The Art of Dining in Medieval Byzantium (Studies in Byzantine Cultural History) [1 ed.] 9780367860011, 9781032608044, 9781003016359, 0367860015

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The Art of Dining in Medieval Byzantium

Thousands of intact ceramic bowls and plates as well as fragments made in the ­medieval Byzantine empire survive to this day. Decorated with figural and ­non-figural imagery applied in a variety of techniques and adorned with colourful paints and glazes, the vessels can tell us much about those who owned them and those who looked at them. In addition to innumerable ceramic vessels, a ­handful of precious metal bowls and plates survive from the period. Together, these ­objects make up the art of dining in medieval Byzantium. This art of dining was ­effervescent, at turns irreverent and deadly serious, visually stunning and fun. It is suggestive of ways in which those viewing the objects used a quotidian and ­biologically necessary (f)act – that of eating – to reflect on their lives and deaths, their aspirations and their realities. This book examines the ceramic and metal vessels in terms of the information offered on the foods eaten, the foods desired and their status; the spectacle of the banquet; the relationship between word and image in medieval Byzantium; the dangers of taste; the emergence of new moral and social ideals; and the use of dining as a tool in constructing and enforcing hierarchy. This book is of appeal to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences interested in the art and material culture of the medieval period and in the social history of food and eating. Lara Frentrop completed her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and has since held lecturing and research roles at The Courtauld Institute and Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research explores how the interactive experience – from physical to rhetorical – of the material culture and architecture of medieval Byzantium created meaning and identity. Her work focuses on themes including communication and relationships, both human and divine; rhetoric; performativity; sin and salvation; and body and space.

Studies in Byzantine Cultural History Series editors: Margaret Mullett, Liz James and Jim Crow

This series brings the insights of art, archaeology and text to create a new cultural history of Byzantium. Studies in all three disciplines are invited, but especially those works which bring together the three disciplines to create something new. The series includes comparative works with neighbouring subjects such as classics, medieval studies, Islamic studies, Ottoman studies, Renaissance studies, and Modern Greek studies, to allow Byzantine studies to be infused with new energy and to respond to its neighbours. Experiencing the Last Judgement Niamh Bhalla Managing Emotion in Byzantium Passions, Affects and Imaginings Edited by Margaret Mullett and Susan Ashbrook Harvey The Art of Dining in Medieval Byzantium Lara Frentrop

The Art of Dining in Medieval Byzantium

Lara Frentrop

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Lara Frentrop The right of Lara Frentrop to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Frentrop, Lara, author. Title: The art of dining in medieval Byzantium / Lara Frentrop. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Studies in Byzantine cultural history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023025997 (print) | LCCN 2023025998 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367860011 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032608044 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003016359 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Food habits—Byzantine Empire—History. | Dinners and dining—Byzantine Empire—History. | Gastronomy—Byzantine Empire—History. | Byzantine Empire—Social life and customs. Classification: LCC GT2853.B97 F74 2024 (print) | LCC GT2853.B97 (ebook) | DDC 394.1/209495—dc23/eng/20230823 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025997 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025998 ISBN: 9780367860011 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032608044 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003016359 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

To Nicholas and Winifred

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction

ix xi xiii 1

1 A Taste for Novelty

14

2 The Theatre of Dining: Splendour and Performance

33

3 Word, Image and Intellect: Rhetoric and Display at Table

56

4 Bad Taste

78

5 Manly Men, Heroic Hunters

103

6 The Display of Triumph: or: How a Plate Can Make You Powerful

118

Conclusion

136

Bibliography Index

143 169

Figures

1.1 Bowl with bird of prey, 1000–1300. 5.3 × 24.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1984 1.2 Bowl with fish, 1100–1300. 9 × 25.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Christopher C. Grisanti and Suzanne P. Fawbush, 2000 1.3 Bowl with ostrich, siren and fish, Corinth, c.1140–1170. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas 2.1 Chafing dish with acrobat and musicians, Corinth, 1100–1150. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas 2.2 Bowl from Berezov, 1100–1200.  The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: Vladimir Terebenin 2.3 Lid of a vessel, 1100–1200.  The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg 3.1 Plate with rider and angel, Corinth, 1130–1160. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas 3.2 Vessel with a couple and animals, 1100–1200. 9 × 27 cm. Photo: author 4.1 Chafing dish with musicians and monsters, Corinth, 1000–1210. 13.8 × 17.8 cm. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas 4.2 Bowl from Berezov, detail: banqueter 4.3 Bowl of Theodore Tourkeles, Byzantium, 1000–1100.  The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Svetlana Suetova 4.4 Bowl with head of feline and human hand, Corinth, 1150–1200. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas

17 17 25 35 41 41 58 61 79 84 89 90

x Figures 4.5 Ivory box with scenes from the Fall of Adam and Eve (front), 900–1100. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Acquired by Henry Walters, 1926 4.6 Fragment with Adam after the Fall, Corinth, 1059–1210. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas 5.1 Fragment of a bowl with a horse and rider, Port Saint Symeon, 1200–1268. 17.2 × 1.3 × 27 × 8.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 5.2 Plate with a dragon slayer, Corinth, 1150–1200. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas 5.3 Plate with fighter and dragon, 1100–1200. 5.1 × 25.7 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Paul Hester 6.1 Bowl from the Basilevsky Collection, 1100–1200. The State Hermitage M ­ useum, St Petersburg

97 99 104 108 109 126

Acknowledgements

This book evolved from my doctoral thesis, ‘The Art of Dining in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Byzantium’, which recontextualised and interpreted a group of metal tableware in the collections of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg through the lens of dining. While this book is in many ways very different to my thesis, with its historical and material scope much widened, their core themes and ideas are closely interconnected. I am grateful for the generous support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the work completed during my PhD. Between then and now, my research has benefited from the invaluable help of colleagues and friends. I am enormously thankful to Antony Eastmond for his continued support, advice and critique. Working with Tony over the years has been a joy and a privilege. I thank Alixe Bovey and Jo Applin for generously bestowing their advice and wisdom on a sprawling range of topics, and Sussan Babaie for sharing her rich insights into food and taste. I am thankful for the British School at Athens, its library and its staff for generously supporting my research and providing me with the resources and facilities necessary to complete this project. I am grateful to the institutions that provided illustrations for this publication and the individuals who assisted the process: Manolis Papadakis at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Olga ­Novoseltseva at the State Hermitage Museum, Donna McClendon at the Menil Collection. I thank the series editors – Liz James, Margaret Mullett and Jim Crow – and Michael Greenwood at Routledge for their invaluable feedback, assistance and ­encouragement throughout the process of writing and editing this book. Their ­expertise and guidance have helped to shape this work into its final form. I am indebted to the many individuals who generously shared their time and expertise to help me refine my research and drafts: Liz for reading and re-reading the full draft, and Tony, Rebecca Müller and Niamh Bhalla for commenting on individual chapters. Your insights, comments and critiques have been instrumental in shaping this final work. A big thank you to Rachel Salmon for remotely chasing up page numbers and trying to navigate the ODB. Lastly, I want to express my gratitude to my husband Nicholas and daughter Winifred. To the first, thank you for making it possible to write this book; to the second, thank you for making it more difficult yet more rewarding!

Abbreviations

Acta sanctorum (Paris, 1863–1940) Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum, ed. E. Schwartz and J. Straub (Berlin, 1914–) AH Art History AOC Archives de l’Orient chrétien ArtB Art Bulletin BBulg Byzantinobulgarica BHG Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca, 3rd ed., ed. F. Halkin, SubsHag 47 (Brussels, 1957; repr. 1969) BMFD Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ “Typika” and Testaments, ed. J. Thomas and A.C. Hero (Washington, D.C., 2000) BMGS Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies BSl Byzantinoslavica BTT Byzantine Texts in Translation Byz Byzantion Byzantinisches Archiv ByzArch Byzantina Australiensia ByzAus Byzantinische Forschungen ByzF Byzantinische Zeitschrift BZ Cahiers archéologiques CahArch Corpus christianorum, Series latina CCSL Corpus fontium historiae byzantinae CFHB Corpus scriptorum historiae byzantinae CSHB Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium CSCO ΔΧΑΕ Δελτίον τῆς Χριστιανικῆς ἀρχαιολογικῆς ἑταιρείας DenkWien Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophischhistorische Klasse, Denkschriften DOBSC Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers DOS Dumbarton Oaks Studies DOT Dumbarton Oaks Texts AASS ACO

xiv Abbreviations GCS

Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies Hesp Hesperia IRAIK Izvestiia Russkogo arkheologicheskogo instituta v Konstantinopole IstMitt Istanbuler Mitteilungen JÖB Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik Loeb Loeb Classical Library MünchJb Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst ODB The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. Kazhdan et al. (New York and Oxford, 1991) PG Patrologiae cursus completus, Series graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1857–66) REB Revue des études byzantines RevBibl Revue biblique ROC Revue de l’Orient chrétien SAWS Sharing Ancient Wisdoms SBCH Studies in Byzantine Cultural History SBNG Studi bizantini e neogreci (Galatina, 1983) SC Sources chrétiennes SPBS Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publications Teubner Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana TIB Tabula imperii byzantini, ed. H. Hunger (Vienna, 1976–) TM Travaux et mémoires TTB Translated Texts for Byzantinists Wiener byzantinistische Studien WByzSt

Introduction

A twelfth-century silver-gilt bowl discovered near the town of Berezov in R ­ ussia in 1967 and now in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg is intricately decorated with incised and relief images. The vessel is small, measuring less than twelve centimetres high and twenty centimetres wide. It has a bulbous body that is worked from two sheets of metal joined at its lip. In its decoration, the vessel brings together different colours and textures of metal – silver, silver-gilt and niello and raised and incised – and a broad range of subject matter, only gradually revealed through using, handling and moving the vessel. The silver-gilt exterior is worked in tiers of small, tightly stacked medallions with an arched shape (fig. 2.3). The medallions show entertainers and birds, felines and hybrids and flowers worked in repoussé. Details are articulated in punched dots and incised lines. The little fields containing individual figures are topped by a rim that depicts animals circling the vessel in pursuit of one another, alternating with trees that anchor the scene in a landscape. The interior of the vessel is made up of a smooth sheet of silver that at the vessel’s bottom bears an incised gilded image of St George on horseback.1 On the vessel’s exterior, the top row of medallions is the only one to show human figures. It represents musicians seated on the floor cross-legged and playing the drum, flute, tambourine and string instruments. The musicians are interspersed with acrobats and somersaulting tumblers and striding male figures, probably representing dancers. Together, they depict the entertainments enjoyed in the Byzantine cultural sphere and beyond, whether in private or public and religious or secular settings.2 The figures surround two medallions that show cupbearers. The first is standing upright, his body turned slightly to his left and holding a cup in his hand; the second,

