scotland and Ireland in a higher degree than the British Museum does for England.’ Wilson, The British Museum: A History, 132; British Museum: Guide to the Exhibition Rooms of the Departments of Natural History and Antiquities (London, 1859) 100.

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culture-historical classifications, persist and still often constitute AngloSaxon art’s main attraction. Early Anglo-Saxon art attracted visitors to the British Museum’s 1991 exhibition under the title The Making of England, and the exhibition catalogue opened with the words: ‘The Anglo-Saxons, whose artistic, technological and cultural achievements in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries are displayed in this exhibition, were the true ancestors of the English of today’.22 Furthermore, despite the partial rejection of these racial ideologies and increasing complexity of ethnic identity within scholarly discourse, a similar ancestralist perspective dominates consideration of early medieval art in academic writing. The author of one of the most theoretically sophisticated recent overviews recognized this tendency in her own approach, reflecting that ‘those of us who study “national” arts or literatures generally both desire and help to perpetuate these fantasies’ of wholeness, continuity and national identity.23 Indeed, Catherine Karkov’s explicit aim in this book is to discuss ‘the processes of becoming a culture or a nation’, which she again locates in the Anglo-Saxon period – ‘the centuries in which England was itself coming into being’.24 Unlike in the field of literature, in art-historical scholarship of this period such a tendency (and desire) to employ the early medieval period as a birthplace and supplier of our own identities is yet to be explored and interrogated.25 Like all assertions of national and ethnic identity, the presentation of Anglo-Saxon art has reflected and promoted the ideological supports of contemporary political relations. Gerald Baldwin Brown believed that his pioneering encyclopaedic work, a multi-volume survey of The Arts in Early England (1903–37), negated the insulting view of those who ‘deprecate the national ability in art’ and thus ‘have credited the foreigner at one time or another with all the good artistic work of Anglo-Saxon England’.26 Such presentations of the Anglo-Saxon period asserted the creative generation of the English against foreign influence. Accordingly, relationships between

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26

L. Webster and J. Backhouse (eds.), The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture, AD 600–900 (London, 1991) 9. Such presentations have a long history at the Museum: O. M. Dalton, as Keeper of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities, introduced his deputy R. A. Smith’s The British Museum: Guide to Anglo-Saxon Antiquities (London, 1923) with the sentiment that, while earlier British collections ‘all comprise objects produced by different races inhabiting these islands’, the Anglo-Saxon guide ‘will make a special appeal to the English people as illustrating what is largely the handiwork of their own forefathers’ (iii). C. E. Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2011) 247. Ibid., 1–2. Cf. Frantzen, Desire for Origins, and recent work around the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, still predominantly in literary studies, as mentioned in note 7 above. G. B. Brown, The Arts in Early England, 6 vols. in 7 (London, 1903–37), vol. 3: Saxon Art and Industry in the Pagan Period (1915) 5.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

European countries – especially England and Germany – have coloured interpretations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the English, ethnic identification with the early medieval past offered a source of origins in the Anglo-Saxon migrations of the fifth century – but this seemed to assert membership of a Germanic peoplegroup. The philologist and antiquary J. M. Kemble noted the similarities in the material cultures of early burials and cremation urns from England and Norhern Germany, and his philological expertise led him to apply familiar concepts to the evidence of material forms. Notably, it was the opportunity provided by a visit to a museum displaying this material, and his acquaintance with his colleagues in Hanover, that prompted Kemble’s observation of similarity. He used this observation to make an ethnic claim: ‘the urns of the “Old Saxon” and those of the “Anglo-Saxon”, are in truth identical . . . Keltic they are not . . . Slavonic they are not . . . The bones are those of men whose tongue we speak, whose blood flows in our veins’.27 Kemble’s ideas certainly influenced Franks, who edited his Horae Ferales, and began to collect continental artefacts as comparators to the British Museum’s Anglo-Saxon collections.28 In times of conflict with Germany, however, such ‘Germanist’ interpretations were less popular. Yet the ethnic paradigm was not dispensed with. Instead, the early medieval evidence was reassessed in order to produce more pleasing interpretations. An early and idiosyncratic manifestation of anti-German sentiment proposed that the Anglo-Saxons were not Germanic, but Scandinavian. George Stephens, an English philologist and antiquary, and professor at Copenhagen University from 1855, explicitly sought to demonstrate through his monumental work on rune-stones [t]hat, as the Northmen (the Scandinavians and the English) more nearly, and the Scando-Goths (the Northmen, the Saxons and the Germans) more generally, are all of one blood and tung, so they should all hold together, love and help and defend each other, avoid every beggarly temptation to hate or plunder or ruin or “annect” each other, nobly taking their stand as brothers and fulfilling their mission as one great folkship with its own local limits and national duties, in necessary

27

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J. M. Kemble, ‘On Mortuary Urns Found at Stade-on-the-Elbe and Other Parts of North Germany, Now in the Museum of the Historical Society of Hanover’, Archaeologia 36 (1856) 270–83, repr. in J. M. Kemble, Horae Ferales, or Studies in the Archaeology of the Northern Nations (London, 1863) 221–32, at 229–30; it is a sign of the English Kemble’s pro-Germanism that his editors, R. G. Latham and A. W. Franks, in publishing Horae Ferales after his death, first had to translate the majority of the text from German into English, since it incorporated lectures for a Hanover audience (vi). See also Lucy, Anglo-Saxon Way of Death, 11. Caygill, ‘“Some recollections of me when I am gone”’, 169.

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  providential counterpoise – but in all friendly harmony with – the great Romance and Magyar and Greek and Slavic and other race-groups.29

In short, he explicitly intended his combination of philological and archaeological work to inform contemporary international relations, through the light it cast on ethnic/national identities. Stephens’ intense antiGermanism, which seems to have motivated his historical interpretations, stemmed at least in part from the Prussian annexation of SchleswigHolstein in 1864 – which he claimed was supported by ‘archaeological fictions’.30 He sought to demonstrate that the English originated in the ‘Old North’, rather than Germany, professing that they should be called ‘Scando-Anglic’ rather than ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Stephens’ identification with Scandinavian heritage was competitive: seeing Germans appropriating Norse mythology as their ancestral inheritance, Stephens railed against this as ‘theft bodily’ from the peoples of the Old North, apparently viewing this as an annexation of cultural heritage equivalent to the territorial annexation he had witnessed.31 Stephens’ ideas were not widely accepted, however; their impact on material culture studies was limited, as they did not seem adequately to explain the evidence.32 In the British Isles themselves, as in France, the divide between Germanic and Celtic ethnicity proved a more popular battleground: who were the true ancestors of the modern inhabitants: the invading barbarians or the indigenous population? The idea of migrating peoples as Germanic (an originally philological designation), although equated at various levels with the influence of modern Germany, was widely accepted and proved too convincing for Stephens to shake. Instead, interpretations of the significance and extent of Germanic conquest in the fifth century fluctuated with modern international relations and cultural ties, the Celtic presence standing for a ‘native’ element. In England after the First World War, and increasingly after the Second, art historians and 29

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G. Stephens, The Old-Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England, vol.1 (London 1866) xvi–xvii. Ibid., x. A. Wawn, ‘George Stephens, Cheapinghaven, and Old Northern Antiquity’, Studies in Medievalism 7 (1995) 63–104, at 86–9. For example, the ‘Vaterländischer Saal’ of the Neues Museum in Berlin was painted in 1852 with a full cycle from the Eddas, depicting Norse gods and mythology, as the appropriate context in which to view the prehistoric artefacts of national German archaeology: see M. Bertram, ‘Vaterländischer Saal [Room of National Antiquities]’, in E. Blauert with A. Bähr (eds.), Neues Museum: Architecture, Collections, History (Berlin, 2012) 106–13. See, for example, Stephens’ influence and the eventual rejection of his arguments regarding the origins of the Gosforth Cross (Cumbria): Townend, Vikings and Victorian Lakeland, 125–36.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

archaeologists began to downplay the northern, ‘Germanic’ influence on Anglo-Saxon art in favour of the ‘Celtic’, and thereby to argue against a wholesale replacement of the Romano-British by invading Anglo-Saxons.33 Similarly in France, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and then again in the post-war period of the 1950s, evidence from Merovingian cemeteries was used to demonstrate that the Frankish migration had been characterized by intermarriage and acculturation with the Gallo-Roman population, rather than conquest.34 While the French interpretations related also to class, in Britain the two distinct barbarian ethnicities stood for the relative contribution of internal and external forces to modern national identities. Yet relationships between the home nations also shaped discussion of interaction between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon art and artefacts.35 From the second half of the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxon distinctiveness has been defined primarily against the art of the ‘Celtic’ peoples who, in contrast, have usually been grouped together, and mapped on to the non-English nations of the British Isles. The most prominent debate relates not to museum artefacts, but manuscripts. The Irish or Northumbrian origins of richly illuminated Gospel books such as the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells, and more particularly the origins of their decorative style, which appears also on items of luxury metalwork, became a point of controversy because of the implications for modern national pride.36 The prejudices are clear in E. A. Lowe’s influential palaeographic assessment of manuscripts from the British Isles (1935): since their scripts were virtually indistinguishable, he based his attributions on his belief that the Irish were more inclined to ‘whim and fancy’, while the English were ‘balanced and

33

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E. T. Leeds, Early Anglo-Saxon Art and Architecture: Being the Rhind Lectures, Delivered in Edinburgh, 1935 (Oxford, 1936) 1–12, 114; Hills, Origins of the English, 37. Historians, too, responded to the contemporary political moment: W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946) – the Ford Lectures of 1943. I. Wood, ‘Barbarians, Historians, and the Construction of National Identities’, Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008) 61–81, at 70–2, 78–9; E. Emery and L. Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot, 2003) 19–21; M. Dietler, ‘“Our Ancestors the Gauls”: Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe’, American Anthropologist II.96 (1994) 584–605, at 591–3. On the similarities of ‘Celticism’ to ‘Germanism’, see G. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge, 2007) 22–5. On the long historiography of this debate since the mid-nineteenth century, see C. Nordenfalk, ‘One Hundred and Fifty Years of Varying Views on the Early Insular Gospel Books’, in M. Ryan (ed.), Ireland and Insular Art, A.D. 500–1200 (Dublin, 1987) 1–6; N. Netzer, ‘Style: A History of Uses and Abuses in the Study of Insular Art’, in M. Redknap (ed.), Pattern and Purpose in Insular Art (Oxford, 2001) 169–77. Other origins have also been suggested for these books, including locations in Pictland and East Anglia.