1 V.P. Darkevich, Светское искусство Византии: Произведения византийского художественного ремесла в Восточной Европе X–XIII века (Moscow, 1975), 78–99; F. Althaus, M. Sutcliffe, P. Stewart and A. Eastmond (ed.), The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity (London, 2006), 169. 2 The line between private and public on one hand and secular and sacred on the other is ambiguous at best in the medieval, and particularly in the Byzantine world, for more on this, see P. Veyne (ed.), A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge, MA, 1987); on the ­imagery of leisure beyond the Byzantine context, see E. R. Hoffman, ‘Pathways of portability: Islamic and Christian interchange from the tenth to the twelfth century’, AH, 24.1 (2001), 17–50 and E. R. Hoffman (ed.), Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World (Oxford, 2007). DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359-1

2 Introduction who is turned to his right, is in the process of pouring a drink from a full-bodied vessel. The two cupbearers flank a medallion showing a seated half-length figure (fig. 4.2) that through its representation is marked out as different from the entertainers and attendants surrounding it, and as central to the scene depicted in the top row of medallions. While the performers and cupbearers are shown in full length, as physically active and turned slightly away from the viewer, the central figure is depicted in a half-length format, in a comparatively static pose and facing the viewer frontally – although this figure, too, is avoiding eye contact with the viewer. The seated figure is firstly a female and secondly dressed in Byzantine imperial garments, contrasting with both the gender and the dress of those surrounding her. This signals differences in both status and behaviour. Most importantly, the figure is a participant at a banquet. This is indicated by the table in front of her on which are resting a small goblet and two round objects, possibly bread or plates, and the two cupbearers flanking her. The image hints that the object on which it is depicted played an important role at the dinner table of its owner, both in terms of its display as a work of art and its functional purpose as a drinking vessel. The vessel from Berezov, a bowl or cup decorated with a multitude of images, is part of the art of dining.3 The medieval Byzantine art of dining is a treasure trove of information about the lives, dreams and fears of its audience. It is the material culture of banqueting, the objects that were used during a meal – rather than depictions of communal meals, which express dogmatic truths and iconographic formulae rather than reality – that enables us to take a seat at the middle Byzantine dinner table.4 It was part of the 3 For an introduction to the social dimension of dining and its distinction from eating, see C. LéviStrauss, ‘The culinary triangle’, The Partisan Review, 33 (1966), 586–96; C. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to the Science of Mythology, I (New York, 1969); J. D’Arms, ‘Control, companionship, and clientela: some social functions of the Roman communal meal’, Echos du monde classique, 28 (1984), 327–48; P. Farb and G. J. Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (Boston, MA, 1980); I. Cook and P. Crang, ‘The world on a plate: culinary culture, displacement, and geographical knowledge’, Journal of Material Culture, 1 (1996), 131–56; C. Counihan and P. van Esterik (ed.), Food and Culture: A Reader (London, 1997); A. Beardsworth and T. Keil, Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society (London, 1997); M. Douglas, ‘Deciphering a meal’, in Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology (London, 1999), 231–51. 4 For a definition and on the potential and problems of material culture for Byzantine studies, see M. Grünbart and D. Stathakopoulos, ‘Sticks and stones: Byzantine material culture’, BMGS, 26 (2002), 298–327, esp. 299; L. James, ‘Things: art and experience in Byzantium’, in C. Nesbitt and M. Jackson (ed.), Experiencing Byzantium: Papers from the 44th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Newcastle and Durham, April 2011, SPBS, 18 (London and New York, 2013), 17–33. On the relationship between visual and material cultures, see D. Cherry (ed.), Art History, Visual Culture, special issue of AH, 27.4 (2004); T. Hamling, ‘Another “turn” in the art history versus visual culture debate?’, AH, 30 (2007), 757–63. See also B.V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, PA, 2010). On the relationship between the preparation and consumption of food and social, spiritual and cultural realities in the medieval West, see T.J. Tomasik and J.M. Vitullo, ‘At the table: metaphorical and material cultures of food in medieval and early modern Europe’, in T.J. Tomasik and J.M. Vitullo (ed.), At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages

Introduction  3 ‘everyday life’ of individuals living across the Byzantine empire in its geographical and socio-economic breadth, offering access to a part of their existence that – at least in comparison to religious life in the empire – remains relatively unstudied.5 And yet, it has received little attention, its analysis restricted by disciplinary and material boundaries. There are thousands of intact ceramic bowls and plates as well as fragments of vessels made in the Byzantine empire, uncovered during archaeological excavations in modern-day Greece and Turkey and in shipwrecks across the Mediterranean and now held in collections across the world. Decorated with figural and non-figural imagery applied in a variety of techniques and adorned with colourful paints and glazes, the vessels can tell us much about those who owned them and those who looked at them. They offer information on the foods eaten, the foods desired and their status; the spectacle of the banquet; the relationship between word and image in medieval Byzantium; the dangers of taste; the emergence of new moral and social ideals; and the use of dining as a tool in constructing and enforcing hierarchy. In addition to innumerable ceramic vessels, a handful of precious metal bowls and plates made of silver and silver-gilt and discovered in remote regions of Eurasia, such as the vessel from Berezov, survive from the medieval period.6 These are of an uncertain and often disputed place of manufacture, and Renaissance, 18 (Turnhout, 2007), xi–xx. See also J. Vroom, ‘Pots and pies: adventures in the archaeology of eating habits in Byzantium’ in E. Sibbeson, B. Jervis and S. Coxon (ed.), Insights from Innovation: New Light on Archaeological Ceramics. Papers Presented in Honour of Professor David Peacock’s Contribution to Archaeological Ceramic Studies (St Andrews, 2016), 221–44; M. Parani, ‘Byzantine cutlery: an overview’, ΔΧΑΕ, 31 (2010), 139–64; J. Vroom, ‘Dishing up history: early medieval ceramic finds from the Triconch Palace in Butrint’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, 120.2 (2008), 291–305. For an introduction on domestic archaeology and arrangements, see K. Rheidt, ‘Byzantinische Wohnhäuser des 11. bis 14. Jahrhunderts in Pergamon’, DOP, 44 (1990), 195–204; on the contents of houses including furniture and tableware, see N. Oikonomides, ‘The contents of the Byzantine house from the eleventh to the fifteenth century’, DOP, 44 (1990), 205–14. 5 For an introduction to scholarly publications on this topic, covering different methodological approaches and subject areas, and exhibition catalogues, see C. Mango, ‘Daily life in Byzantium’, in 16. Internationaler Byzantinistenkongress, Wien 4.–9. Oktober 1981. Akten, 1 (Vienna, 1981), 337–53; J. Haldon, ‘Everyday life in Byzantium: some problems of approach’, BMGS, 10 (1986), 51–72; G. Prinzing and D. Simon (ed.), Fest und Alltag in Byzanz (Munich, 1990); S. Baumann (ed.), Byzanz – das Licht aus dem Osten: Kult und Alltag im Byzantinischen Reich vom 4. bis 15. ­Jahrhundert, Vernissage, 14 (Heidelberg, 2001); D. Papanikola-Bakirtzi (ed.), Everyday Life in ­Byzantium (Athens, 2002); K. Dark (ed.), Secular Buildings and the Archaeology of Everyday Life in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford, 2004); J. Frings and H. Willinghöfer (ed.), Byzanz: Pracht und Alltag (Munich, 2010); F. Daim and J. Drauschke (ed.), Hinter den Mauern und auf dem Offenen Land: Neue Forschungen zum Leben im Byzantinischen Reich, Byzanz zwischen Orient und Okzident, 3 (Mainz, 2016); M. Grünbart, Macht und Präsenz der Buchstaben im byzantinischen Alltag: Zugänge zu den historischen Hilfswissenschaften des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes (Berlin, 2021). 6 The objects are examined most comprehensively in Darkevich, Светское искусство; the same and additional metal objects are studied in L. Frentrop, ‘The art of dining in eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium’ (PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2016). The objects have received passing mention as part of wider arguments and catalogues in a number of publications; for an introductory bibliography, see Frentrop, ‘The art of dining’, 43–51. More recent publications discussing the objects include A. Walker, ‘Integrated yet segregated: eastern Islamic art in twelfth-century Byzantium’ in A. Olsen Lam and R. Schroeder (ed.), The Eloquence of Art: Essays in Honour of Henry Maguire

4 Introduction though where they were made is less relevant here. What is of interest is their imagery, which spans from scenes of entertainment and dining to depictions of fight and triumph and even scenes of otherworldly punishments. The images depicted on the precious metal objects bear strong similarities to the themes found on glazed ceramic vessels. They are interconnected with rhetorical and visual trends occurring in the Byzantine empire at the time of the making of the metal vessels – the eleventh and twelfth centuries – suggesting that this is where they could and would have been viewed and understood. The ceramic and silver vessels make up the art of dining, which was effervescent, at turns irreverent and deadly serious, visually stunning and fun. It is suggestive of ways in which those living in the medieval Byzantine empire used a quotidian and biologically necessary (f)act – that of eating – to reflect on their lives and deaths, their aspirations and their realities. The artworks can offer up valuable information about their specific context of use, that of the Byzantine dining table, and the important role that its art played at all social levels in constructing and displaying fluid messages about economic, social and cultural identity. The artworks’ role at the table also raises the question of the ways in which practices of dining, including visual, material and intellectual cultures, participated in wider cultural developments. The ceramic and precious metal objects viewed at the table articulate related social and cultural concepts at the heart of this book: an interest in food and its conspicuous display; the theatre of the banquet; the use of the visual forms of rhetorical tropes to create layered and fluid meaning; warnings against sensory overindulgence and the new ideals of manliness and triumph that emerged during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. To understand the social, cultural and intellectual context of communal eating in medieval Byzantium, I shall explore the role of food consumption and its material culture and the relationship between the two. Food, from the staples of the Byzantine to complex and unusual dishes, held meaning, encoded in its presentation and its preparation. This was displayed and enhanced through vessels of tableware, their material, their shape and their decoration. The pursuit of novelty and artifice in the presentation of culinary creations at the dining table and changes in ceramic consumption hold important clues to the changing perception of food during the middle Byzantine period and the role of tableware and the dining context in constructing and articulating social and cultural identity. Where and how food was consumed, the food itself, and the images viewed on tableware but also on walls and in other media reveal new facets of communal life and dining in medieval Byzantium. The bowls, plates and chafing dishes studied here were made between the e­ leventh and early thirteenth century. This is a particularly interesting period to look at as it witnessed the most pronounced changes in the shape and decoration

(London, 2020), 387–406; A. Walker, ‘Setting the elite table across the Byzantine-Seljuq divide’, in M. Belli Bose (ed.), Intersections: Art and Islamic Cosmopolitanism (Gainesville, FL, 2021). A silver cup found in the Chungul Kurgan is the subject of W. Woodfin, ‘Within a budding grove: dancers, gardens, and the enamel cup from the Chungul Kurgan’, ArtB, 98.2 (2016), 151–80.

Introduction  5 of ceramic vessels especially. These changes indicate that the role and perception of these objects transformed during this period, spurred on by new aesthetic and culinary tastes. From the eleventh century onwards, a marked increase took place in the production and consumption of glazed ceramics, indicating that the use of ceramic tableware became more common. It also suggests that greater interest was taken by both potters and consumers in the decoration of the vessels and in the display of food contained in them. It is however worth noting that even glazed ceramics, the arguably more ‘democratic’ medium of dining, did not reach all parts and audiences of the empire. This is suggested by both the number of glazed vessels in relation to unglazed ones, which continued to dominate archaeological finds especially in rural contexts, and by archaeological excavations in and surveys of smaller settlements in the countryside. But for surprisingly large swathes of the Byzantine population across an unprecedented socio-economic spectrum, these centuries mark the period when ‘the art of dining’ took off and took on an increasingly important role in the context of the communal meal. It was not only the images on the objects that were invested with meaning – the shape, the colour and the texture of the tableware in many cases were carefully designed to heighten the meaning of the imagery. The majority of the ceramic vessels I examine displays figural imagery; the decoration on the precious metal vessels is exclusively figural.7 What does the imagery and the material of the art of dining mean, if anything at all? How does the significance of the images impact on their surroundings, and how do the surroundings of the images shift their interpretation in turn? What is the connection between material and meaning? And how are the objects used to structure and even subvert social relationships, hierarchy and identity? These are some of the key questions that I shall address to show that Byzantine meals, and the art present during them, were anything but boring. The study of the art of dining has been limited for a range of reasons, some practical, others methodological. Food and eating it in medieval Byzantium are a substantial and growing area of study. More often than not, it is the practicalities of food and eating, rather than visual culture, that receive most attention. The focus tends to be on historical, anthropological and archaeological material that can explain how certain foodstuffs were grown, transported and exchanged, on eating implements and on food morality.8 Individual chapters, articles and essays have been dedicated to the visual culture of dining and to a handful of objects associated with the dinner table.9 Some existing works are methodologically problematic:

7 There is a significant body of material showing symbolic imagery and pseudo-writing, which merits further study. 8 Examples of collections of essays on the topic are L. Brubaker and K. Linardou (ed.), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, SPBS, 13 (Aldershot, 2007); W. Mayer and S. Trzcionka (ed.), Feast, Fast or Famine: Food and Drink in Byzantium, ByzAus, 15 (Brisbane, 2005). See Chapter 1 for additional bibliography. 9 H. Maguire and E. Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, 2007), 29–41 and 46–57; the art of dining is the topic of individual essays in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, and Feast, Fast or Famine, ed. Mayer and Trzcionka.

6 Introduction they accept the idea that Byzantine images can be read as accurate depictions of real life. Because of the nature of these publications, dedicated to a single object or theme, they shine a spotlight on specific aspects of the art of dining. This however fails to illuminate just how much of a multivalent, nuanced and rich genre this ­really is. Taking a broader material and historical approach allows to uncover how it changed over the course of a few centuries in response to new tastes and ideas, and just how enmeshed the dining table was with other areas of Byzantine life. The images on display and as such used at the dining table played a crucial role in the creation and display of status, relationships and identity. They incorporated practices such as the contemplation of death and the Last Things, which played an important role in communal and individual worship, and contributed to forming trends also present in other genres and spaces such as rhetoric and the imperial court. The art of dining does not exist in a vacuum but instead as part of a n­ etwork – of objects and images, of conversations, of social interactions and spaces. The different materials of surviving tableware pose their own sets of challenges. Though it is painting with a broad brush and the field is ever changing, it is not incorrect to say that archaeologists have tended to ignore Byzantine pottery because it is the stuff in the way while digging down to the more ‘interesting’ material (as evidenced by the lacunae in the recording of the find spots and stratigraphy of the medieval objects in some excavations, particularly those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). In the same vein, art historians can be dismissive of Byzantine ceramic tableware because of the poor state of preservation of some objects and the crude nature of the manufacture of others – in short, because it is not ‘art’.10 For the pottery tableware, the sheer quantity in which it survives is daunting. The selection of what to publish, in catalogues of individual collections or thematically structured exhibitions, and of what to show to the public is in itself a judgement of value both artistic and material, with certain contingents of the material deemed just not worth the effort. Those that do make the cut are rarely if ever approached in terms of what they, as the art present at the dining table of individuals living in the Byzantine empire, can tell us about this aspect of Byzantine art and life and its impact beyond the banquet. The bowls and plates made of silver and silver-gilt are far less numerous than their ceramic counterparts. Their origin is disputed, their access through museums and publications difficult as a result of display, history and language.11 Studying them together with contemporary

10 For an introduction to the problematic nature of judgements of ‘quality’ in art, see J. Rosenberg, On Quality in Art (Princeton, NJ, 1967); B. Boice, ‘The quality problem’, Artforum 11.2 (1972), 68–70. 11 A set of plates bought by the Greek state and catalogued in A. Ballian and A. Drandaki, ‘A middle Byzantine silver treasure’, ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟ ΜΒΕΝΑΚΙ, 3 (2003), 47–80 was later declared loot by the Bulgarian state; attempts to reclaim the treasure were unresolved with the objects no longer on display and their current whereabouts unknown. Objects that could be seen until recently such as a bowl discovered in Chernihiv and held in Kyiv, as well as the objects in Russia, are inaccessible now because of the geopolitical situation. See note 5 for a select bibliography on the objects. See Frentrop, ‘The art of dining’, 43–51 for a review of earlier literature on the objects.

Introduction  7 Byzantine ceramic tableware reveals the similarities between the two materials, their shared iconography and themes pointing towards the same concerns and interests. Re-contextualising these objects at the banqueting table, as part of the art of dining, allows to treat them as works with agency and an active role and thereby to uncover their significance more fully. In some ways, the meaning of the images on the art of dining seems obvious and even literal. If a ceramic bowl shows a fish, then surely said bowl was used to serve fish at table? But while the images on some objects can seem simple, both in their significance and their appearance, they are not. Nor are they merely one-to-one illustrations of their contents and their surroundings. Instead, they are an eloquent if not loquacious form of commentary on anything and everything from the food to the guests. They even point out their own thing-ness, for example through paint dripping down the edge of a chafing dish, mimicking the dripping of the sauce contained inside the vessel. The images are in vivid conversation with developments occurring in other areas of Byzantine life including but not limited to culinary and aesthetic tastes and the desire for novelty. They respond to the popularity of rhetorical games and add their own ludic contribution to the dinner table. The images display their own take on the entertainments of the banquet and reveal the delight taken by their audiences in the pursuit of sensory pleasure. They participate in the emergence of new ideals of behaviour and offer visual rebukes for those who do not meet the bar. The objects and their decoration are rich in subtext and operate within a network of intertextuality. The meaning of images varied depending on who saw them, who they were and what they knew, and on whether they were viewed individually or in combination with other scenes. The imagery on ceramic vessels often centres on a single decorative element such as a figure playing an instrument, a lone animal or an individual squaring off against a dragon-serpent. While these images and the objects they are depicted on carry meaning on their own, this could have been modified, combined and re-combined ad infinitum as part of a dinner set. A hare with a siren is not the same as the hare with a hunter; a dancer with a musician is not the same as a dancer with a military man. By changing the selection of vessels on display during a meal, those picking the tableware had the choice of making fun of their guests, scaring them or flattering them – provided the combination of vessels was not haphazard. In addition to a first attempt at interpretation by the host, another round of creating meaning would have taken place each time an individual guest looked at the objects, bringing their own sets of experience and agency. As a result, the meaning of each object is nuanced and continuously shifting. Over a relatively constrained time period, from the eleventh to the first half of the thirteenth century, the objects of tableware – the art of dining – display images that are shared across materials, geographies and socio-economic spheres. Some iconographic themes that I shall discuss such as animals and fighting men form the most frequently occurring subjects on tableware made and used in a wide range of places, from central Greece to Asia Minor. The shared themes are important for two crucial, interconnected reasons. First, they indicate that cultural developments

8 Introduction predominantly associated with the imperial sphere and the capital of Constantinople in fact took place much more widely and across the social spectrum.12 The imagery on ceramic tableware in particular highlights the central role played by the middling and lower classes in the formation and dispersion of cultural trends including visual, discursive and social. Second, new themes such as that of the heroic, fighting man appear around the same time on works in both clay and metal. This undermines the perceived hierarchy of materials, where it is held that innovation occurs in the more ‘expensive’ medium and then arrives at the cheaper end in a trickle-down effect.13 The ceramic art of dining was not a passive participant in and recipient of wider developments but instead an active agent in their shaping and diffusion. It seems that cultural, visual and artistic trends in the Byzantine empire were a lot more ‘democratic’ than has previously been assumed, with ceramics the key to unlocking a unique, and redefining perspective on Byzantine life and culture. Nonetheless, ceramics are everyday objects, in the sense that they are involved in the consumption of food – though this does not mean that they were ‘banal’, ‘cheap’ or ‘without value’. Making ceramics was difficult and technically challenging, and firing the vessels was expensive. Byzantine ceramicists were technologically innovative and appropriated techniques and motifs from other cultures, including Italy, China and the Islamic World, as the developing and changing roster of ceramic wares during the Middle Ages reveals.14 Nor does the relative inexpensiveness of pottery in relation to precious metal equate to the fact that only the lower and middle classes bought and displayed decorated ceramic tableware,

12 On the (outdated) binary of centre and periphery, see A. Eastmond, ‘Art and the periphery’, in R. Cormack, J. Haldon and E. Jeffreys (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford, 2008), 770–6; R. Cormack, ‘Away from the centre: “provincial” art in the ninth century’, in L. Brubaker (ed.), Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? Papers from the Thirtieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham, March 1996, SPBS, 5 (Aldershot, 1998), 151–63. 13 On the relative expense of ceramics and the technological challenges of their production, see Chapters 1 and 2. While some publications acknowledge this, others repeat the trope that the images and shape of ceramic tableware are but imitations of those of or secondary to precious metal objects. See for example G. Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies for 9th to 13th century Glazed Wares at Corinth: methodology and social conclusions’, in K. Belke, F. Hild, J. Koder and P. Soustal (ed.), Byzanz als Raum. Zu Methoden und Inhalten der historischen Geographie des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für die TIB, 7 (2000), 153–74, esp. 171; Ballian and Drandaki, ‘A middle Byzantine silver treasure’; B. Böhlendorf-Arslan, ‘Byzantinische Glasurkeramik: “billige Imitate” oder “Volkskunst”?’ in N. Asutay-Effenberger and F. Daim (ed.), ΦΙΛΟΠΑΤΙΟΝ: Spaziergang im Kaiserlichen Garten. Schriften Über Byzanz und seinen Nachbarn. Festschrift für Arne Effenberger zum 70. Geburtstag (Mainz, 2012), 79–94, esp. 79; K. Dark, Byzantine Pottery (Gloucestershire, Charleston, Joué-lès-Tours and Erfurt, 2001), 72, 77, 101; M.J. Blackman and S. Redford, ‘Neutron activation analysis of medieval ceramics from Kinet, Turkey, especially Port Saint Symeon Ware’, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, 42 (2005), 83–186, 85, 92, 105; S. Redford, ‘On sāqīs and ceramics: systems of representation in the northeast Mediterranean’, in D. Weiss and L. Mahoney (ed.), France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades (Baltimore, 2004), 282–312. 14 Dark, Byzantine Pottery, 62–3.