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disciplined’. Following this method based on ‘temperamental differences’, the Book of Durrow was identified as an English work – as in fact, were all accomplished and high-quality manuscripts.37 On the other hand, the desire to present a distinct ‘Celtic’ culture and achievement from an early period encouraged the attribution of the style to the Irish – and ensured its longevity. In 1977, Carl Nordenfalk, although he emphasized the Northumbrian creation of many of these manuscripts, combated arguments against Irish origins for the style itself by claiming that we should not ‘deprive Ireland of the honor of having played an essential part in the creation of what has been considered its greatest national exploit’.38 From an English perspective, the decorative, geometric style of the Gospel books, with its talismanic, magic associations, fed into Orientalizing images of ‘the Visionary Celt’ – a Romantic idea of the Irish, Scottish and Welsh, which was shaped by medieval literature as well as the contemporary politics of Irish revivalism.39 In Celtic regions, scholars and public alike enthusiastically adopted these ideas for themselves, and they were extended from religious manuscripts to encompass a variety of early medieval artefacts. In 1989, the British Museum, the National Museum of Ireland and the National Museums of Scotland collaborated on an exhibition of early medieval Celtic metalwork with the title The Work of Angels: the phrase came from Gerald of Wales’ description (c. 1188) of an illuminated Gospel book seen in Kildare, Ireland, but was here applied, on the basis of style and belief in a unifying Celtic culture, to secular as well as religious objects from all non-Anglo-Saxon areas of the British Isles.40 The catalogue’s prefatory notes from the UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish

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E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1935; 2nd edn. 1972) xii; Nordenfalk, ‘One Hundred and Fifty Years of Varying Views’, 2. C. Nordenfalk, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting (London, 1977) 11. P. Sims-Williams, ‘The Visionary Celt: The Construction of an Ethnic Preconception’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 11 (1986) 71–96, traces the creation of the image to the nineteenth century, and notes its increased popularity in scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s. See also J. Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival, 1830–1930 (London, 1980). Oscar Wilde proposed: ‘Now that the Celtic spirit has become the leaven of our politics, there is no reason why it should not contribute something to our decorative art’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 17 December 1887, quoted in A. Carpenter, Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. 1 (Dublin, 2014) 12). S. Youngs (ed.),‘The Work of Angels’: Masterpieces of Celtic Metalwork, 6th–9th centuries AD (London, 1989); Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica, in J. F. Dimock (ed.), Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 5 (London, 1867), Distinctio. II, ch. 38: ‘liber ille mirandus . . . tam delicatas et subtiles, tam arctas et artitas, tam nodosas et vinculatim colligatas, tamque recentibus adhuc coloribus illustratas notare poteris intricaturas, ut vere haec omnia potius angelica quam humana diligentia jam asseveraveris esse composita’.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

Taoiseach Charles Haughey reflect the political message of collaboration between the nations that the exhibition represented.41 In response to debates over its Irish, British or English origins, scholars have adopted the term ‘Insular’ to refer to the art of the early medieval British Isles, and sometimes more particularly the style distinctive to these Gospel books and associated items.42 It is recognized that one of the benefits of this term is that it avoids ethnic attribution. However, two explicit definitions of the term claimed that the art it described ‘was produced by people who today refer to themselves as English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh, or, at times, following modern political boundaries, as British and Irish’, or, similarly, was created in the islands ‘occupied by those peoples who today call themselves English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh, or sometimes Irish and British’.43 Even with the shift in terminology, the assumption that the producers of early medieval art were somehow the same ‘people(s)’ as the current inhabitants of the regions demonstrates that the connection of early medieval art to national identity remains strong.44 The role of early medieval art in the formation of Celtic identity was explored in the British Museum exhibition Celts: Art and Identity in 2015 (this time, the collaboration was pursued with the National Museums of Scotland only). It is interesting to note that reviewers rejected the exhibition’s narrative that there was no single Celtic identity across millennia, preferring to understand the objects as the expression of a single people. The tongue-incheek, but enthusiastic, endorsement of the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones encapsulates the power of cultural stereotypes, embedded narratives of early medieval history, and the dominance of the ethnic paradigm: ‘If you leave untouched by mystic fire, you have no imagination. Or are a Saxon.’45

41 42

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I. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013) 323. L. Nees, ‘Ethnic and Primitive Paradigms in the Study of Early Medieval Art’, in C. Chazelle and F. Lifshitz (eds.), Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies (Basingstoke, 2007) 41–60, 49: the term originated in the field of palaeography, coined by Ludwig Traube (‘insulare Schrift’) to describe the largely indistinguishable Irish, British and Anglo-Saxon script. For a description of the style, see G. Henderson and I. Henderson, The Art of the Picts: Sculpture and Metalwork in Early Medieval Scotland (London, 2004) 15–29. Netzer, ‘Style: A History of Uses and Abuses in the Study of Insular Art’, 169; R. Cramp, ‘The Insular Tradition: An Overview’, in C. E. Karkov, M. Ryan, and R. T. Farrell (eds.), The Insular Tradition (Albany, NY, 1997) 283–99, at 283. Of course, the historiography of the art of the British Isles is not unique in these respects – the early medieval histories of various ‘ethnic’ groups have been co-opted as the original sources of modern European nations: Geary, The Myth of Nations, esp. 15–40. J. Jones, ‘Jonathan Jones’s Top 10 Art Shows of 2015’, The Guardian (16 December 2015), www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/16/jonathan-joness-top-10-art-shows-of-2015 (accessed 16 December 2015).

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Public visitors, on the other hand, seem to have been more receptive to the exhibition’s narrative, even though many were motivated to visit because of their own ‘Celtic connections’.46 Thus, while not uncomplicated, it is still a successful strategy for museums to present to the public a narrative in which early medieval peoples represent the origins of nations. However, Ian Wood has interpreted the more recent history of early medieval exhibitions as primarily reflecting an image of the origins of Europe. Since 1989, this has grown to encompass Central and Eastern Europe as well.47 A 2007 exhibition in Moscow, which displayed Merovingian artefacts looted from Berlin at the end of the Second World War, was called ‘Europe without Borders’. The early medieval gallery in the British Museum, redesigned and reopened in 2014, bears the title ‘Sutton Hoo and Europe’, now placing the Anglo-Saxons at the centre of European origins. Such presentations may not be entirely novel: European unity had earlier provided an alternative model to Germanist displays of the early medieval past.48 Given Germany’s current dominance within the European Union, these ideas no longer stand in counterpoint to each other. The British Library’s ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms’ exhibition of 2018-19 emphasised continental connections and was viewed by many as a statement of European identity following the 2016 EU referendum.49 As so often in the history of collecting and display, new interpretations not only reflect continuing discoveries, but also the changed meaning of the artefacts with respect to contemporary international relations.

2.

But Is It Art?

During the nineteenth-century formation of early medieval museum collections, ‘barbarian’ objects were usually considered as of purely historical or ethnographic interest, rather than viewed as art in their own right. In 1857 the curator of antiquities at the Louvre, Adrien de Longpérier, dismissed a call for the establishment of a Celtic Museum, because he did not consider these unimpressive objects were to be on a level with the classical, Egyptian and Near Eastern art displayed in the galleries of the 46

47 48 49

M. H. McIntyre, Celtic Connections: A summative report of Celts: Art and Identity at the British Museum (British Museum, unpublished evaluation report, 2016) 3, 7–8, 17, 30. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages, 316–26. Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past, 167. C. Breay and J. Story (eds), Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War (London, 2018). At the time of writing, the UK population had voted to leave the EU; how the changing political context may affect this ‘European’ trend in exhibition programming remains to be seen.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

Louvre.50 Meanwhile in Berlin, the ethnographic, prehistoric and early historic collections were grouped together; they had been excluded from the Altes Museum and were eventually moved from the Neues Museum to the Völkerkundemuseum (Ethnological Museum) in 1886.51 Their status reflected a long-held feeling that early medieval artefacts did not belong beside the more impressive art of the greater civilizations of classical antiquity. A similar attitude prevailed at the British Museum where, in 1866, the newly created department for British and Medieval Antiquities also encompassed Ethnography.52 Although the collection of early medieval artefacts was spurred by the desire to represent ‘national antiquities’ alongside the cultures of other civilizations, even their greatest supporters did not claim that they were on a par with classical Greek sculpture. In his diatribe against the rejection of the Faussett collection, Roach Smith explained: It was rumoured that one of the Trustees, who attended at the meetings (if such they could be called) which repudiated the Saxon antiquities, urged that they were not works of high art! As well might he have complained that our Saxon or Norman ancestors were not Greeks or Romans . . . But viewing antiquities only as works of high art, is exhibiting a low sense of the object the historian has in view in studying them.53

Early medieval antiquities were valued by nineteenth-century collectors primarily for the information they revealed about historical movements and the primitive, direct expression of the nation’s character, rather than valued as cultural achievements in themselves. The widespread association with ethnography, meanwhile, seems to have been more than a marriage of convenience (although at the British Museum it arose immediately from Franks’ own interests), but an application of the idea that contemporary ‘primitive’ societies could profitably be compared with earlier stages in European societies’ development. Various intellectual and artistic movements, however, led to a growing appreciation of the beauty and skill of early medieval art. In particular, explorations of ornamental traditions and the decorative stimulated interest in ‘primitive’ art of all forms. While this viewpoint came from a new direction, it also reinforced the association between the creations of early medieval barbarians and the arts of ‘exotic’ societies – now, on an aesthetic as well as an anthropological level. Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament (1856) placed early medieval motifs – which he termed ‘Celtic 50 51 52 53

Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past, 267. Blauert with Bähr (eds.), Neues Museum: Architecture, Collections, History, 80. Wilson, The British Museum: A History, 140–2. Smith, ‘The Faussett Collection of National Antiquities’, 11–12.

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Ornament’ – within his survey of Ornamental Art, ranging from the art of ‘Savage Tribes’ through ancient cultures, Arabian, Indian and Chinese designs, to designs from medieval and renaissance Europe. The ‘Celtic’ motifs, which in fact encompassed many Anglo-Saxon examples, were drawn almost exclusively from illuminated manuscripts (supplemented with a few examples of stone sculpture).54 The accompanying essay by J. O. Westwood justified the inclusion of these early medieval ornaments through a strong sense of national pride and British distinctiveness in an age of darkness; in doing so, Westwood chimed in with Jones’ own consistent emphasis on ornamental art as a function of instinct. Yet although Jones believed that ornament should be appropriate to form and function, his collection of plates representing disembodied decorative motifs from diverse material contexts somewhat undercut his philosophy.55 Jones’ work was an early contribution to a new tendency to place aesthetic value on the decorative.56 In the second half of the nineteenth century, this attitude began to influence perceptions of early medieval museum objects, as well as illuminated manuscripts, particularly under influence from the Arts and Crafts movement. In particular, the period of ‘Celtic Revival’ (at its height in the years 1880–1930) stimulated more general enthusiasm for so-called ‘Celtic’ motifs, now based on early medieval metalwork, stone sculpture and manuscripts.57 Yet replicas and new artworks inspired by early medieval forms removed them from their original religious contexts: in the 1890s one of Edmond Johnson’s bestselling replicas was a sugar bowl based on the Ardagh Chalice.58 Some years later, one of Johnson’s former employees likewise based his design for the Sam Maguire Cup for the Gaelic Football Championships on the Ardagh

54

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56 57

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J. O. Westwood, ‘Celtic Ornament’, in O. Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856) 2: ‘The genius of the inhabitants of the British Islands has, in all ages, been indicated by productions of a class or style singularly at variance with those of the rest of the world’. See also E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford, 1979; 2nd edn. 1984) 51–5. J. Collis, ‘The Sheffield Origins of Celtic Art’, in C. Gosden, S. Crawford and K. Ulmschneider (eds.), Celtic Art in Europe – Making Connections: Essays in Honour of Vincent Megaw on His 80th birthday (Oxford, 2014) 19–27, at 22–5, discusses Westwood’s definition of the term ‘Celtic Art’. Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 1: ‘It is more than probable that the first result of sending forth to the world this collection will be seriously to increase this dangerous tendency . . .’. On the problem of defining ‘the decorative’, see Gombrich, The Sense of Order, x, 17–19. Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past, esp. 95–101, 149–55; I. Bradley, Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams (Edinburgh, 1999) 119–24. Bradley, Celtic Christianity, 139.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