Introduction  9 or that ceramics were considered as without value. The wide breadth of ceramic products in terms of quality and style should be understood as an indicator of its social and economic fluidity and its competitiveness in the market of tablewares. Most of imported lead-glazed Incised Sgraffito and Champlevé wares excavated at Sagalassos in southwestern Turkey were found to have repair holes – a practice previously attested in other middle Byzantine ceramic assemblages.15 It seems that repairing broken glazed pottery with lead thread was a common practice during the period; the repair, in turn, indicates that a vessel was valued by its owner. The technological ambition demonstrated by ceramic tableware, the visual appeal of its colours and glazes and its continued appreciation by its owners makes it plausible that ceramic vessels were used and displayed in homes alongside and as part of an elite dinner service. Documentary and literary sources attest that these could also include precious metal and tinned vessels, and in the imperial palace rock crystal and gem-encrusted plates and vessels. Near irrespective of budget, whether rich, poor or somewhere in the middle, a buyer would have found a decorated vessel to suit his or her taste and needs. This means that the art of dining and especially the ceramics viewed at the dinner table are perhaps the medium that can give us an insight into the broadest cross-section of Byzantine society, from the poor and rural to the wealthy, powerful and urban. The material and the manufacture of the art of dining was invested with significance in and of itself. The shining lustre of the glazes used in the making of pottery and the gleam of gold and silver caught the eye of those around them and communicated wealth and sophistication. It spoke of jockeying for position within social groups and the role of material culture in this process. The makers of the objects exploited the technological tools at their availability to create different colours, shapes and textures to heighten the visual impact made by the vessels. Often, the appearance of the material of a vessel was manipulated to support its primary purpose – the applied relief figures on chafing dishes, crowding the exterior of the vessels, evoke the hustle and bustle of the performances accompanying a banquet and even produce comedic effects through surprise and laughter. Gold and silver tableware was considered especially suitable to carry images of military triumph and imperial power and was the preferred medium for scaring opponents into submission. On glazed ceramics, the presence of figural imagery satisfied a new appetite for aesthetic novelty at the dinner table and the increasing and deliberate care taken in the display of food. The placing of decoration in hard-to-see places prompted their users to handle and move them and thereby furthered the interactive and communicative nature of the banquet as well as the drama of viewing the objects. 15 A.K. Vionis, J. Poblome, B. De Cupere and M. Waelkens, ‘A middle–late Byzantine pottery assemblage from Sagalassos: typo-chronology and sociocultural interpretation’, Hesp, 79.3 (2010), 423–64, 447; D. Papanikola-Bakirtzi (ed.), Byzantine Glazed Ceramics: The Art of Sgraffito (Athens, 1999), 33, 36; Everyday Life, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 333; J. Vroom, After Antiquity: Ceramics and Society in the Aegean from the 7th to the 20th Century A.C.: A Case Study from Boeotia, Central Greece, Archaeological Studies, Leiden University, 10 (Leiden, 2003), 281.

10 Introduction Material culture played a central role in constructing and enhancing the meaning of the components of the banquet. One of the most frequently occurring iconographies on tableware made of both clay and metal depicts animals, either on their own or in groups. Plates and bowls show birds, wild game, felines and fish, which correspond to some of the most commonly consumed foodstuffs at the Byzantine table. The staples of the Byzantine diet were relatively simple, with grains, legumes and vegetables playing a central role. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a period during which the Byzantines’ attitudes towards food and foodstuffs underwent significant changes, with evidence pointing towards a ‘greater desire for sumptuous meals and a greater availability of different foodstuffs’ in the twelfth century.16 Elaborate and composite dishes were considered as the most desirable and carried a complex symbolism. The taste for these dishes is signalled by medieval Byzantine tableware, which in addition to the rota of hares, lions and birds displays combinations of rarer and even mythical creatures, including hybrids and monsters. These are allegorical representations of the novel culinary creations that brought together earth, sky and sea and were designed to stun and astonish those eating them and those looking at them. One of the most important purposes of the vessels used at the Byzantine dinner table was to attract the eyes of diners and to produce sensations of awe. This was achieved first through the visual and physical qualities of the objects and second through the way they were brought to the table. The glaze and paint covering the vessels of ceramic tableware were exactly the point, practically and aesthetically. The glazing of pottery fulfilled a practical purpose, sealing the surface of a vessel to enable it to hold liquids. But it was the aesthetic qualities of glazed pottery that cemented its desirability, with the visual properties of the techniques used in glazed pottery exploited and explored by both the makers and users of ceramic tableware to create the theatre of dining. Viewers were invited to decipher the imagery, with its meaning accentuated, altered and subverted through the placement of colour and glaze. The glistening and shining qualities of gold and silver tableware encrusted with gems and pearls were deliberately deployed in banqueting contexts to produce sensations of awe through visual splendour. The reflective properties of the materials used for tableware, emphasising colour and decoration, were a determining factor in the use and display of both metal and ceramic tableware. The way in which food was presented to guests at banquets was heavily orchestrated and stage-managed – certainly at the imperial court but also in other contexts. The medieval Byzantine dining table was a locus for suspense, animation and delight. The theatrical, spectacular nature of the banquet was heightened through the entertainments that surrounded the diners. These ranged from musicians, dancers and acrobats, as I will discuss, to language and words in the shape of rhetoric and communication. Together, these aspects of the middle Byzantine banquet stimulated the senses of their participants – from food and taste, to the hearing

16 A. Kazhdan and A. Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (London, 1985), 81.

Introduction  11 and seeing of images, movement, music and language. The presence of these performers on ceramic and metal tableware reveals that eating, music and dance were closely interconnected in the creation of the splendour and surprise of the banquet in houses across a broad social spectrum, as the material and cost spectrum of the objects suggests. The performance of music during the theatre of the banquet allowed participants to engage in a ‘higher’ form of sensory perception, perhaps to offset the (over)indulgence of taste, smell and touch that could accompany a meal. In images and descriptions of leisure, the presence of musicians appears to be closely tied to performances by acrobats and dancers. The presence of dancers could fulfil a range of functions, from salubrious entertainment to moral edification and triumphal messaging. One of the most important roles of both the dancers depicted on tableware and the dance that accompanied a banquet was to stimulate the senses of those present. Acrobats provided light-hearted entertainment, with mimes and jesters the focus of orchestrated humour within the Byzantine court and wealthy households. However, the function of acrobats at feasts was not restricted to comedy and laughter but also encompassed the display of superiority. Together, the material and visual properties of tableware, its images and the entertainments surrounding the objects played an important role in constructing the theatre of the dining table, designed to divert and impress guests. At the banquet, words were seen but also imagined. They were involved in the word play, the rhetoric and the communication essential to not only communal meals but also to medieval Byzantine society more generally. The often multivalent and eclectically combined images on medieval Byzantine tableware confront the viewer with a problem: how should the complex and often ambiguous imagery of the bowls and plates be interpreted? Is a single, coherent meaning intended by their decoration, or is the latter a jumble of meaningless scenery? The clue to their interpretation can be found in contemporary rhetorical strategies and performances. Riddles and ‘double-tonguedness’ prominently featured in twelfth-century rhetorical performances and works and even in material culture.17 Studying visual and rhetorical displays together can illuminate not only the interpretation of individual artworks but also the broader relationship in medieval Byzantium between rhetoric and the visual arts. The Byzantine banquet appears to be one of the settings outside of the religious context where sensory indulgence was actively pursued and even indulged. The engagement in and display of the activities of the banquet, from food to entertainment and tableware, acted as social markers that denoted sophistication and good taste. Good taste however could easily turn into bad taste – to maintain social norms and to ensure the salvation of one’s soul, it was crucial to not let indulgence turn into overindulgence, as I will move on to examine. It was enjoyment of food that posed a risk to an individual’s moral and physical well-being: the sense of taste was not only a vehicle for enjoyment but also for damnation. In addition to revealing

17 For an introduction to double-tonguedness, see P. Roilos, Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (Washington, DC, 2005).

12 Introduction whether an individual was of a good or bad character, food consumption in itself could constitute a sin. Decorated objects of tableware vividly illustrated what happened to those that perpetrated a sin, whether related to the table or not. They show beasts and monsters munching on (or disgorging) human body parts, with this imagery recalling contemporary depictions of the Last Judgement.18 The offences associated with food and eating ranged in type and gravity, from punishable offences in monastic refectories to overindulgence and, worst of all, gluttony. Gluttony as the excessive consumption of food and drink is intimately tied to the sense of taste and the lack of restraint in exploring the sensory delights offered by it. Eating, the sense of taste and the sin caused by its (over)indulgence are shown on contemporary works of art, including objects of tableware, to be the cause for the Fall of Adam and Eve, with the images designed to act as deterrents from similar behaviour. By representing scenes of vivid physical pain and punishment that were fluid in their specificity, the tableware used in the medieval Byzantine world encouraged reflections on mortality and on one’s own behaviour, admonishing the viewer to stay on the path of moral virtue. To avoid damnation, the art of dining offered its participants a number of recourses. In addition to the consideration of death while at the table, the art of dining encouraged its viewers to imitate the role models depicted on vessels and their behaviour. Images of men wearing armour and engaged in valiant battles on ceramic tableware reveal that these objects played a crucial role in the formation of a new male ideal that emerged during the Komnenian period – that of the heroic, manly man. The ‘manliness’ of these figures was intimately tied up in their activities, which provided opportunities for the demonstration of bravery and honour. They are shown hunting both game and dragons, alluding to contemporary thought that conceived of the hunt as a preparation for warfare. The presence of such imagery on ceramic vessels suggests that while hunting for leisure and glory may have been out of financial reach to much of the objects’ audiences, the activity of the hunt appealed to a wider range of social circles than often assumed. Representations of these kinds of men are one of the most frequently occurring iconographies on plates and bowls, highlighting the immense popularity enjoyed by this theme across a wide geographical and socio-economic range. The images emphasise military might and courage in the face of evil, a topos that appears prominently in popular literature but at the same time becomes associated closely with the emperor. Images of powerful fighters and successful hunters played an integral role in displays of power and triumph, so crucial to the identity of the upper classes, that took place in banqueting contexts. Nuanced and subtly encoded messages were constructed through pointed iconographies found on precious metal vessels that depicted specific historic and fictional events. They included the victorious

18 For a recent reassessment of the Last Judgement, see N. Bhalla, Experiencing the Last Judgement, SBCH, 1 (Abingdon and New York, 2022); for an introduction to Last Judgement imagery on tableware, see L. Frentrop, ‘Protection and salvation: an eleventh-century silver vessel, its imagery, and its function’, BMGS, 42.1 (2018), 26–44.

Introduction  13 campaigns of emperors, with the decorated tableware tactically deployed to further the humiliation of those they had vanquished. The material properties of the art of dining including the weight and colour of precious metal were used to further communicate the might of an object’s owner in combination with the way in which the artwork was presented to its viewers and users. Another subject used to communicate power and might was that of Alexander the Great, a triumphal ruler associated through visual and textual culture with the figure of the emperor. Alexander the Great is shown on a silver-gilt vessel, accompanied by scenes of leisure and pleasure. Re-contextualising depictions of pleasure, which accompany the images of triumphal rulers on metal tableware in particular, through contemporary discourse and art reveals that they held an alternative meaning that encoded specific nuances of power and triumph. This fluidity of meaning was central to the art of dining, with interpretations constructed and re-constructed discursively with each new and individual beholder.

1

A Taste for Novelty

The Byzantine culture of dining underwent a profound transformation during the medieval period. While dining practices at the imperial court from furniture to seating order remained largely stable, as necessitated by the conception of the nature of imperial power, communal meals in the houses of the middle and lower classes changed in appearance and content.1 Visual and culinary developments in the culture of dining of the period reveal a taste for novelty. In the religious life of the Byzantine empire, novelty and innovation had an ambiguous status and in some circles were even viewed with mistrust after the end of Iconomachy.2 This of course did not stop artistic innovation from occurring and instead primarily affected how it was presented to its viewership, usually under the guise of tradition and consistency.3 But beyond the fringes of the religious sphere – a division that is never clear-cut in Byzantium – novelty played an overtly important role in both art and literature. The changes in middle Byzantine dining practices rest on the foundation of developments in Byzantine material culture. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were marked by the increased production and consumption of ceramics, coupled with the increased popularity of ceramic tableware decorated with colourful glazes, patterns and figures, which came to eclipse the previously

1 On imperial dining during the late antique and middle Byzantine periods, see S. Malmberg, ‘Visualizing hierarchy at imperial banquets’, in W. Mayer and S. Trzcionka (ed.), Feast, Fast or Famine: Food and Drink in Byzantium, ByzAus, 15 (Brisbane, 2005), 11–24; S. Malmberg, ‘Dazzling dining: banquets as an expression of imperial legitimacy’, in L. Brubaker and K. Linardou (ed.), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, SPBS, 13 (Aldershot, 2007), 75–92. 2 L. Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm, Studies in Early Medieval History (London, 2012); A. Littlewood (ed.), Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art and Music (Oxford, 1995), esp. A. Cutler, ‘Originality as a cultural phenomenon’, 203–16. On the question of conservatism and novelty in religious art, see A. Cutler, ‘The limits of conservatism in the arts of Byzantium’, in Proceedings of the 22nd International Congress of Byzantine Studies: Plenary Papers (Sofia, 2011), 537–56. 3 C. Barber, ‘On the origin of the work of art: tradition, inspiration and innovation in the postIconoclastic era’, in K. Mitalaité and A. Vasiliu (ed.), L’icône dans la pensée et dans l’art: constitutions, contestations, reinventions de la notion d’image divine en contexte chrétien (Turnhout, 2017), 153–74; J. Wilson, ‘A meadow that lifts the soul: originality as anthologizing in the Byzantine church interior’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 81 (2020), 1–21, esp. 10–18. DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359-2

A Taste for Novelty  15 dominant ceramic type of unglazed pottery.4 One of the most frequently occurring iconographies on tableware made of both clay and metal depicts animals, either on their own or in groups. Plates and bowls show birds, wild game, felines and fish, which correspond to some of the most commonly consumed foodstuffs at the Byzantine table. The staples of the Byzantine diet were relatively simple, with grains, legumes and vegetables playing a central role. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a period during which the Byzantines’ attitudes towards food and foodstuffs underwent significant changes, with evidence pointing towards a ‘greater desire for sumptuous meals and a greater availability of different foodstuffs’ in the twelfth century.5 Elaborate and composite dishes were considered as the most desirable and carried a complex symbolism. The taste for these dishes is signalled by medieval Byzantine tableware, which in addition to the rota of hares, lions and birds displays combinations of rarer and even mythical creatures including hybrids and monsters. These are allegorical representations of the novel culinary creations that brought together earth, sky and sea and were designed to stun and astonish those eating them and those looking at them. Crucially, the decorated tableware acts as a commentary on the food served to and the food desired by diners. The images, together with contemporary texts, reveal what kinds of food were considered the norm and even boring, and what sorts of dish were perceived as luxurious, strange and appealing. The meals served at the table of the middle Byzantine host were designed to intrigue, astonish and awe guests at their table through the combination of ingredients and their symbolism, the visual presentation of the food and the dramatic way that it was revealed. While the serving of food in sizeable gold vessels hung from gilded ropes and carried by several men at once may have been restricted to the imperial court, the tableware of the medieval Byzantine period sought to produce similar effects through the techniques inherent to its medium. The glittering and shining glaze of the ceramic vessels and fabric of the precious metal vessels appealed to the diners’ eyes through their light-reflecting surfaces, an effect that would have been enhanced by candles and lamps in the light of which banquets would have taken place. The dramatic presentation and display of food in ceramic and metal bowls and plates sought to produce admiration and awe.

4 G. Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies for 9th to 13th century Glazed Wares at Corinth: methodology and social conclusions’, in K. Belke, F. Hild, J. Koder and P. Soustal (ed.), Byzanz als Raum. Zu Methoden und Inhalten der historischen Geographie des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für die TIB, 7 (2000), 153–74, 166. For an example of archaeological evidence and the relationship between the numbers of glazed and unglazed vessels in other rural contexts, see A.K. Vionis, ‘The Byzantine to early modern pottery from Thespiai’, in J.L. Bintliff, E. Farinetti, B. Slapak and A.M. Snodgrass (ed.), Boeotia Project, Volume II: The City of Thespiai. Survey at a Complex Urban Site (Cambridge, 2017), 351–74. 5 A. Kazhdan and A. Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (London, 1985), 81. On the late medieval period, see A.K. Vionis, M. Dikomitou-Eliadou, M. Roumpou, N. Kalogeropoulos and V. Kilikoglou, ‘Stirring pots on fire: medieval technology, diet, and daily life in Cyprus’, in M. Olympios and M. Parani (ed.), The Art and Archaeology of Lusignian and Venetian Cyprus (1192–1571): Recent Research and New Discoveries, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, 12 (Turnhout, 2019), 245–86.

16  A Taste for Novelty The lustrous glazes and incised, stamped and raised imagery decorating tableware were – and still are – visually stunning, indicating that the vessels fulfilled an important social and aesthetic function through their display.6 This was often carefully planned, with material culture supporting and enhancing on one hand the sensory appeal of the novel and elaborate food contained in the vessels and on the other the spectacle of dining. Although texts such as the Book of Ceremonies and the Kletorologion make Byzantine dinner parties appear rather drab, the dining room was in fact a cultural space marked by novelty, sensory indulgence and fun.7 The love of novelty is on display on the vessels used at the Byzantine dining table by means of their appearance and their imagery. A fragmentary plate dated to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century and now in the Benaki Museum in Athens represents a large hare placed at the centre of the vessel.8 The hare has been worked in a technique known as champlevé, whereby shapes are formed by scraping glaze – in this case yellow – off the body of a vessel to expose its fabric – in this case a red clay –, producing a contrast between the colours of the materials and between the textures of the surface. The hare takes up most of the vessel’s surface area and is encircled by alternating lines of red and yellow. A bowl found in Thessalonike and dated to the second half of the twelfth century is decorated with spiral motifs in green and brown paint that surround a central medallion.9 In this medallion, a bird has been engraved with a stylus through the yellowish slip of the bowl in a technique known as sgraffito. On either side of the bird is a foliate motif. The edges of the bowl are decorated with incised foliate motifs and lines and strokes painted in green and brown paint. A more restrained version of the same subject is depicted on a bowl from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, highlighting the popularity of such images (fig. 1.1). And a large bowl represents a single fish at the bottom of the vessel’s inside (fig. 1.2). Surrounding the fish are V-shaped lines, perhaps representing the waves of the sea. The visual and conceptual importance of the animals adorning objects of tableware is highlighted through the placement and scale of their representations. The images are placed at the heart of the vessel they adorn and occupy most of its surface. Often, the depictions of animals are highlighted through additional ornament such as concentric circles that draw the viewer’s eye to the image. As these vessels show, depictions of animals were not limited to a specific shape or style of ceramics. Instead, they occur consistently and

6 On changes in and the display of status, see E.F. Henrickson and M.M.A. McDonald, ‘Ceramic form and function: an ethnographic search and an archaeological application’, American Anthropologist, 85 (1983), 630–45; J.J. Lischka, ‘A functional analysis of middle classic ceramics at Kaminaljuyu’, in R.K. Wetherington (ed.), The Ceramics of Kaminaljuyu (Guatemala, 1978), 223–78. On the articulation and assertion of individual and group identity through dining habits, see J. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge, 1982), esp. 38. 7 For more on this subject and a select bibliography, see S. Tougher, ‘Having fun in Byzantium’, in L. James (ed.), A Companion to Byzantium (London, 2012), 135–45. 8 The Benaki Museum, Athens, inv. no. 17360. 9 The Benaki Museum, Athens, inv. no. 13556.

A Taste for Novelty  17

Figure 1.1 Bowl with bird of prey, 1000–1300. 5.3 × 24.4  cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 1984.

Figure 1.2 Bowl with fish, 1100–1300. 9 × 25.5  cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Christopher C. Grisanti and Suzanne P. Fawbush, 2000.

18  A Taste for Novelty frequently on ceramic tableware that represents a broad range of the cost and skill spectrum in its manufacture and decoration. Ceramic bowls and plates such as these signal their owners’ engagement with the new aesthetic tastes of dining that emphasised visual complexity and the deliberate display of the food at the table. Both craftsmen and audiences exploited the material and visual properties of the material of ceramics to this end. The images of animals that decorate the above examples and many other ceramic vessels are visually prominent, the figures large and centrally placed. This is a notable novelty in itself: figural imagery was virtually absent from the decoration of ceramic tableware for nearly half a millennium beforehand.10 Until around the late tenth or eleventh century, the visual appearance of ceramic tableware was dominated by symbols and tool marks that only covered a small portion of the surface. This came to be replaced by images of animals, humans and symbols drawn in a range of styles and innovative techniques. This represented a relatively recent development in the decoration of ceramic vessels at the time that the objects were made. Over the same period, ceramics decorated with shiny and colourful glazes in different colours grew significantly in popularity.11 This new type of tableware, decorated in lustrous glazes and with incised, stamped and raised imagery, was visually stunning. The glistening and lavish appearance of glazed and decorated ceramic tableware would have been particularly striking under the light and shadows of candles and oil lamps. The objects’ decoration, which plays around with recessed and raised surfaces and lines, would have been thrown in starker contrast through the flickering flames. With shadows appearing deeper and surfaces highlighted, the figures on the vessels would have appeared animated, with fish swimming, cheetahs prowling and hares leaping. The imagery almost would have seemed to their viewers to project outwards from the body of the object. The visual splendour of decorated and glazed vessels achieved through the introduction of new decorative techniques was paralleled by the changing shapes of ceramic tableware. The wide and flat shape of bowls and plates made it easier to access the vessels’ contents both visually and physically. The larger size of ceramic tableware, with vessels sometimes measuring up to 30 cm in diameter, commandeered attention.12 Laden

10 J. Vroom, After Antiquity: Ceramics and Society in the Aegean from the 7th to the 20th Century A.C.: A Case Study from Boeotia, Central Greece, Archaeological Studies, Leiden University, 10 (Leiden, 2003), 230; K. Dark, Byzantine Pottery (Gloucestershire, Charleston, Joué-lès-Tours and Erfurt, 2001), 102–3. 11 In Corinth, glazed wares represented less than 0.7% by weight of all pottery dated to the tenth and eleventh century; in later contexts in the city, this increases significantly to around 2% in the early twelfth century, 6% by the middle of the twelfth century, and around 20% by the middle of the thirteenth century. Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies’, 166. 12 On changing ceramic typology, see J. Vroom, ‘Pots and pies: adventures in the archaeology of eating habits in Byzantium’, in E. Sibbeson, B. Jervis and S. Coxon (ed.), Insights from Innovation: New Light on Archaeological Ceramics. Papers Presented in Honour of Professor David Peacock’s Contribution to Archaeological Ceramic Studies (St Andrews, 2016), 221–44; for the rim diameters of middle Byzantine ceramic vessels, see Vroom, After Antiquity, table 7.3.