Figure 14.1 Sam Maguire Cup, Ireland. Made by Matthew J. Staunton in Dublin in 1928. Silver. GAA Museum, Croke Park. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

Chalice (Figure 14.1).59 By transferring pattern and style to domestic contexts and ignoring their religious meanings and functions, such celebrations of Celtic art encouraged the notion that it was purely ornamental. Museums’ and collectors’ interests in the aesthetic value of early medieval objects began to develop but, similarly, it frequently resulted in artefacts being divorced from their archaeological and historical contexts. In museums, early medieval artefacts might be arranged in typological or stylistic sequence, rather than according to burial assemblages or in relation to their original functions.60 The art market certainly accelerated the dispersal of collections and displacement of objects; North American collectors were more likely than their European counterparts to view their early medieval objects primarily in terms of aesthetics, perhaps because they were less invested in associated national histories, but also because they lacked documentation or any further information about them.61 For the Arts and Crafts movement, one aspect of historical context was particularly relevant. Its members’ interest in the work of artisans rather than the elite, and of handicrafts rather than industrial production, encouraged a valorization of these qualities in early medieval art.62 Similar antiindustrial sentiments were expressed by Baldwin Brown in his major 59

60 61 62

F. O’Toole, ‘Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks, 1928 – the Sam Maguire Cup, by Hopkins & Hopkins’, The Irish Times (7 February 2015), www.irishtimes.com/culture/modern-ireland-in100-artworks-1928-the-sam-maguire-cup-by-hopkins-hopkins-1.2094310 (accessed 30 March 2016). The Cup is now in the GAA Museum, Croke Park, Dublin. Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, 64–88. Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past, vii. Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past, 101, 152.

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survey of The Arts in Early England (1903–37). He invoked William Morris to bolster his idea that the beauty of early medieval art was largely accidental, caused by the individuality of the craftsman: ‘It was made for a man by a man and not by a machine for a unit of population’.63 Baldwin Brown was also clearly influenced by continental art history in his interpretations. He approvingly cited Josef Strzygowski, and elaborated on the dichotomy between classical art, which took inspiration from nature, and barbarian art, which involved the decoration of surfaces with conventionalized abstract forms.64 In writing this, Baldwin Brown responded to analytical art-historical approaches which were emerging in this period. They also identified the style of early medieval art from the British Isles as primarily decorative, and pinned this classification onto the historical model of barbarians opposed to Romans.65 The dominant approach equated this dichotomy with two distinct artistic tendencies: the classicizing, naturalistic and figural style of Rome, and the ornamental, abstract and geometric styles of the barbarians, whether Germanic or Celtic.66 Because of the prevalence of this basic distinction, the dichotomy between barbarians and Romans is particularly difficult to reject in art history. In the mid-twentieth century this contrast enjoyed consensus, and was referred to off-hand in the first Guide to Anglo-Saxon Antiquities published by the British Museum in 1923: ‘Teutonic art stands in vivid contrast to the classical’.67 The broad significance of the contrast was described most powerfully by Ernst Kitzinger, a German Jewish refugee to London, in his 1940 Early Medieval Art in the British Museum – a work which has never gone out of print. Kitzinger, who had just completed his doctoral thesis in Munich when he came to London in 1935, brought a German art-historical perspective to the British Museum for the first time, and here opened it up for an English-speaking audience.68 In this work, commissioned as an art-historical guidebook to

63

64 65

66

67 68

G. B. Brown, The Arts in Early England, vol. 1: The Life of Saxon England in its Relation to the Arts (1903) 17–19. Ibid., 38–9. On the distinct, but related, problems of this dichotomy in archaeology, see P. von Rummel, ‘The Fading Power of Images: Romans, Barbarians, and the Uses of a Dichotomy in Early Medieval Archaeology’, in W. Pohl and G. Heydemann (eds.), Post-Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West (Turnhout, 2013) 365–406. This contrast between Roman and barbarian may usefully be compared with the Semitic/ Hellenic dichotomy discussed in Chapter 11 (pp. 299–300). Smith, The British Museum: Guide to Anglo-Saxon Antiquities, 10. J. Mitchell, ‘Ernst Kitzinger, 27 December 1912 – 22 January 2003’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 151 (2007) 345–50.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

the Museum’s collection, Kitzinger claimed that ‘Northern art was opposed to Mediterranean art in almost every respect’.69 The barbarian style was envisaged as less sophisticated, and derived from the inherent preferences of the ‘new peoples’, who lacked the cultural development of Rome. The classical–barbarian dichotomy has been undercut in recent decades, as historians and archaeologists have increasingly presented Late Antiquity as the ‘Transformation of the Roman World’, involving a process of reorganization and interaction between ‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians’ who were increasingly difficult to distinguish. The British Museum participated in the major European Science Foundation project of this name, leading a programme of associated exhibitions.70 Yet the dichotomy remains especially tenacious as a framework for understanding the art of the early medieval British Isles. One reason for this tenacity is that the study of Britain has only recently been subject to historical revisions similar to those of the rest of the Roman Empire, and thus for many the old narrative of the fall of Rome and the invasion of a barbarian people still retains its power.71 In Britain, the effects of the withdrawal of Roman forces and authority in the very early fifth century were more significant and dramatic than in any continental region, not least on the material culture of the island. Groups of migrants from the continent originated in regions outside the empire – although they may be associated with material culture showing Roman influence. Ireland, moreover, had never been part of the empire. A certain distinction between Roman and non-Roman – ‘barbarian’ – cultures therefore retains explanatory power.72 Thomas Kendrick, while Keeper of British and Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum, used this framework to explain the art of early medieval Britain.73 In his two volumes on Anglo-Saxon art (published in

69

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E. Kitzinger, Early Medieval Art in the British Museum (London, 1940) 36; Wilson, The British Museum: A History, 237. L. Webster and M. Brown (eds.), The Transformation of the Roman World, AD 400–900 (London, 1997). See I. Wood, ‘Report: The European Science Foundation’s Programme on the Transformation of the Roman World and Emergence of Early Medieval Europe’, Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997) 217–27. G. Halsall, ‘Movers and Shakers: The Barbarians and the Fall of Rome’, Early Medieval Europe 8 (1999) 131–45, esp. 140–2, 144–5; S. Oosthuizen, The Emergence of the English (Leeds, 2019). For a full critical discussion of recent archaeological approaches and a rejection of this use of material culture, see D. J. M. Harland, ‘Deconstructing Anglo-Saxon Archaeology: A Critical Enquiry into the Study of Ethnicity in Lowland Britain in Late Antiquity (c. 350–600)’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2017). Kendrick joined the department of British and Medieval Antiquities in 1922; he became Director of the Museum in 1950 until his retirement in 1958: R. Bruce-Mitford, ‘Thomas Downing Kendrick, 1895–1979’, in M. Lapidge (ed.), Interpreters of Early Medieval Britain (Oxford, 2002) 399–424, at 399.

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1938 and 1949 respectively), Kendrick presented his central theme of ‘a protracted series of conflicts between the mutually irreconcilable principles of the barbaric and the classical aesthetic systems’.74 This approach enabled Kendrick, writing in an anti-Germanist atmosphere, to downplay overtly racial arguments in favour of continuity between Celtic and Germanic barbarians, attributing highly skilled techniques and more aesthetically pleasing designs to British origins.75 Kendrick’s belief in the superiority of classical art emerges throughout his account of the ongoing struggles between ‘the barbaric mood’ which led to ‘back-slidings’ into the native tradition, and the ‘serene and serious Romanesque discipline’ of the Church.76 Kendrick’s work provided the first art-historical synthesis of early medieval art from Britain, and his influences in this respect seem clear: he employed Kitzinger, who assisted him with his index of AngloSaxon sculpture, and commissioned him to write Early Medieval Art; Kendrick also collaborated with the newly established Courtauld Institute and the refugee Warburg Institute.77 His two volumes acted as the standard introduction and reference to Anglo-Saxon art for many years, although subsequent discoveries (not least those from Sutton Hoo) significantly changed the picture and disproved some of Kendrick’s theories.78 For this reason, his overarching narrative, more than specific detail, is still influential and his categories – particularly his characterization of barbarian and classical traditions – are still used. Leslie Webster, Kendrick’s recent successor as Keeper at the British Museum, began her Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History by arguing that the two styles were not irreconcilable as he claimed, but that we should think in terms of ‘assimilation, not opposition’.79 Although the relationship of the two traditions may be disputed, the distinctiveness of Anglo-Saxon art continues to be attributed to its position as the boundary between the indigenous culture of the barbaric northerners and the civilization and heritage of Rome. 74

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T. D. Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art to AD 900 (London, 1938) 1; T. D. Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art (London, 1949). Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art, 64, 71–3; S. Dooley-Fairchild, ‘Material Belief: A Critical History of Archaeological Approaches to Religious Change in Anglo-Saxon England’ (PhD thesis, Durham University, 2012) 188. Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art, 140, 159. Wilson, The British Museum: A History, 246; Bruce-Mitford, ‘Thomas Downing Kendrick’, 409. R. N. Bailey, ‘Anglo-Saxon Art: Some Forms, Orderings and Their Meanings’, in S. Crawford, H. Hamerow and L. Webster (eds.), Form and Order in the Anglo-Saxon World, AD 600–1100 (Oxford, 2009) 18–30, at 18; N. Netzer, ‘Framing the Book of Durrow Inside/Outside the Anglo-Saxon World’, in Crawford et al. (eds.), Form and Order in the Anglo-Saxon World, 65–78, at 68. L. Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History (London, 2012) 40.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

Although scholars now usually avoid placing these styles in an obvious hierarchy, for those trained in this way of thinking, the preference for naturalistic, figural painting and sculpture may often still exert its influence.80 Yet the identification of distinct styles with Romans and barbarians is troubled not only by recent deconstructions of the latter ‘ethnic’ categories, but also by questioning of the basic concepts which distinguish classicizing and barbarian art. Richard Bailey has argued that what we consider ‘classical’ or ‘barbarian’ owes more to prejudices favouring particular styles of naturalistic painting than to the early medieval evidence. His brief study highlighted some examples of the varied styles and modes of representation that Anglo-Saxons would have encountered in Rome – and thus would have experienced as ‘classical’ – evidence which calls into question long-held beliefs about the ‘barbarian’ aspects of works such as the frontal, stylized, full-page miniatures of King David in the Durham Cassiodorus, an eighth-century Northumbrian manuscript.81 Likewise, the characterization of ‘barbarian’ art has come under criticism. Lawrence Nees, writing as recently as 2007, called for the replacement of the ‘ethnic paradigm’ in early medieval art history, which he called a ‘blunt scholarly tool’ in its association of barbarian art with primitive, tribal culture.82 Yet, consciously or unconsciously, use of the ethnic paradigm is also ideological – not only in the association of early medieval artefacts or collections with modern nations, but also in the application of a broad barbarian–classical dichotomy.83 Feminist and post-colonial thinkers have demonstrated the assumptions underlying the relegation of ornament and the decorative to a status lower than ‘art’, devoid of meaning, through its codification as feminine, childish, primitive, and exotic.84 On the one hand, feminist art historians have emphasized the vitality of the ornamental, that its functionless and sensual qualities might be valued rather than despised, and that their dismissal is

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84

See L. Nees, ‘Recent Trends in Dating Works of Insular Art’, in C. Hourihane (ed.), Insular and Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period (Princeton, 2011) 14–30, for historiography of the dichotomy. Bailey, ‘Anglo-Saxon Art’. Bailey here reiterated a point made in his England’s Earliest Sculptors (Toronto, 1996) 16–17, since it had not been confronted by the rest of the field. Nees, ‘Ethnic and Primitive Paradigms’, 50. This theme is echoed in several of the chapters in this volume; see especially Nadia Ali’s contribution on early Islamic art as ‘purely Arab’ in Chapter 13, pp. 385 and 390. See Gombrich’s discussion of Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime (1908), in which he quotes an article of 1898 by Loos: ‘The Red Indian says: That woman is beautiful because she wears golden rings in her nose and in her ears. The civilized person says: this woman is beautiful because she has no rings in her nose and in her ears’ (Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 59–61).