A Taste for Novelty  19 with food, the plates and bowls would have taken up a substantial amount of space on the dining table and attracted the eyes (and hands) of the diners. The novel developments in dining habits that emphasised the visual, sensory appeal of ceramic tableware by means of size, colour and imagery invited – demanded, even – close looking. The images of animals on tableware are multivalent but most immediately function as depictions of some of the mainstays of the Byzantine diet.13 The birds and game animals depicted on tableware were consumed throughout the empire, though the patterns and frequency in which these and other meats were eaten varied depending on availability and affordability, as well as dietary restrictions.14 The main animals reared in the Byzantine countryside for consumption were sheep, goats, pigs and cattle. Suckling pig, lamb, kid, pigeons and chickens were also eaten, though more rarely, so that their consumption constituted a form of culinary novelty to many.15 The Byzantine upper classes both in cities and in the countryside probably consumed significant amounts of meat, though sources suggest that it played a less important role in the diet of other Byzantine individuals.16 A deep plate dated to the middle of the twelfth century is decorated with the image of a large cheetah, whose mane, tail and fur are articulated 13 The symbolic meaning of animals including those represented on ceramic tableware has been discussed in detail in the works of Henry Maguire and others. See for example H. Maguire, ‘“Signs and symbols of your always victorious reign.” The political ideology and meaning of falconry in Byzantium’, in A. Lymberopoulou (ed.), Images of the Byzantine World: Visions, Messages and Meanings. Studies Presented to Leslie Brubaker (Ashgate, 2011), 135–46. 14 See C. Bourbou and S. Garvie-Lok, ‘Bread, oil, wine, and milk: feeding infants and adults in Byzantine Greece’, Archaeodiet in the Greek World: Dietary Reconstruction from Stable Isotope Analysis, Hesperia Supplements, 49 (2015), 171–94; Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, Section II Practicalities, 27–74; D. Papanikola-Bakirtzi (ed.), Βυζαντινών διατροφή και μαγειρείαι. Πρακτικά ημερίδας ‘Περί της διατροφής στο Βυζάντιο’ (Athens, 2005); O. Schmitt, ‘Zur Fleischversorgung Konstantinopels’, JÖB, 54 (2004), 13–57; A.A.M. Bryer, ‘The means of agricultural production: muscle and tools’, in A. Laiou (ed.), The Economic History of Byzantium, vol. 1 (Washington, DC, 2002), 101–13; J. Vroom, ‘Byzantine garlic and Turkish delight: dining habits and cultural change in central Greece from Byzantine to Ottoman times’, Archaeological Dialogues, 7.2 (2000), 199–216; C. Mango and G. Dagron (ed.), Constantinople and its Hinterland: Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, April 1993, SPBS, 3 (Aldershot, 1995), Section I The Land and its Products, 9–76; J. Koder, Gemüse in Byzanz: Die Versorgung Konstantinopels mit Frischgemüse im Lichte der Geoponika, Byzantinische Geschichtsschreiber. Ergänzungsband, 3 (Vienna, 1993); M. Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle: propriété et exploitation du sol (Paris, 1992); T. Kolias, ‘Eßgewohnheiten und Verpflegung im byzantinischen Heer’, in W. Hörandner, J. Koder, O. Kresten and E. Trapp (ed.), ΒΥΖΑΝΤΙΟΣ: Festschrift für Herbert Hunger zum 70. Geburtstag (Vienna, 1984), 193–202; A.A.M. Bryer, ‘The estates of the empire of Trebizond: evidence for their resources, products, agriculture, ownership and location’, Αρχείον Πόντου, 35 (1979), 392–413; J. Teall, ‘The grain supply of the Byzantine empire, 330–1025’, DOP, 13 (1959), 87–139; see also M. Dembińska, ‘Diet: a comparison of food consumption between some eastern and western monasteries in the 4th–12th centuries’, Byz, 55.2 (1985), 431–62. 15 C. Motsias, Τι έτρωγαν οι Βυζαντινοί (Athens, 1998); A. Kazhdan, ‘The peasantry’, in G. Cavallo (ed.), The Byzantines (Chicago, 1997), 43–73, 52–56. 16 Kazhdan, ‘Peasantry’, 55; A. Dalby, Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece (London, 1996), 196; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 44–45.

20  A Taste for Novelty through incised circles, dots and lines.17 The four paws of the feline are clawing on a deer. The deer – the cheetah’s prey – is lying on the ground with its tongue lolling out of its mouth, indicating the successful outcome of the cheetah’s hunt. Around the pair of animals depicted on the vessel, curving lines suggest the shape of the branches and leaves of trees and place the scene in the wild outdoors. The moving trees, the pouncing cheetah and the prone deer create a dynamic scene that implies movement, and even sound – the running, jumping and struggle of the animals and the gentle swaying and whispering of leaves, branches and trees. Cheetahs were used in the hunt by the rich and powerful throughout the medieval world. The depiction of a cheetah in pursuit of a deer on the plate, similarly to the representation of birds of prey and other hunting felines on other ceramic vessels, alludes to the activity of the hunt both as a leisure pastime and as a means of procuring meat for dinner. In this context, the imagery of the vessel is highly self-referential, pointing at both what the plate may have contained and how it was killed. Depending on its viewing context, the image could even act as a self-conscious visual joke: while it suggests that the host of the banquet – the plate’s owner – may have gone on a heroic hunt to serve dinner, it was far more likely that he was in fact a man of the middling classes who did no more than buy a piece of meat at the market.18 Wealthy aristocrats in contrast cultivated animal parks in which creatures to hunt and animals trained to hunt them were kept. The communal consumption of the hunted game played an important part in the rituals of power and social structuring.19 On the Clephane Horn, an oliphant made in eleventh-century Sicily that depicts the activities of the Hippodrome in Constantinople, a cheetah sits on the back of a horse during a hunt.20 With public venues such as the Hippodrome featuring these activities, hunts were accessible to those who did not have the funds to have their own hunting parks – even if it was only as onlookers. The ceramic plate depicting the cheetah and deer fulfils a similarly democratic purpose. It offers a representation of an activity primarily associated with the wealthy and powerful – that of hunting for pleasure rather than necessity – in a medium that was financially accessible to larger swathes of the population. A small thirteenth-century bowl now in Bodrum shows on its inside two fish circling its centre, with the head of each fish touching the fins of the other.21 The bodies of the two creatures are articulated with delicately incised sgraffito lines, the dark red colour of which contrasts with the now yellow-brown glaze of the vessel. When

17 Byzantine Glazed Ceramics, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 123, cat. 134. 18 On meat trade in Constantinople, see M. Mundell Mango, ‘The commercial map of Constantinople’, DOP, 54 (2000), 189–207. 19 For more on this, see Chapter 5. 20 On the oliphant, see A. Eastmond, ‘Byzantine oliphants?’, in N. Asutay-Effenberger and F. Daim (ed.), ΦΙΛΟΠΑΤΙΟΝ. Spaziergang im kaiserlichen Garten. Schriften über Byzanz und seine Nachbarn. Festschrift für Arne Effenberger zum 70. Geburtstag, Monographien des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 106 (Mainz, 2012), 95–118. 21 Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, inv. no. 430, H 11.6, D 17 cm; A. Ödekan (ed.), ‘The Remnants’: 12th and 13th Centuries, Byzantine Objects in Turkey (Istanbul, 2007), 94.

A Taste for Novelty  21 the bowl was filled with a clear liquid, the fish would have appeared to be swimming in the vessel, with the visual effect of water rippling in a pond heightened by the graduated colour of the glaze.22 Fishponds were among the non-utilitarian waterworks installed in Constantinople, and presumably other cities, during the Macedonian period. Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (r. 913–959) for example laid out a fishpond as part of his embellishments of the Boukoleon Palace, which also featured fountains decorated with elaborate sculpture.23 Fish also formed an important decorative motif on objects and monuments related to water, such as the baths built by Leo VI (r. 886–912) that were decorated with mosaic cycles depicting fishing scenes.24 Here, the imagery of circling fish and visual mimicry of water turn the ceramic bowl into a miniature fishpond, alluding to the decorative water feature found in both gardens and cities. The consumption of fish in medieval Byzantium is documented by archaeozoology on one hand and in textual sources such as the third of the Ptochoprodromic Poems on the other. The poem claims authorship by a former monk of the Philotheou Monastery in Constantinople and draws a lively picture of the ways in which fish was prepared for eating: Πρῶτον διαβαίνει τὸ ἐκζεστόν, ψησσόπουλον μπουρδᾶτον, καὶ δεύτερον περίχυμα, μαζὸς βεβαρυμένος, καὶ τρίτον ὀξυνόγλυκος κροκατομαγείρια, ἔχουσα στάχος, σύσγουδα, καρυόφυλλα, τριψίδια, ἀμανιτἀρια, ὄξος τε καὶ μέλιν ἐκ τὸ ἀκάπνιν, καὶ ἀπέσο κεῖται κόκκινη, μεγάγη φιλομῆλα, καὶ κέφαλος τριπίθαμος αὐγᾶτος ἐκ το Ῥήγιν καὶ συναγρίδα πεπανή, ἐκ τὰς καλάς, τὰς πρώτας – αἴ, νὰ ἔφαγα ἐκ τὰ θρύμματα, νὰ ἔπια ἐκ τὸ ζουμίν των, καὶ χιώτικον νὰ ἐτσάκωδα κἄν τέσσαρα μουχρούτια, καὶ νὰ ἐρευξάμην εὔνοστα καὶ νὰ ἐπαρηγορήθην! – 22 On the properties of water (and wine) as drinks, see E. Kislinger, ‘Being and well-being in Byzantium: the case of beverages’, in M. Grünbart, E. Kislinger, A. Muthesius and D. Stathakopoulos (ed.), Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453), DenkWien, 336 (Vienna, 2007), 147–54; see also E. Kislinger, ‘Dall’ubriacone al krasopateras: consumo del vino a Bisanzio’, in G. Archetti and P. Villa (ed.), La civilità del vino: fonti, temi e produzioni vitivinicole dal medioevo al Novecento (Brescia, 2003), 173–96. 23 Theophanes Continuatus, Chronographia, VI.8, ed. I. Bekker, Theophanes Continuatus, Ioannes Cameniata, Symeon Magister, Georgius Monachus, CSHB, 33 (Bonn, 1838), 447; tr. C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (London, 1986), 207–8. On open water, in contrast to ponds and fountains, as a metaphor for wilderness, see V. della Dora, Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2016), 236–44. 24 Patria, ed. T. Preger, Scriptores originum Constantinopolitarum (Leipzig, 1901–7), 145, 222, 228; R. Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique de l’Empire byzantin (Paris, 1969), 298–300; Theophanes Continuatus, Chronographia, VI.42, ed. Bekker, 460–1; P. Magdalino, ‘The bath of Leo the Wise and the “Macedonian renaissance” revisited: topography, iconography, ceremonial, ideology’, DOP, 42 (1988), 97–118, esp. 116–8; P. Magdalino, ‘The cult of water in the “Macedonian renaissance”’, in B. Shilling and P. Stephenson (ed.), Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2016), 130–44.