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linked to their association with the feminine. A more radical viewpoint, however, suggests that the characterization of ornament as irrational and meaningless serves to undermine the feminine with which it is associated; the category itself should be questioned, not merely the value attributed to it.85 From this perspective, alternative forms of artistic expression have been classed as decorative (meaningless) precisely because they are associated with (and practised by) non-hegemonic groups. The application of this idea to non-Western art is apparent;86 and, by extension, to the nonRoman styles of early medieval peoples. These deconstructions have significant implications for a field which still frequently defines its interest as the interface between barbarian and classical impulses.87 If neither this dichotomy of styles, nor the dichotomy between barbarian and Roman identities can be maintained, then surely we need a different approach to early medieval art.

3.

Barbarism and Religion?

The underlying framework of barbarian abstraction and Roman naturalism which governs the study of early medieval – and especially Anglo-Saxon and British – art has had significant effects for the understanding of religion through visual culture. Firstly, ethnic distinctions have dominated the field to the detriment of other possible approaches to early medieval material culture – such as a focus on religion. Although scholars have intermittently approached the topic of religion and conversion in the early Anglo-Saxon period, such approaches have never been dominant.88 Because archaeological excavations began to be pursued and artefacts collected in the nineteenth century, they were first interpreted and categorized according to contemporary intellectual preoccupations. Thus nationalist and racial concerns were embedded into the foundations of research in this field. Other aspects of research into the Anglo-Saxon period have longer disciplinary histories, which arose from other concerns. The study of Old English literature, for instance, owes much to the efforts of Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew 85 86

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L. Negrin, ‘Ornament and the Feminine’, Feminist Theory 7 (2006) 219–35. S. Kleinert, ‘Deconstructing “The Decorative”: The Impact of Euro-American Artistic Traditions on the Reception of Aboriginal Art and Craft’, in N. Iannou (ed.), Craft in Society: An Anthology of Perspectives (South Fremantle, 1992) 115–30. E.g. R. Deshman, The Benedictional of St Æthelwold (Princeton, 1995) 216, and above. Dooley-Fairchild, ‘Material Belief’.

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Parker in collecting and studying the manuscripts which now form the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; his interests emerged in relation to the confessional disputes of the Reformation.89 In the seventeenth century, legal and constitutional history came to dominate, again based on documentary and literary rather than material evidence.90 We may identify common threads throughout in a perception of the Anglo-Saxon age as a period of origins, but the intellectual frameworks which governed its significance differed over the centuries. The relatively recent genesis of those disciplines which trace their development from antiquarianism (particularly early medieval archaeology and art history) – as well as the continuing material discoveries in the field – mean that established categories and narratives are only now beginning to be approached critically.91 The antiquarian concentration on ethnic/national identity, and on early medieval art as a reflection of these identities as material facts, has until recently obscured other lenses through which we might wish to view early medieval material and visual culture. Secondly, the effect of this has been to embed an implicit religious narrative based on anachronistic assumptions into the categories used to analyse early medieval art. Naturalistic art styles and particularly figural art – in the classical model – have frequently been associated with the extension of Christianity throughout the medieval world. In particular, they have been associated with the Roman Church (in Western Europe; the story of Byzantine art history is of course different, as explored elsewhere in this volume). Thus the Church takes the place of the Empire in the dichotomy of Roman and barbarian. This narrative was frequently accepted because many interpreters unquestionably accepted that Christian conversion in the Early Middle Ages extended the trappings of civilization to Northern Europe – not only literacy, but also art. Such an approach is exemplified in, and was propagated by, Thomas Kendrick’s Anglo-Saxon Art to AD 900 and Late Saxon and Viking Art. In the embedded narrative, classical art was introduced into Anglo-Saxon England with the first Roman missionaries under Augustine in 597. Kendrick narrated its progress in his two volumes on Anglo-Saxon art, 89

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For the broader cultural context, see J. Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2. 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002). Hills, Origins of the English, 31–5. E.g. Dooley-Fairchild, ‘Material Belief’; J. Hawkes, ‘W. G. Collingwood and Anglo-Saxon Sculpture: Art History or Archaeology?’, in R. Moss (ed.), Making and Meaning in Insular Art (Dublin, 2007) 259–75; N. L. Wicker, ‘Art History and Archaeology: Common Ground for the New Millennium’, Medieval Archaeology 43 (1999) 161–71.

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showing how the Church, from its centre at Rome, repeatedly encouraged the Anglo-Saxons away from their instinctive barbarian aesthetic towards the classical style. He stated that there was little art to discuss before the Church began to build in England – perhaps a more convincing statement at the time, since his book was published the year before the excavation of Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo. After the conversion, however, Kendrick saw an influx of Roman art as part of the ‘Golden Age’ of the English Church, which subsequent scholars developed in the concept of the ‘Northumbrian Renaissance’.92 Anglo-Saxon classicizing art earned the English Church, in Kendrick’s eyes, the status of ‘principal custodian of that immense and potent tradition’.93 It was no accident that the classical style was associated with Christianity, however. Not only was the Church’s classical tradition more sophisticated, but it was also suited for religious purposes where barbarian art was not. The characterization of barbarian art as abstract and ornamental presented it as devoid of meaning and therefore incapable of conveying mythologies and theological or doctrinal concepts. In his discussion of standing crosses, Kendrick explained that: Their very purpose as significant monuments of Christianity demanded some measure of resistance to the in-born aesthetic tendencies of the northerner whose artistic traditions were in concept and practice totally incapable of providing a medium for such public declarations of the Faith as naturalistic figure-carving and ornament could provide.94

The final triumph of the classical tradition in England, and the accompanying rejection of the decorative style, stemmed from just these qualities. While in Kendrick’s view the dominance of the superior style may have seemed inevitable, ultimately he attributed its success to its connection with the Church.95 The unfolding of Kendrick’s perceived struggle between 92

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C. Neuman de Vegvar, The Northumbrian Renaissance: A Study in the Transmission of Style (London and Toronto, 1987); J. Hawkes and S. Mills (eds.), Northumbria’s Golden Age (Stroud, 1999). Kendrick used this word himself, extolling ‘the revolution caused by the intense and undisguised Italian taste of the leading ecclesiastics of the Roman Church in England . . . that we should speak of a “renaissance” when confronted by this sudden return of humanistic art is no more than the event deserves’: Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art, 118. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 128. Cf. Kitzinger, Early Medieval Art in the British Museum, 40: ‘Barbaric art was abstract to a degree that very nearly precluded its use by the Roman Church. It was inarticulate. It was not suitable as an instrument of instruction or propaganda, being incapable of conveying to the spectator a definite message. As an illustration of historical matter this style was entirely inadequate. This is undoubtedly one of the principal reasons for the much more complete submission to the Mediterranean models which Charlemagne initiated.’ Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art, 2.

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classical and barbarian aesthetics was inextricably bound up with the religious history of the British Isles. The continuing dominance of this narrative may be seen in art historians’ concentration on the Christian period in England, to the neglect of fifth- and sixth-century artefacts. In a self-proclaimed update to Kendrick’s work, David Wilson, as Director of the British Museum, in 1984 published his overview of Anglo-Saxon art; he called it Anglo-Saxon Art from the Seventh Century to the Norman Conquest and explicitly set out to describe the arts of the Christian period only. The arts of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, represented exclusively by the contents of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, were treated as no more than a precursor to Christian art. The Museum’s 1991 Making of England exhibition took a similar approach in presenting the year 600 as the date of commencement.96 Although the exhibition clearly made the equation between early medieval ethnicity and modern national identity, it took as its date of commencement not the migrations of the fifth century, but the year 600 – the important event was the arrival of the missionary St Augustine in 597, rather than the traditional arrival of Anglo-Saxon founder ancestors a hundred and fifty years earlier.97 Several other European exhibitions have recently followed a similar line. The Dutch exhibition of 1995, ‘Willibrord and the beginning of the Netherlands’ (Willibrord en het begin van Nederland), focused on the mission to Frisia, while the 2008 Venetian exhibition on ‘Rome and the Barbarians’ described Christianity as ‘Europe’s new mortar’.98 In such presentations, it appears that national origins lie not only in the emergence of early medieval peoples, but also in the moment of conversion to Christianity. Moreover, when conversion is presented as the cohesive moment of origin, Christianity becomes enshrined as essential to European culture. For the British Isles, however, this narrative was complicated by the presence of different Christian traditions in the Early Middle Ages. While the Roman Church in England has been associated with classical style and figural images, allegedly opposed decorative impulses have been equated with the Irish Church, the art of which is shown to depend upon both Germanic and Celtic ‘barbarian’ traditions.99 However, the stark 96 97 98 99

Webster and Backhouse (eds.), The Making of England. Ibid. N. James, ‘(Rome + Barbarians) = Europe?’, Antiquity 82 (2008) 493–6, at 494. J. Hines, ‘Religion: The Limits of Knowledge’, in J. Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 1997) 375–401, at 391.

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distinction between two churches emerged from a long historiographical development that owed nothing to the art of the period. The division, which derives primarily from an overemphasis on the two Churches’ confrontation at the Synod of Whitby, has been used as historical support in Protestant–Catholic disputes since the Reformation.100 Sixteenthcentury reformers, in particular Archbishop Parker, looked to the AngloSaxon Church and its vernacular translations for precedents and to argue for Anglican independence. However, the early British and Irish Churches also offered the opportunity to make claims to past independence from Rome in more confrontational manner. These Churches – increasingly defined as one ‘Celtic’ Church – proved particularly useful to Protestant reformers in Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who recast Protestantism as a revival of the native Church, thus countering Catholic presentations of a foreign imposition.101 Notably, Archbishop Ussher of Armagh in 1631 published An answer to a challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland. Wherein, the judgment of antiquity in the points questioned is truly delivered, and the novelty of the now Romish doctrine plainly discovered. To which is added A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and British, in which he argued that the ancient religion of the Irish, Scottish and Welsh was one and the same.102 The concept of a common Celtic Church gained in favour throughout the nineteenth century, as it chimed with the Romantic notion of the ‘Visionary Celt’.103 To the features of independence and monasticism already identified as characteristic of the Celtic Church were added an emphasis on spirituality and an appreciation of nature.104 While recognition of the Celtic Church grew during the twentieth century, interest was always as much popular as scholarly.105 Historians of the period now dispute 100

101 102

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See A. Arceo, ‘Rethinking the Synod of Whitby and Northumbrian Monastic Sites’, Haskins Society Journal 20 (2008) 19–30. Bradley, Celtic Christianity, 93–103. J. Ussher, An answer to a challenge made by a Jesuite in Ireland. Wherein, the judgment of antiquity in the points questioned is truly delivered, and the novelty of the now Romish doctrine plainly discovered. To which is added A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and British (London, 1631). Sims-Williams, ‘The Visionary Celt’. Emerging as the background to art history in Brown, The Life of Saxon England in its Relation to the Arts, 149: ‘side by side with the normal Christianity of the Romanized West, a Christianity of Celtic origin and of a more emotional type, with a correspondingly loose Church organization in which the bishop had a more restricted office and a totally different social position’. A connected thread, also with a strong popular component, is the interest in Celtic paganism: e.g. M. Green, Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers (London, 1995).