22  A Taste for Novelty καὶ τέταρτον τὸ ὀπτούτσικον, καὶ πέμπτον τὸ τηγάνου, κομμάτια μεσοκόμματα, τριγλία μουστακᾶτα, καὶ διπλοτήγανον παχὺν μεγάλων ἀθερίνων, καὶ κιθαργὸς ὀπτούτσικος, ἀκέραιος, μὲ τὸ γάρος, τὀ καρναβάδιν ἄνωθεν ἕως κάτω πεπασμένος, καὶ πάλιν ἀπολάκτισμα μεγάλου λαβρακίου. First comes the baked dish, the little pisi in their stew. Second, the saucy one, a hake weighed down with gravy. Third, the sweet-and-sour, the saffron dish, with spikenard, valerian, cloves, cinnamon, and little mushrooms, and vinegar and unsmoked honey, and in the midst a big golden gurnard and a grey mullet, three hands’ breadths, with roe, from Rygin harbour, and a fine, well grown, first quality dentex (…). Fourth the grill and fifth the fry-up: chopped morsels from the middle; red mullets (with their moustaches); a double-sized deep pan of big sand-smelts; a flounder, nicely grilled on its own, with fish sauce, sprinkled from top to tail with caraway; and a steak from a big seabass.25 The sheer quantity of depictions of fish on ceramic tableware is suggestive of the desirability of this type of food. The frequency of such surviving images and the vivid detail with which the preparation and taste of fish and seafood is described in textual sources ensured that even if they may not always have featured as part of a meal, they certainly were on the audiences’ minds. The visual qualities of the bowl from Bodrum with its variegated glaze and tactile surface, and the array of fish, shellfish and spices listed by Ptochoprodromos hint at the sensory richness of the Byzantine banquet. The effects of the fragrant food brought to the table would have been augmented by the shape, colour and imagery of the vessels in which it was served. The imagery on and appearance of middle Byzantine ceramic tableware highlights that the Byzantine banquet was a context in which sensory experiences and perhaps even excess were promoted through visual and material culture on one hand and culinary culture on the other. Yet the frequency with which fish and seafood as well as meat form the subject of the art of the banquet, in sensorially appealing and evocative ways, may not have been matched by their actual consumption. Some form of fasting, the restriction or complete avoidance of the consumption of oil, meat, eggs, cheese and fish, was practised during around half of the year in Byzantium in secular settings as well as in monastic contexts.26 The observation 25 Ptochoprodromika, 3.147–63, ed. D.C. Hesseling and H. Pernot, Poèmes Prodromiques en grec vulgaire (Amsterdam, 1910), 54–5, tr. A. Dalby, Tastes of Byzantium: The Cuisine of a Legendary Empire (London, 2010), 173–4. 26 Johannes Koder and Chryssi Bourbou and Sandra Garvie-Lok calculated that a minimum of 170 days of the year were days of fasting. See J. Koder, ‘Stew and salted meat - opulent normality in the diet of everyday?’, in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, 59–72, 61, n.15; Koder, Gemüse in Byzanz, 18, n.8; Bourbou and Garvie-Lok, ‘Bread, oil, wine, and milk’, 172. For

A Taste for Novelty  23 of fasting rules by lay communities constituted a major moral and social concern, with the upholding of dietary restrictions represented in medieval Byzantine texts as a defining factor of the good Christian. In the apocalyptic tales, which warn against ‘everyday’ sins to ensure social cohesion and stability, transgressions in this area are represented as offences that warrant painful and eternal punishment in the afterlife.27 In the Apocalypse of Anastasia, compiled some time between the late tenth and twelfth centuries, audiences are reminded to abstain from meat and cheese every Wednesday and Friday and to practise dry fasting.28 Addressing all Christians both lay and monastic, the patriarch of Constantinople Athanasios (1230–1310) writes that men, women and children ‘should stop eating fish (…). Instead of these, kollyba [boiled wheat mixed with flour, pomegranate seeds, and raisins] and pulses and fruits and vegetables are sufficient for the Orthodox’.29 Beyond the lay context, the monks of Mt Athos are reminded in a didactic poem written by Nicholas Grammatikos in the early twelfth century to fast and consume only bread, salt, vegetables and water, adding that the rules are ‘not only for monks, but for all believers and worshippers of Christ’.30 And in the early eleventh century, the metropolitan Demetrios Chomatedos writes that on days of fasting, the monks after prayer and hymns eat ‘only bread, dried figs, dates, and vegetables’ and drink water instead of the customary wine.31 And yet, typika such as that of the Pantokrator

a contemporary definition of fasting and abstinence, see Black Mountain: Regulations of Nikon of the Black Mountain, Ch. 91, ed. V. Benešević, Taktikon Nikona Chernogortsa (Petrograd, 1917), tr. R. Allison, BMFD, I, 416. For a detailed list of fast and feast days and fasting recommendations, see Nicholas III Grammatikos, Νικολάου τοῦ ἁγιωτάτου πατριάρχου Κωνσταντινουπόλεως ποίημα πρὸς τὸν πρῶτον τοῦ Ἁγίου Ὄρους ὡς τυπικόν, tr. J. Koder, ‘Das Fastengedicht des Patriarchen Nikolaos III Grammatikos’, JÖB, 19 (1970), 203–41. On food rations in the Great Lavra Monastery in the early 1100s, see Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 26; see also J.W. Nesbitt, ‘Mechanisms of agricultural production on estates of the Byzantine praktika’ (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1972), 46. 27 J. Baun, Tales from another Byzantium: Celestial Journey and Local Community in the Medieval Greek Apocrypha (Cambridge, 2007), 346–50; on the social role of Last Judgement imagery, see N. Bhalla, Experiencing the Last Judgement, SBCH, 1 (Abingdon and New York, 2022). 28 Apocalypse of Anastasia, ed. R. Homburg, Apocalypsis Anastasiae, ad trium codicum auctoritatem Panormitani Ambrosiani Parisi (Leipzig, 1903), Ch. 4, Ch. 26, tr. Baun, Tales from another Byzantium, 328. 29 ‘καὶ βρῶσιν ἰχθύων παυθῆναι ἐν τῷ αἰγιαλῷ παρὰ τῶν γραïδίων ἐνεργουμένην, ἀρκούντων ἀντὶ τούτων τοῖς ὀρθοδόξοις κολλύβων ἤ ὀσπρίων ἢ ὀπωρῶν ἢ λαχάνων’, Athanasios I, Ep. 43.36–44, ed. tr. A.-M. Talbot, The Correspondence of Athanasius I Patriarch of Constantinople: Letters to the Emperor Andronicus II, Members of the Imperial Family, and Officials, CFHB, 7 (Washington, DC, 1975), 90–1. 30 Nicholas Grammatikos, Ποίημα πρὸς τὸν πρῶτον, v.130–1, tr. Koder, ‘Fastengedicht’, 215. 31 Koder, Gemüse in Byzanz, 19. For more on the fasting period in different monasteries of the middle Byzantine period, see Stoudios: Rule of the Monastery of St. John Stoudios in Constantinople, Ch. 30, ed. A. Dmitrievsky, Opisanie liturgicheskikh rykopisei, I: Typika, pt. 1 (Kyiv, 1895) [recension A], ed. A. Mai and J. Cozza-Luzi, Nova partum bibliotheca, V (Rome, 1849), 111–25, repr. PG 99:1704–20 [recension B], tr. T. Miller, BMFD, I, 110–11; Black Mountain, Ch. 56, tr. BMFD, I, 401–2; Kecharitomene: Typikon of Empress Irene Doukaina Komnene for the Convent of the Mother of God Kecharitomene in Constantinople, Ch. 47, ed. P. Gautier, ‘Le typikon de la Théotokos

24  A Taste for Novelty monastery, dated to 1136, reveal that while religious doctrine may have forbidden the consumption of certain foodstuffs such as fish and shellfish, some monks lived a life of luxury and excess in stark contrast with the ascetic ideal promoted around the same time.32 It is likely that lay communities, too, did not always adhere to the dietary regulations of orthodox life and often chose feasting above fasting. The excesses indulged in some monasteries, at the imperial court and in lay communities form the subject of poetry and of historical chronicles, and are satirised in the Ptochoprodromic poems, suggesting that the unofficial motto may have been ‘eat as I say, not as I do’. More exotic and composite kinds of novelty are represented on a deep ceramic bowl from Corinth (fig. 1.3), dated to c.1140–70. The bowl depicts on its interior a large bird, a siren and a fish. The bird has long legs and a long feathery tail – an o­ strich. Ostriches were common birds in several regions bordering the southern and eastern Mediterranean. They are depicted in late antique mosaics and their eggs were widely traded in the antique period and fashioned into luxury objects. The Book of Job states that the ostrich ‘leaveth her eggs on the earth and warmeth them in the dust and forgetteth that the foot may crush them […] she is hardened against her young ones’; Pliny and the Physiologus credit the ostrich with being able to eat anything, including glowing coal, and using her gaze to hatch her eggs. Ostrich eggs were hung from the ceilings of Orthodox, Coptic and Assyrian churches including the monastery of St Catherine at Sinai, with the church dedicated to the saint decorated with upwards of sixteen hanging ostrich eggs.33 There is no evidence that the medieval Byzantines ate ostriches. Instead, on the bowl from Corinth, the ostrich alludes to the qualities associated with the bird through word, image and material culture. On the back of the ostrich depicted on the ceramic bowl stands a siren, a figure with a male human head with short curly

Kécharitôménè’, REB, 43 (1985), 5–165, 19–155, tr. R. Jordan, BMFD, II, 691–3; Kosmosoteira: Typikon of the Sebastokrator Isaac Komnenos for the Monastery of the Mother of God Kosmosoteira near Bera, Ch. 25, ed. L. Petit, ‘Typikon du monastère de la Kosmosotira près d’Aenos (1152)’, IRAIK, 13 (1908), 17–75, 19–75, tr. N.P. Ševčenko, BMFD, II, 813; Phoberos: Rule of John for the Monastery of St. John the Forerunner of Phoberos, Ch. 28, ed. A.I. PapadopoulosKerameus, Noctes Petropolitanae (St Petersburg, 1913), 1–88, tr. R. Jordan, BMFD, III, 914–17; Mamas: Typikon of Athanasios Philanthropenos for the Monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople, Ch. 18, ed. S. Eustratiades, ‘Typikon tes en Konstantinoupolei mones tou hagiou megalomartyros Mamantos‘, Hellenika, 1 (1928), 256–31, 256–311, tr. A Bandy, BMFD, III, 1006–8; Heliou ­Bomon: Typikon of Nikephoros Mystikos for the Monastery of the Mother of God ton Heliou Bomon or ­Elegmon, Ch. 18, ed. A. Dmitrievsky, 715–69, tr. A. Bandy, BMFD, III, 1063–5. 32 Kazhdan and Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture, 81; P. Gautier, ‘Le typicon du Christ Sauveur Pantocrator’, REB, 32 (1974), 1–145, 57.466–82. 33 N. Green, ‘Ostrich eggs and peacock feathers: sacred objects as cultural exchange between ­Christianity and Islam’, Al-Masāq, 18.1 (2006), 27–78, 30–5; G.H. Forsyth and K. Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Church and Fortress of Justinian, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1965), pl. 43, 57, 60, 85, 101; Job 39:13–17, also Lamentations 4:3. On ostrich eggs as church lighting in late antique period, see G. Galavaris, ‘Some aspects of symbolic use of lights in the Eastern church candles, lamps and ostrich eggs’, BMGS, 4 (Essays presented to Sir Steven Runciman) (1978), 69–78.