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whether the term ‘Celtic Church’ is of any use at all;106 Wendy Davies actually referred to it as ‘harmful’, in a piece which revealed her exasperation at its continuing invocation despite lack of supporting evidence.107 The central criticism is that it implies similarity and uniformity where there was none, and moreover there was no centrally administered structure or identity. Importantly, art had little part to play in the formulation of this concept. Excluding manuscripts, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic art were rarely identified as such before the later nineteenth century. Even then, with the definition of a distinct ‘Celtic’ style, art played a peripheral role in perceptions of the early medieval Church.108 Only in the twentieth century were ideas of a specific Celtic art – developed in a racial, culture history framework and envisaged as purely decorative – matched to notions of a spiritual, natureoriented Celtic Church, in conflict with Rome. The equation of non-figural art with this Celtic Church then reinforces Protestant, iconophobic views of a spiritual and pure early British (or Irish) Christianity. The idea of nonrepresentational art as characteristic of Celtic Christianity holds significant weight in modern historiography, and it has recently been proposed that this characteristic was a result of a distinct Celtic theology.109 While this may be the case, it is difficult to assess the argument independently of historic uses of the Celtic Church in Catholic–Protestant disputes. Furthermore, a religious explanation linked to the austerity of the ‘Celtic Church’ does not appear to be sufficient in explaining the dominance of decorative

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J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005) 5; K. Hughes, ‘The Celtic Church: Is This a Valid Concept?’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981) 1–20; repr. in K. Hughes, Church and Society in Ireland, AD 400–1200, ed. D. N. Dumville (London, 1987) no. xviii. W. Davies, ‘The Myth of the Celtic Church’, in N. Edwards and A. Lane (eds.), The Early Church in Wales and the West (Oxford, 1992) 12–21, at 12. On the developing definition of ‘Celtic Art’, in which Kemble and Franks played an early but crucial role, see Collis, ‘The Sheffield Origins of Celtic Art’. On the independent development of the concept of a ‘Celtic Church’, see Davies, ‘The Myth of the Celtic Church’, 13. M. W. Herren and S. A. Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity: Britain and Ireland from the Fifth to the Tenth Century (Woodbridge, 2002; paperback edn. 2012) have argued that the decorative and symbolic art of the early Celtic Church resulted from its ‘Pelagian’ theology, which – they suggested – involved strictures against images (18). Their definition of this ‘common Celtic Church’ (of the mid-fifth to early seventh centuries) describes it as a ‘low Church’, in which the sacraments played a less significant role than elsewhere, with an ambivalence about the Eucharist in particular, and in which liturgy, buildings and artefacts were ‘modest’ and lacked ‘pomp and ceremony’: S. A. Brown and M. W. Herren, ‘NeoPelagianism, Early Insular Religious Art, and the Image of Christ’, in Redknap (ed.), Pattern and Purpose in Insular Art, 61–71, at 61. On the Eucharist, Herren and Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity, 126–7.

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designs in early medieval Britain, since the art of the pre-Christian AngloSaxons reveals a similar interest in ornament rather than figural representation. Nor, for that matter, does an ethnic explanation, since both Celtic and Anglo-Saxon styles preserve this quality (and actually frequently appear in combination). This brings us to the third point: commencing discussion around the year 600 and focusing on Christian art relegates objects of the pagan period to a lower status. This periodization reflects a feeling that the metalwork found in fifth- and sixth-century graves does not constitute art but is rather, for instance, ‘secular crafts’ produced by ‘decorative artisans’.110 While materials recovered from burials may be relatively plentiful, their embellishment is not (usually) figural, they are (primarily) functional objects, and their techniques belong to the so-called ‘minor arts’. Because of these ‘barbarian’ characteristics, art historians have approached these objects almost exclusively in terms of technique and style. A considerable proportion of all scholarship on pagan-period metalwork, for example, focuses on the classification, development and chronological relationship of styles of animal ornament (often following Bernhard Salin’s 1904 terminology of Style I and Style II; Kendrick preferred the terms ‘Helmet Style’ and ‘Ribbon Style’), rather than exploring the meanings of these decorative approaches in varied contexts and applications.111 It is only once the classicizing influence of Rome is felt that studies of iconography and aesthetics proliferate. Thus the Roman Church mission of 597 appears, judging from modern art-historical research, to have brought both art and religion to England. Pagan religion has never become a prominent field of investigation for art historians. For instance, in the twenty-five years since the International Conferences on Insular Art began, studies of Christian iconography have multiplied, but it is hard to locate references to non-Christian belief in the pages of its proceedings. In contrast, cautious but varied archaeological approaches to paganism have investigated non-Christian Anglo-Saxon beliefs through the analysis of objects, monuments and sites dating from the fifth to eighth centuries. David Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Paganism, which relies solely on archaeological information and its relation to religious

110 111

Neuman de Vegvar, The Northumbrian Renaissance, 60, 68. E.g. Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art, 49–67; B. Salin, Die altgermanische Thierornamentik (Stockholm, 1904); Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art, 74–85. Cf. J. Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives: The Visual Evidence’, in Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century, 311–38, at 317–18.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

practice, remains a solid point of reference; but in his book on Anglo-Saxon Art, Wilson made only cursory reference to paganism and suggested that art did not provide useful information in this respect.112 Once the idea that furnished burials were necessarily pagan was demolished, the topic of nonChristian belief became less popular, but in recent decades new approaches to this evidence have proved fruitful. Martin Carver recently lamented the dominance of the Church subsequent to conversion – ‘the dark curtain of Christianity’ – because it put an end to ‘original thought about the supernatural’ for the next millennium.113 Among archaeologists such as Carver, this attitude is perhaps understandable: from the period of Christianization onwards, their typical materials (furnished burials in particular) become scarcer and less suggestive in terms of religious belief. In contrast, materials which appeal to art-historical approaches to religion – displaying figural iconography and links to liturgical and scriptural texts – are much richer from the Christian period. Indeed, there has been a ‘quiet revolution’ in the study of Anglo-Saxon and Insular Christian art in recent years, as art historians interpret these works as ‘visual exegesis’.114 Studies of individual artworks, such as those by Carol Neuman de Vegvar, Éamonn Ó Carragáin and Jennifer O’Reilly, reveal the sophisticated messages that Christian images contained, and the particular qualities that enabled them to convey religious meaning and elicit spiritual experience. These iconographic approaches rely on the use of religious and contemporary literature; for this reason, similar attempts have not been made for non-Christian works of art. However, a few examples demonstrate that artworks from the preChristian or conversion period can enlighten us about beliefs current at that time in Britain. George Speake led the way in his work on Anglo-Saxon Animal Art (1980), which combined archaeological and art-historical approaches.115 The archaeologist Tania Dickinson has revealed the possibilities in understanding certain motifs, particularly zoomorphic images, in

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D. M. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Paganism (London, 1992); D. M. Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art: From the Seventh Century to the Norman Conquest (London, 1984) 13, 27. M. Carver, ‘Agency, Intellect and the Archaeological Agenda’, in M. Carver, A. Sanmark and S. Semple (eds.), Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited (Oxford, 2010) 1–20, at 16; see this collection as a whole for the ‘cutting edge’ of this field of research. C. Neuman de Vegvar, ‘Remembering Jerusalem: Architecture and Meaning in Insular Canon Table Arcades’, in R. Moss (ed.), Making and Meaning in Insular Art (Dublin, 2007) 242–56, at 242. G. Speake, Anglo-Saxon Animal Art and Its Germanic Background (Oxford, 1980).

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Figure 14.2 Shield from the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship burial (fittings original, reconstructed). England. 91.4 cm diameter. Early 7th century AD. British Museum, BM 1939,1010.94, AN35177001. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

symbolic ways.116 The birds of prey and pike-like fishes presented on the front of shields may now be seen as predatory beasts of battle, with mythological links to Woden; their apotropaic status as symbols of protection enhanced the shield’s function (Figure 14.2). Birds decorating drinking horns and buckles, however, might relate more to the aristocratic pastimes of the Germanic warrior, and thus symbols of status.117 Art historians have demonstrated how we can move beyond linking iconographic representation to supposedly stable symbolic meanings. Jane Hawkes contributed a chapter entitled ‘Symbolic Lives’ to the European Science Foundation volume on the Anglo-Saxons. Under this title, Hawkes was able to avoid the rigidity of the usual dichotomy between Christian and pagan and, through a focus on animal imagery and interlace, reveal the role of art in early Anglo-Saxon belief, practice and protection. She proposed, for instance, the prominence of interlacing designs as images to be disentangled by the viewer, but noted the transition from pagan-period zoomorphs (Figure 14.3) to a Christian form with hidden crosses.118 Such attempts remain rare, however, and meet resistance. In the same volume, John Hines argued that in the absence of text we cannot know about religion.119 116

117 118 119

T. Dickinson, ‘Symbols of Protection: The Significance of Animal-Ornamented Shields in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, Medieval Archaeology 49 (2005) 109–63. Ibid., 161; Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives’, 320–2. Hawkes, ‘Symbolic Lives’, 328–33. Hines, ‘Religion: The Limits of Knowledge’, 377, 381. Of course, this is an issue faced by scholars of many periods and religions, especially for prehistoric art: see P. Taylor (ed.), Iconography Without Texts (London, 2008).

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

Figure 14.3 Great buckle from the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship burial. England. 13.2 cm length, 5.6 cm maximum width, 412.7 grams. Gold with niello inlay. Early 7th century AD. British Museum, BM 1939,1010.1, AN1258506001. Photograph: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum. A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the colour version, refer to the plate section.

The reluctance to consider early objects as ‘religious’ in any sense suggests that many art historians are also unwilling to entertain the converse, that art may be able to tell scholars about the religion of the period, especially where texts are lacking. Certainly, we cannot make the same kind of analyses as have been completed so successfully for Christian works of art. But, after all, it is not the same kind of art that we are dealing with – and, given the many differences, probably not the same kind of religion. These issues are of relevance not merely to the early Anglo-Saxon period, but to any expressions of pagan or unorthodox belief. Viking Age stone sculpture is another body of material for which the association of barbaric art with abstraction, and Christian art with naturalism, has on occasion acted to prevent religious readings. Kendrick’s detailed discussion of the ninth- and tenth-century sculpture from northern England provides a pertinent example. Kendrick’s interpretation of Viking Age stone sculpture, which built on the work of W. G. Collingwood, was moulded by his key theme of the conflict between barbarian and classical art, but it was also dominated by his understanding of religious and national history. Because many of the monuments of the late ninth and tenth centuries did not display the same styles as Scandinavian art, and there was no prior tradition of stone relief carving in Scandinavia, Kendrick attributed the stone sculpture throughout this period to Anglo-Saxon artists. The distribution of such sculptures in areas dominated by Scandinavian settlers he gave a social explanation – they were, in fact, monuments created by brave ecclesiastics and representative of ‘a victory of Christendom’ over the pagan settlers.120 Once again, the inclination was to associate 120

Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art, 56.

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works of art – even when considered to be of very low standard – with Christianity and the Church. Subsequent work has in fact suggested the contrary; qualitative and quantitative differences in sculpture from the ninth century onwards may be explained by a shift from monastic production and display to the influence of lay patronage.121 Moreover, Kendrick’s pride in the English Church led him to minimize the importance of foreign influence, despite seeing the sculpture of this period as purely barbaric in style. The ‘reversion’ to barbarian style resulted from a combination of the state of chaos and poverty that resulted from the viking conquests which, in stripping away all civilized discipline, allowed Anglo-Saxon sculptors to revert to their ‘deepseated and almost ineradicable aesthetic instinct’ for the Hiberno-Saxon (i.e. Insular) style, and a concession to the taste of Scandinavian settlers.122 The minimal foreign impact was not directly stylistic, but made itself felt in its barbarian quality: ‘wild’, ‘rugged’, ‘unruly’, ‘unrestful’, ‘violent’, ‘tempestuous’ – but at the same time ‘heavy’, ‘clumsy’ and ‘even’.123 With his stress on continuity, and a degree of English pride, Kendrick proclaimed that at least the Anglo-Saxon craftsmen managed to work within their own tradition and not succumb to the even more barbaric Scandinavian styles.124 Kendrick’s designation of such northern sculpture as ‘violently barbaric’, but ultimately Anglo-Saxon and Christian, determined his interpretation of the monuments’ decoration and iconography.125 Although the most popular motifs constitute decorative interlace and vine-scrolls, a number of stones bear figural imagery with Christian, pagan and secular themes, frequently in combination. The most prominent example is the Gosforth Cross, which stands in a churchyard in Cumbria, and displays a Crucifixion scene alongside monsters and warriors, which are usually interpreted as episodes from Ragnarök, the final battle and destruction of the gods in Norse mythology (Figures 14.4 and 14.5). It is difficult to square such artworks – which clearly challenge Kendrick’s belief that barbarian art was necessarily decorative and not figural – with his assertion that they were monuments of Christianity raised in defiance of paganism.

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R. N. Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture in Northern England (London, 1980) 82–4. Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art, 57. Ibid., 88, 93, 96–7. Ibid., 96–7: ‘Let us count it to their credit that the imported designs were swept quickly into the background, and that the Viking taste was allowed to do little more than occasionally introduce a note of unrestful dishevelment that by disturbing the smoother and more orderly English designs, has left us an easily recognizable period-style most appropriate to a turbulent age.’ Ibid., 78.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

Figure 14.4 Gosforth Cross, Cumbria, 10th century. Photograph © Corpus of AngloSaxon Stone Sculpture, photographer T. Middlemass

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Figure 14.5 Gosforth Cross, Cumbria, 10th century. Drawing by W. G. Collingwood, from his Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age (London, 1927) p. 156, fig. 184.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

Indeed, Kendrick used his historical narrative of the resilient northern Church to deny the monuments any pagan significance. Suggestions that the pagan myths were used as parallels for Christian doctrine had been popular since the mid-nineteenth century,126 but Kendrick refused them credence, because this seems to me to suggest a weakness that the Church Militant of this heroic age would have repudiated; for the appeasement of the heathen was a policy that the pugnacious ecclesiastics of the Dark Ages never considered. The crosses are witnesses to indomitable Christian courage and are themselves proof to the contrary.127

Thus, Kendrick rejected the interpretations of his antiquarian predecessors George Stephens, W. S. Calverley, and W. G. Collingwood, who were fascinated by the mythological images on sculpture such as the Gosforth Cross and their possible Christian meanings.128 Instead, Kendrick denied that the iconography was an issue at all. He simply asserted that what appeared figural was, on these barbarian monuments, merely pattern and contained no iconographic meaning, since the figure-subject itself had degenerated into a purely ornamental composition without serious doctrinal significance. It was not so much a scene or an episode in a story as an intriguing pattern . . . Figure-subjects, in other words, had ceased to be significant . . . For by this time both the angels and Sigurd were, like a run of interlace, just decoration.129

Kendrick developed this argument for the various regions of the north, noting that, when figures were featured, they dissolved into pattern. He dismissed as purely ornamental the iconography of monuments such as the Gosforth Cross and the Kirkby Stephen ‘bound Devil’ – a fragmentary cross shaft, also from Cumbria, bearing an image of a horned male figure with bound arms, legs and stomach, which has alternatively been identified as the Norse god Loki.130 In making this argument, Kendrick reiterated the abstract, and inferior, nature of barbarian art, and also avoided any discussion of the role of art in negotiating pagan and Christian religions.

126 127 128 129 130

Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture in Northern England, 101. Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art, 59. Townend, Vikings and Victorian Lakeland, 120–53. Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art, 59–60. L. Kopár, Gods and Settlers: The Iconography of Norse Mythology in Anglo-Scandinavian Sculpture (Turnhout, 2012) 85.

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Numerous illuminating studies of northern sculpture in this period have now been produced, many of which demonstrate the invalidity of Kendrick’s astonishing assertion that the stone carvings of the Viking Age north were ‘just decoration’. Although many of them build on Kendrick’s work, particularly the card catalogue of stone sculpture which he compiled, they have departed considerably from his interpretation.131 The Gosforth Cross’s combination of Crucifixion scene with figures and monsters relating to Ragnarök, for example, has received a significant amount of iconographic analysis.132 Most of these interpretations stress the predominantly Christian context of the sculptures’ creation, and suggest Christian readings of the pagan mythological scenes represented. These analyses imply that Christians within England translated pagan mythologies into figural representation in stone. However, several scenes from pagan mythology have only been convincingly identified in the English context through comparison with art from Scandinavia, notably the Gotland picture stones. Although these are a very unusual and perhaps unique development in Scandinavia, it is suggested that they reflect wider iconographic traditions on textiles – a suggestion supported by the rare preserved tapestries bearing images of people, animals and carts from the ninth-century Oseberg ship burial in Norway.133 Therefore, these diachronic comparisons raise questions about the role of art in the respective religious traditions, and, at the very least, encourage us to separate figural, narrative images from purely Roman (Christian) contexts. It remains difficult for art historians to integrate Viking Age stone sculpture into overarching views of Anglo-Saxon art. The art of northern England defies ethnic and religious categories; and northern artists seemed to be appealing to a very different standard from those of the south. Wilson disparaged the material as ‘so crude as to be of little interest to the style historian’; in his view, interest lay precisely in the iconography and the information this gave about the interaction of paganism and 131

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J. Lang, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, Vol. III: York and East Yorkshire (Oxford, 1991) 1. E.g. R. Bailey, ‘Scandinavian Myth on Viking-Period Stone Sculpture in England’, in G. Barnes and M. C. Ross (eds.), Old Norse Myths: Literature and Society (Sydney, 2000) 15–23; Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England, 255–8; Kopár, Gods and Settlers, xvii–xxi, 90–104. Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture in Northern England, 105, 137, 142. Other traditions of figural images in what appear to have been religious contexts have been identified in Scandinavia, such as the gold foils with embracing figures from the island of Bornholm: N. L. Wicker, ‘The Scandinavian Animal Styles in Response to Mediterranean and Christian Narrative Art’, in M. Carver (ed.), The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300 (York, 2003) 531–50, at 539.

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Christianity.134 However, this was a matter for the social historian, since it made little impact on the development of art in England. He contrasted ‘the scruffy sculpture of the north’ unfavourably with ‘the glitter, sensitivity and competence of the art of the south’, which was the real subject of art history. It was the art of the south which, for Wilson, earned the label ‘the golden age of English art’.135 Indeed, the British Museum exhibition of that title, which opened the same year that Wilson’s book was published, simply ignored the northern traditions of the period it covered – presumably because they were considered separate and inferior to the Winchester style and southern art, and possibly because they were by now seen as (Anglo-) Scandinavian rather than Anglo-Saxon.136 Research into northern stone sculpture has advanced as something of a field of its own, benefiting from new discoveries (such as fifty pieces in York Minster) and the publication of ten volumes of the British Academy’s Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture.137 In readings sensitive to political, ethnic and social contexts, recent work stresses the regional variation and local significance of Viking Age stone monuments.138 As a result, although it has moved our understandings of style, iconography and culture far beyond the Romantic reconstructions of the nineteenth century and the dismissive attitudes of the mid-twentieth, northern Viking Age sculpture has not found a place within general histories of Anglo-Saxon art. Overviews find it difficult to integrate the art of the north with that of the south in the later AngloSaxon period because at this point artists across England do not seem to have been following one artistic trajectory. Neither can northern stone sculpture be considered a purely ‘Viking’ art, since much of it was demonstrably created by native artists and within local traditions. Viking Age art thus challenges the ethnic paradigm, since it proves impossible to fit into a teleological narrative of English national history. Artefacts and images such as these, which cannot be placed comfortably within dichotomies of pagan/barbarian/decorative, or Christian/Roman/ 134 135 136

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Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Art, 150. Ibid., 152–4. J. Backhouse, D. H. Turner and L. Webster (eds.), The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art, 966–1066 (London, 1984). R. Cramp (ed.), Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (Oxford, 1984–); B. Hope-Taylor, Under York Minster: Archaeological Discoveries, 1966–1971 (York, 1971). For instance, D. Stocker, ‘Monuments and Merchants: Irregularities in the Distribution of Stone Sculpture in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in the Tenth Century’, 179–212, and P. Sidebottom, ‘Viking Age Stone Monuments and Social Identity in Derbyshire’, 213–36, both in D. M. Hadley and J. D. Richards (eds.), Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Turnhout, 2000).

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naturalistic, nor be assigned clear ethnic designations, thus lead us to search for new ways of viewing early medieval art. When in contact, of course, these dualistic categories may well have had contemporary meaning in relation to each other. In Kendrick’s presentation, Alfred and his successors completely rejected the barbarian style because they perceived it to be intimately connected to the viking enemy. In this situation, ‘the issue was raised to a different plane, classicism then standing for the stability of inherited culture, and barbaric art for the evil forces that then threatened English society with disruption’.139 Likewise, Nancy Wicker has proposed that decorative and zoomorphic styles dominated Scandinavian art of the Viking Age precisely because they created a distinction from Christian art – Kendrick’s argument from the opposite perspective.140 Karkov hints at the power of a cultural explanation of difference when she discusses ‘the creation of a set of cultural binaries that has carried over into modern scholarship: Christian/pagan, literate/illiterate, civilized/barbaric, peaceful/ violent. By extension, Viking art was read as pagan, illiterate, barbaric and violent in subject matter and in its technique’.141 But it is imperative that we separate the identification of these meanings in our subject material from values in our scholarship. Only then, when we are free from (or at least aware of ) an imposed narrative of ethnic and religious history, can early medieval art speak to us about the religious life of its users and creators. New discoveries also lead to the rejection of existing categories and the creation of new perspectives. For the British Museum, the most significant excavation and acquisition for the early medieval collection was the ship burial from Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, excavated in 1939 and donated to the Museum (Figures 14.2 and 14.3). Because of the precise moment when they were discovered, some attempts were made to link the Sutton Hoo finds to English national identity, emphasizing British and Swedish connections rather than Germanic.142 But the multitude of artefacts and influences in the burial assemblage – identified as Germanic, Scandinavian, Celtic, Merovingian and Byzantine – did not encourage ethno-nationalist interpretations. The artefacts and their relationships are so rich and complex that to reduce the Sutton Hoo finds to an assessment of ethnicity 139 140 141 142

Kendrick, Anglo-Saxon Art, 221. Wicker, ‘Scandinavian Animal Styles’. Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England, 249. W. Filmer-Sankey, ‘Was Redwald a European? Sutton Hoo as a Reflection of British Attitudes to Europe’, in M. Henig and T. J. Smith (eds.), Collectanea Antiqua: Essays in Memory of Sonia Chadwick Hawkes (Oxford, 2007) 61–6.

Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion

would have been impossibly limiting. The use of both ‘Roman’ and ‘barbarian’ visual languages, and pagan and Christian symbols, in relation to a single individual, cast those binaries in a new light. The effects of the discovery on Anglo-Saxon scholarship were perhaps slow to materialize, but ultimately deeply significant. Rupert Bruce-Mitford finally published his detailed report, after the re-excavation of the mound, between 1975 and 1983.143 Subsequent research raised a plethora of new questions related to the early Anglo-Saxon period and its their material culture: the Sutton Hoo ship burial prompted scholars to think about connections, rather than distinctions, within the early medieval British Isles; the development of kingship, elite culture and new communities; the emergent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms’ relationship to the past; relationships with powers near and far; monumentality and the landscape; and, of course, creative beliefs and practices which reflected a changing and conflicted religious context.144 Moreover, investigation of Sutton Hoo and these themes required that arthistorical and archaeological approaches combine once again. Kendrick never rewrote Anglo-Saxon Art to A.D. 900 to take account of the Sutton Hoo discoveries, which had fundamentally changed the evidence base only a year after publication. But it would not have been a simple matter for him to do so, since his broad approach to characterizing early medieval art as a clash of barbarian and classical impulses would not have adequately explained the finds. Instead, as new material continues to do – whether spectacular and dramatic, such as the 2009 discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, or the exponential increase of small finds evidence recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme – they required new ways of thinking about the art of the Early Middle Ages.

143

144

R. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, 3 vols. (London 1975–83); Wilson, The British Museum: A History, 289. Key publications include M. Carver, Sutton Hoo: A Seventh-Century Princely Burial Ground and Its Context (London, 2005); M. Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings? (London, 1998); C. B. Kendall and P. S. Wells (eds.), Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo (Minneapolis, 1992); R. T. Farrell and C. Neuman de Vegvar (eds.), Sutton Hoo: Fifty Years After (Oxford, OH, 1992); A. C. Evans The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial (London, 1986).

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507

Index of Names

Figures in italic refer to figures Abduh, Muhammed 362–70 Adam and Eve 191, 298 Ahura Mazda 237–40, 244, 250 Ainalov, Dmitriy 133, 139–40, 142–9, 152, 160 Alexander the Great 18, 28, 31, 36, 41, 48, 244–5, 253, 335 Al-Hallāj, Mansur 208, 210–13 Al-Husri, Sati’ 384, 392–4 Al-Walīd b. Yazīd 216–19 Anāhitā 228–30, 234–5, 237, 240 Ashoka 40, 325–6, 328 Avi-Yonah, Michael 306–7, 310 Beard, Mary 63 Bhairava 277–8 Bianchi Bandinelli, Ranuccio 124–5 Boyce, Mary 245–6 Brahma 263, 271, 284 Buddha, the 27–9, 31–3, 37, 42–3, 45–6, 47 Constantine the Great 18, 59, 111, 234 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 33–42, 45–6, 49, 323 Cuadra, Luis de 207–8 Cumont, Franz 85–9

Jonah 191, 296–8, 297 Jupiter Dolichenus 82, 91, 98–107, 99, 104 Karttikeya 270–1, 284–6 Kendrick, Thomas 413–15, 417–19, 422, 425–30, 432–3 Kirdir 235, 246–7, 246 Kirsch, Johannes Peter 118 Kondakov, Nikodim Pavlovich 129–40, 130, 142–3, 148, 152–60, 371 Kramrisch, Stella 276–7, 289 Kraus, Franz Xaver 118, 141 Kripal, Jeffrey 348–51, 354–5 Kurd ‘Ali, Muhammed 388–9, 394 Laine, James 329–53, 355 Luther, Martin 115, 162, 369 Mahmud of Ghazni 328–9, 334–8 Malhotra, Rajiv 332–4, 349, 351, 354–5, 359 Massignon, Louis 192–4, 206–14, 216, 221–2 Mohammed, the Prophet 22, 219 Mommsen, Theodor 60–1 North, John 63

Doniger, Wendy 348, 350, 354–7 Durkheim, Émile 74, 77 Dvorak, Max 120–1

Osman Hamdi Bey 375–8, 380–2, 394

Foucher, Alfred 29–34, 39–48 Franks, Augustus Wollaton 399–401, 403, 409

Panofsky, Erwin 122–3 Pharro 284 Piper, Ferdinand 165–7, 170–85 Price, Simon 63, 76

Ganesh 271, 284 Geertz, Clifford 76 Glueck, Nelson 385–8 Gordon, Richard 54–5, 90 Grabar, André 124–6, 132 Grabar, Oleg 192–4, 214–16, 219, 222

508

Herzfeld, Ernst 192–8, 196, 200–6, 221–2, 243, 253, 256

Rama 345–8 Ramakrishna 349–51 Ramanujan, Attipate Krishnaswami 345–6, 348, 351–3, 355 Redin, Egor 133, 140, 142–3 Renfrew, Colin 76 Rezā Shāh 240–3, 255 Rezā Shāh, Mohammed 244, 254–5

Index of Names

Riegl, Alois 69, 112–17, 119–23, 125, 139, 144, 183 Roach Smith, Charles 397, 399–401, 409 Rossi, Giovanni Battista de 118–19, 141, 163, 171, 371 Rostovtzev, Mikhail 132, 142 Said, Edward 49, 334 Sarapis 284 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 325, 327–9 Scheid, John 63 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 19, 166–70, 177–82 Śiva 21, 43, 260–1, 263, 268, 271–87, 274, 277–8, 282, 289, 344 Smith, Jonathan Z., 288 Smith, Vincent Arthur 34, 41 Strzygowski, Josef 112, 115–17, 121, 123–5, 139, 144–8, 156, 202–5, 255, 276, 305–6, 314, 379, 381, 412 Sukenik, Eleazar Lipa 304–6, 309–11

Thapar, Romila 332–3, 335–6, 355, 359 Turcan, Robert 63 Varaha 43 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 63 Vishnu 43, 261, 263, 266, 271, 284, 330 Waal, Anton de 118 Wesho 260, 265–80, 273, 275–6, 286–7, 289 Wickhoff, Franz 69, 112–17, 137 Wilpert, Josef 118–20, 141, 146, 163–5, 183, 371 Witzel, Michael 339–41 Yadin, Yigael 310 Zoroaster 244, 258

509

Index of Subjects

Figures in italic refer to figures

510

Abstraction 412, 416 versus Naturalism 425 Academia 351 Academic freedom 355–6 and Publications 351–8 Academia and the Academy Writing outside academia 332–4 Aesthetics 34, 36, 114, 409–13 Hegel 162 Protestant 162, 182–3 Āgamadambara 265–6, 267, 288 _ Agency 34–5 Artistic 45 Ahistoricity 270 Al-Qasr palace, Jordan 140 Altars 51–2 Ara Pacis 58 Maryport 53, 53–4, 56–8, 57, 68, 72–3, 77–9 Ancestralism 6, 12, 51, 82–3, 111, 265, 306, 396–7 Anchoring 1–2, 317–19 Evidential 4–6 Political 3–4 Religious 3 Anglo-Saxon Art 413–15, 417–19 Aniconism 218–20 Islamic 191–2 Jewish 293–5, 298–300 Primitivism 27 Zoroastrian 230 Anschauung 167–70, 177–81 See also Experience, religious Anthropomorphism 27–8, 272 Anti-Islamism 334–8 Antiquarianism 397–8 Antiquities, reclamation of 393–4 Anti-Semitism 193, 204–6, 252, 305 Apologetic 3, 7, 65–6, 94–5, 114–15 Art and Religion, gap between 70–2 Arts and Crafts movement 410–12 Aryanism 13, 116, 204–6, 252, 255–7

Ashokan pillars 325–7 Austro-Hungarian Empire 110–13 Authority Academic 332–4 Authorial 322–33 Divine 281 from Antiquity 340 Ottoman 370–5 Papal 371 Religious 245 Avatars Hindu 43 Zoroastrian 227 Avesta 90, 244, 257, 281 Ayodhya 345, 346, 351 Bar Kochva Revolt 308 Barbarians 396–7 Barbarian Art 418 Barbarian Arts 413–15 Barbarian–Classical dichotomy 413–15, 417, 425, 433 Bhairava, iconography of 276–7 Brahmins 344 Byzantine Art 128, 138, 143–5, 159–60 Byzantine Studies 135 Byzantium 59, 142–3 Caricatures 231, 322 Catacombs 119, 163–4, 296–9 Categorization 59–60, 68, 73–4, 81–2, 100–1, 432 Celtic Church 420–2 Centre versus Periphery 380–2 Christian Archaeology as Field of Study 185 Christianocentrism 28–9, 82–4, 86–8, 109 Classification 73, 298 Coins 234–5, 272–3, 278–80, 285, 308 National currency 308–9, 309 Colonialism 289

Index of Subjects

Communis opinio See Anchoring Comparison 82 Problems of 6, 10–11, 15, 289 Conflation, problems of 329 Connections 64 versus Distinctions 85, 433 Conquest Germanic 404 Islamic 236–7, 258 Constantinople See Byzantium Continuity 117 Apostolic 12, 117–19 in South Asia 271 Indian 322 Religious 235 Zoroastrian 244–6 Controversy in Scholarship 348–58 Counter-Reformation 117, 295 Crucifixion 426 Ctesiphon 228 Cycle, princely 215–16 Dating 31, 44–5 Debate, Catholic versus Protestant 2, 7–9, 166, 419–21 Scholarly 141, 164–5, 179–80, 232, 293–5 Decadence 68–9, 123, 191, 219–20, 231, 382 Decline 69, 123–4 Religious 230 versus Renewal 124–6 Decorative, the 415–16, 426 Definitions Negative 262 the Problem of 59–60, 261–5 Degeneracy 115, 231 Desert Castles 189 Diaspora Hindu 350–1, 355 Jewish 314 Parsi 236 Didarganj 342 Didarganj Yakshi 342–4, 343 Disciplines 67 Creation of 4, 16, 122–3, 135–6, 165–6, 312–14 Disciplinary divides 54–5, 58, 67, 77–8, 85 Interdisciplinarity 80 Discrimination 340–1 Doctrine 64–5

Doliche 98 Drawings, architectural 199 Dynasties Abbasid 194–5, 216–17 Achaemenid 243–4 Pahlavi 223, 240–2 Qājār 223, 237–40 Umayyad 194, 216–17 Eastern Cults 99, 101, See also Oriental Cults Education and Politics 334–42, 393 Eleusinian Mysteries 88–9 Embeddedness 61–2 Enlightenment 51 Epithets 279 Essentialism 298, 305 Zoroastrian 247–9 Ethnicity Ethnic character 304–5 Rejection of ethnic narrative 432–3 Ethnography 409 Eurocentrism 4, 13–15, 29, 33–4, 36, 48, 110, 117, 119, 126, 258 in Jewish Art 318–19 Rejection of 234 European Art Self-sufficiency of 116–17 Evidence Conflict between types 54, 219–20 Epigraphic 56 Overstretching of 224–30 Problems of 79–80 Excavation and Nationalism 311–12 and Politics 5 and the State 323 Fashions of 4 Monopoly of 242–3 Exceptionalism Zoroastrian 257–8 Exchange, artistic 235 Exclusivism in Jewish Art 295–7 Exegesis 60, 84, 179 Visual 423 Experience, religious 11, 167 Fantasy 121, 214, 219–20, 300 in Scholarship 331–2 Fatwā 364–7 Feminism 415–16 Forms 215

511

512

Index of Subjects

Gandhara 31 Art of 29–33, 37, 40, 47–8 Generalization 10 Gold Glass 296–7, 297 Gosforth Cross 426–30, 427 Gospel Books 405–7 Book of Durrow 405–6 Book of Kells 405 Gotland picture stones 430 Greco-Buddhism 29–33 Hadīth 219 Harpy Tomb, Lycia 134 Healing, sacred 88 Hegemony Ancestral 300 Christian 417–19, 422–3, 425–6 Classical Art 414 Ecclesiastical 417–19 Imperial 157–9, 370–84 Textual 8, 11–12, 58, 64–6, 81–90, 97, 108, 224, 249, 269, 280, 363, 367, 423–4 Zoroastrian 223 Hellenism and Byzantine Art 142–9 Hellenization 254 Heritage Sasanian 237–42 Hindutva 287, 327–31 and Historiography 329–32, 358–9 Vishwa Hindu Parashad 347–8 Hira 195 History, gaps in 390 Holocaust, Jewish 309–10 Holy Roman Empire 110–11 Iconoclasm 235 Icons Mount Athos 153–4 Russian 155–7 Sinai Collection 149–53, 151 Idealization 293 Identification, problems of 280–7 Identity Ancestral 12–13, 325–7, 407–8 and Antiquity 251 and Politics 358–60 and Scholarship 193–205, 220–2, 325 Arab 384–5, 388 Closets 219, 221 Conflicting 39 Cultural 6 Ethnic 314–16, 402–4

Hindu 264 Jewish 301 Lack of common 265–6 National 240–4, 302–3, 314–16, 325–8, 398–9, 401–3 Political 327–8 Religious 3, 58, 301 Self-construction of 23, 353, 361 Social 58 Ideology, bias in 312–17 Idolatry 115, 212, 293, 299 Images Ambivalence of 227–9 ‘Live’ or ‘Dead’ 344–5 Reappropriation of 240 Restrictions of the use of 364–7 Imaret-i Khusraw 199–200 Imperialism 4 Incorporation, in Hinduism 268–9 India Flag of 326 Independence 323, 325 Indian Council for Historical Research 334–5 Individual Focus on 62–3 versus Group 42 Initiation 87, 92–8, 108 Insider versus Outsider 39, 42, 81, 92–5, 349–50, 359 Insular Art 407 Insularity 350 Interventions, academic 345–7 Invention of Art Byzantine 131–6 Invention of Religion Hinduism 261–3 Islamic Art and Ideologies 361–2 as a Category 390 Continuity in 190–1 European discovery of 204 Exotica 382–3 from Eastern perspective 361–73, 394–5 in Museums 375–8 Jewish discovery of 203–4, 221 New models in 189–92 Ottoman promotion of 370–2 Sasanian influences 196–202 Spirituality of 193, 206–7, 213, 220 Israel Independence 318 Land conquest 311

Index of Subjects

Land of 301–2 State of 204, 300, 318 Italian Counter-Reformation See CounterReformation Jewish Art as Field of Study 312 Jonah narrative 298 Judaism and Sovereignty 304, 307–9 as a Culture 303 Jupiter Dolichenus, worship of 98–107 Bronze statuette 99 Bronze Triangles 101–3, 104, 105–6 Kirkby Stephen ‘bound Devil’ 429 Kunstwollen 121–3 Labelling 58, 67, 280 Late Antique Art 128 Late Antiquity 396, 413 Construction of 12, 110–14, 126–7 Long Late Antiquity 390 Linga 281–3, 282, 285, 344 Mukhalinga 281 Loriyan Tangai 32–3 Mahabharata 275 Mahapurana 272, 275 Manuscripts 148 Conservation of 137 Illuminated 405–7, 410, 415 Illustrated 136–9 Mapping 288 Marketplace, religious 62 Marxism 74–5, 324 Mathura 32 Meaning 79 Consistency of 224–7 Religious 70 Mecca 374 Medina 374 Menorah 296, 298 Miniatures 137–8, 148 Mithraea 92 Capua Vetere 95–6, 96 Santa Prisca 97 Mithraic Worship 90–8, 108 Mainz Cup 95–6, 96 Ritual 92–8 Textual sources on 93–5

Modernity 23, 126–7, 369–70 and Islam 362–4 and Modernization 381, 394 Monoliths 288–9 Monotheism 91, 367 Zoroastrian 249 Monumental Theology 165–7, 172–7, 175 Mosaics 140–1, 389–90 Mosques al-Aqsa 373, 387 Babri Masjid 345–8, 346, 354 Dome of the Rock 203, 218, 373–4, 385–8 Great Mosque of Damascus 218, 374–5, 389–90, 391 Great Mosque of Mecca 374 Mosque of Ibn Tulun 203 Mshatta 14, 195, 197, 203, 215, 378–82, 379, 386 Museums 408–9 Arab Academy 388 British Museum 396, 399–401, 406–9, 431 Christliches Museum 171–2, 184 Hermitage 135 Imperial Museum, Ottoman 375–8 Iraq Museum 392–3 Museum of Arab Antiquities 393 National Museum of Ireland 406 National Museums of Scotland 406 Vaticano Museo Pio Cristiano 171–2 Mystery Cults 83, 86–9, 99–101 Mysticism 84, 107–8, 206, 210–11, 225–7, 349, 407 Mystical literature 207–8 Mythology 59, 240 Zionist 310 Naqš-e Rostam 239–40, 239, 246 Nationalism 16, 426, 432–3 and Ideology 156 and Scholarship 416–17 Arabic 389, 392 British 410 Hindu 328 in Scholarship 40–2, 323 Iranian 252–3 National Antiquities 398–402 Naturalism 412, 416 Rejection of 212 Sophistication of 27, 29 New Hebrew 309 Normativism 4, 6, 104–6 North–South divide, British 431

513

514

Index of Subjects

Optimism versus Pessimism 124–6 Oriental Cults 89–90, See also Mystery Cults Orientalism 190 Western perceptions of 382–4 Orientalization 380–1 Origins, search for 245–6, 250 Orthodoxy 108 Zoroastrian 246–7 Oseberg ship burial 430 Othering 4, 82, 328, 378, 390–1 Ownership of Field of Study 320–1 of Land 301–2 of Past 320–1, 385

Revival 308 Celtic 410–11 Irish 406 Protestant 171 Ritual 55, 76–7 Rock reliefs 231 Roman Empire Art 68–72, 113–14 Religions 59–66, 81 Romanocentrism 59, 119 Russia as successor to Byzantium 128–9, 160 Russian Revolution 130 Soviet Union 156–7

Parsis 248–51 Patronage 5 Royal 214, 234–5 Periodization 422 Pitribhu 327 Pluralism 288 Polemic 3, 92, 94–5, 216–18 Politics and History 322 Polytheism 78, 107 Zoroastrian 249–50 Portable Antiquities Scheme 433 Positivism 4 Primitivism 298–300 Privileging of Greece and Rome 51 Production, artistic 191 Projections, modern 289 Protestantism 7, 61 and Islam 363–4 Calvinism 318 Protestant attitudes to texts 369 Punyabhu 327 Purity 208, 210–12, 298–9 Purification of religion 367–70

Sacred objects, collection of 372–3 Sacrifice 52, 52, 55 Salvation 28, 87, 108 Sam Maguire Cup 410, 411 Samarra 195, 201 Paintings 200–2 Samarran style 200–2 Sanchi, Great Stupa of 27 Sanskrit 330 Sarnath 32–3 Sasanian Art and Zoroastrianism 223, 233, 236, 250 Inventions in 199 Scholar viewer, omniscient 230 Science and Religion 369 Scripture 84, 108–9, 293–4, 363 Lack of 78 Ten Commandments 294 Seals Jewish 307 Second Temple, Jewish 296, 385 Secrecy 88–9, 94, 213–14 Secular versus Profane, the 74 Secularism 222, 304 Secular nation state 384 Self versus Other 361–73 Sexuality 194, 349–50 Homosexuality 207–12 Significance, sacred Absence of 230–3 Denial of 422–3, 426–30 in Anglo-Saxon art 423–4 Significance, spiritual 225–7 Silpashastras 37 Silverware, Sasanian 224–5, 226 Simurgh 197, 203 Sin 208

Quran 373 Qusayr ‘Amra 191, 215–19, 386 Racism 1, 13 Rejection of 256–7 Ragnarök 426, 430 Rationalism 363–7 Reformation 115, 369 Relics 46 Religiosity 61 and Emotion 171 Renaissance 12 Renewal 123–4

Index of Subjects Śiva Iconography of 272–9, 284–7 Śaivism 261, 264, 266, 268, 272, 275, 281–2, 284, 356 Social phenomenon, religion as 74–5 Somnath 336–8 Spirituality 206–7 in Art 37, 120–1 St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai 149–53 Staffordshire Hoard 433 Style, Oriental 306 Sutton Hoo finds 408, 419, 424, 432–3 Symbolism 119–20, 134, 173, 206 Synagogues 314–17 Beth Alpha 218, 315, 316 Dura-Europos 218, 309, 319 Hammath Tiberias 315 Na‘aran 315 Salbit 311–12 Sepphoris 315 Syncretism 283–4, 287 Tāq-e Bostān 232, 237–9, 238 Tekieh Mo’āven al-molk, Kermanshāh 241–2 Terminology 35, 40–1, 83–4, 87, 268, 331–2, 407 Textbooks, problems of 334–42 Texts, problems of using 39–40, 227, 263–4 Theology Role in Art History 115, 161–5, 175–7 Theology of Art, Protestant 163–6, 182–4 Third Reich Ideology of 62, 157, 255–6, 307

Timelessness 269–71, 286, 356–7 in Iconography 275–9 Primordialism 260 Translation, cultural 190, 203 Uniqueness 6, 10 Christian 6–7 Islamic 388 Upheavals, religious 229–30 Vedas 263–5 Verism See Realism Viking Age sculpture 425–32 Violence, religious 335, 345 Vishnu Vaishnavism 261, 264, 267, 356 Visitation of the Stranger 209 War First World War 111–12, 158, 384, 404 Franco-Prussian War 405 Iran–Iraq (1980) 252 Second World War 129, 306, 404 Six Day War 310 War of Independence, Jewish 310 Warburg Institute 122 Wesho, iconography of 275, 281–7 Yazatā 227 Zionism 204, 301–2, 318, 387 1940s 306–10 Early 302–6 Post-independence 310–12

515