A Taste for Novelty  25

Figure 1.3 Bowl with ostrich, siren and fish, Corinth, c.1140–1170.  American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas.

hair atop the body of a bird with scale-like feathers and long claws. To the right of the vessel’s inside is represented a fish that is positioned at a right angle to the two other creatures. Its long body, which stretches to almost the full height of the large bird next to it, is covered by scales and outlined by thin, fringed lines. The imagery of the vessel brings together the eclectic combination of a commonly available foodstuff – fish – that, depending on its type and origin, could be considered a delicacy; a bird whose eggs were considered a luxury item in the medieval world; and a hybrid creature. Taken together, this serves as a commentary on the food consumed and the food desired. The visual novelty on the bowl from Corinth expresses the types of culinary novelty pursued by medieval Byzantine diners: rarity, luxury and hybridity. These aspects of culinary novelty and delight were achieved in cookery first through the ingredients, their origin and their quality, and second their preparation and presentation. Although the diet of most Byzantine individuals was relatively simple, largely vegetarian and dominated by dietary regulations from medical concerns to religious rules around fasting, texts reveal a love for elaborate and complex dishes.34 Across genres, textual sources – which in light of their authors’ social

34 It has been suggested that the diet of the poorer classes, because of the cost of meat, would have been mainly vegetarian, with olives and olive oil the main sources of fat and calories. See Koder,

26  A Taste for Novelty and intellectual status tend to speak predominantly to and of the activities of the upper classes – are relatively consistent in terms of what types of food are classed as novel and desirable. This suggests some form of standardised food norms understood by most across the socio-economic spectrum, something confirmed by the images on ceramic tableware and their meaning. The representation on ceramic tableware of rarefied foodstuffs esteemed by contemporary discourse indicates that the images and texts partook in shared dietary aspirations if not a shared dietary reality. The third Ptochoprodromic Poem, which so eloquently describes an array of fish dishes, lays out the protagonist’s complaints about the disparity in food served to the ordinary monks and to the monastics of higher rank at his monastery. While the poem may be read as exaggerating the respective properties of the food consumed for satirical and comic effect, it still offers valuable information concerning what was considered as desirable or non-desirable food by its author and audiences.35 Ptochoprodromos’s deploration of the food allocated to him and envy of the food consumed by his superiors reveals that the poem’s narrator – and, by extension, the poem’s audiences – had a hankering for meals seasoned with hard-tocome-by and expensive spices and prepared with skill and a complex selection of quite literally refined and high-quality ingredients. In Ptochoprodromos’s account, these include a wide range of fruit and fish, accompanied by coveted cheeses and imported wines. In contrast, food made from lower quality and coarse ­ingredients, with little diversity in components and seasoning, and prepared in inappropriate cooking ware is presented as undesirable. The categories of desirable foods ­described in literary works are confirmed by historical sources, including middle Byzantine epistolography that describes food gifts sent and received and elucidates their perceived value, and historical reports such as Eustathios of Thessalonike’s (c.1115–c.1195/6) account of the wedding banquet held by Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143–1180) for his children in 1179 or 1180.36 Taken together, literary works, Gemüse in Byzanz, 17; Bourbou and Garvie-Lok, ‘Bread, oil, wine, and milk’, 173. On medical rules concerning eating, see F. Lauritzen, ‘Between the past and the east: Symeon Seth’s nutritional advice to Michael VII Doukas’, in B. Pitarakis (ed.), Life is Short, Art Long: The Art of Healing in Byzantium (Istanbul, 2015), 124–34. 35 Ptochoprodromika, III.174–94, ed. tr. H. Eideneier, Ptochoprodromos: Einführung, kritische Ausgabe, deutsche Übersetzung, Glossar, Neograeca Medii Aevi, 5 (Cologne, 1991), 194–5. 36 Eustathios of Thessalonike, Λόγος I, ed. P. Wirth, Eustathii Thessalonicensis opera minora: magnam partem inedita, CFHB, 32 (Berlin, 2000), 170–81; Eustathios of Thessalonike, De emenanda vita monachica, ed. T.L.F. Tafel, Eustathii metropolitae Thessalonicensis opuscula (Frankfurt am Main, 1832), 230–1. D. Chernoglazov, ‘Was bedeuten drei Fische? Betrachtung von Geschenken in byzantinischen Briefen (IV.–XII. Jh.)’, in M. Grünbart (ed)., Geschenke erhalten die Freundschaft: Gabentausch und Netzwerkpflege im europäischen Mittelalter. Akten des internationalen Kolloquiums Münster, 19.–20. November 2009, Byzantinische Studien und Texte (Berlin, 2011), 55–69; M. Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid: Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop (Aldershot, 1997), 33; A. Karpozelos, ‘Realia in Byzantine epistolography‘, BZ, 77.1 (1984), 20–37. See also Michael Psellos, Ep. 87, ed. E. Kurtz and F. Drexl, Michaelis Psellis Scripta minora: magnam partem adhuc inedita, 2: Epistulae (Milan, 1941), 116, 1.15–16; tr. F. Bernard‚ ‘“Greet me with words”: gifts and intellectual friendships in eleventh-century Byzantium’, in Geschenke erhalten die Freundschaft, Grünbart ed., 1–11, 1; Michael Psellos, Ep. 40, ed. Kurtz and Drexl, 66, 1.26–30; tr. F. Bernard,

A Taste for Novelty  27 chronicles and epistles draw a more complete picture of the ordinary and extraordinary diet of individuals living during the middle Byzantine period. They highlight that certain foods and food groups were consistently regarded as particularly desirable and luxurious. These include certain categories of fruit and vegetables; texts also demonstrate a particular appreciation for certain types of meat and fish. The shared properties of these prized foodstuffs were that they tended to be hard to come by – they needed to be cultivated and harvested, hunted or transported over long distances – and that they often belong to food groups of which the consumption would have been restricted during a large part of the year, namely meat, fish and sweets. It is the exclusive and restricted nature of these foods that makes them desirable, novel and valuable in the eyes of both giver and recipient – and, as Ptochoprodromos’s writings attest, the envy of bystanders. The depictions on ceramic (and metal) tableware of novel and composite animals including sirens, as on the bowl with an ostrich from Corinth, and other creatures reveal their audiences’ love for novelty both culinary and artistic and, at the dining table, for complex and composite fare. On a deep plate dated to between 1100 and 1150, two of these creatures are incised into the vessel’s glaze.37 They are standing back-to-back, each facing towards the edge of the plate. The curly hair on their heads seems to almost fuse together, creating a visually dense mirage of merging spirals. Their human heads end in proudly inflated bird bodies. Their wings point downwards. Around them, snaking tendrils frame the image – perhaps a visual tool to signal that these strange and perhaps even dangerous creatures are safely contained within the medium of the ceramic plate. This message is echoed by the sirens’ stance, which is proudly vigilant rather than menacing. Here, they promise the viewer and banqueter their protection and offer the sensory delight contained in the food heaped upon them. Another type of hybrid, a griffin, is represented on a fragmentary ceramic bowl.38 The figure is incised into the white slip of the vessel and takes up most of what remains of the bowl’s surface. What remains visible of the mystical creature are its body, consisting of a solid trunk, that extends into four

‘Humor in Byzantine letters of the tenth to twelfth centuries: some preliminary remarks’, DOP, 69 (2015), 179–96, 189; Psellos, Ep. 74, ed. K. Sathas, Μεσαιωνική Βιβλιοθήκη, vol. 5 (Paris, 1876), 309; Michael Psellos, Πονήμα Ἰατρικόν, ed. I.L. Ideler, Physici et medici graeci minores, I (Berlin, 1841), 206.88–90. Eustathios of Thessalonike, Ep. 1, 2, 6, 17, 28, ed. Tafel, 308, 313, 324, 335; P. Koukoules, Βυζαντινών βίος και πολιτισμός, vol. 5 (Athens, 1952), 106, 288. On meat exchanged as gifts, see R. Browning, ‘Unpublished correspondence between Michael Italicus Archbishop of Philippopolis and Theodore Prodromos’, BBulg, 1 (1962), 279–297, 285, 291; Theodore Daphnopates, Ep. 28, ed. tr. J. Darrouzès and L.G. Westerink, Théodore Daphnopatès, Correspondance, Le monde byzantin (Paris, 1978), 189. On sweets, see John Tzetzes, Ep. 1, ed. J. Darrouzès, Épistoliers byzantins du Xe siècle, AOC, 6 (Paris, 1960), 318.39. 37 B. Böhlendorf-Arslan, Spätantike, byzantinische und postbyzantinische Keramik, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst. Bestandskataloge, 3 (Wiesbaden, 2013), 561–2, cat. 1356, pl. 176. 38 ‘The Remnants’, ed. Ödekan, 78. A fine sgraffito bowl in Dumbarton Oaks depicts a similar subject, H. Evans and W. Wixom (ed.), The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261 (New York, 1997), 263, cat. 185.

28  A Taste for Novelty legs ending in talons and a pair of wings. The body of the griffin curves up the wall of the bowl and its claws almost burst out of the confines of the vessel. The griffin is shown attacking a smaller animal, perhaps a deer. The scale and movement of the figure express strength and dynamism. The griffin’s body is decorated with incised stencils, mirrored by the pattern on the body of its prey, that probably indicate fur. Its wings are drawn in a scale-like pattern. The combination of different styles of ‘draughtsmanship’, of soft fur and scaled wings, highlights the creature’s ‘compositeness’ not only in terms of its very nature but also in terms of its visual qualities, its texture, its appearance. As creatures that are not found within the realms of nature but were thought to exist outside of it, the griffins, sirens and other hybrids are in their very essence novel. In Byzantine art history, the discussion of such creatures has been limited to identification with innovation in the secular realm.39 While the appearance of such creatures on metal and ceramic tableware has been noted, the reasoning behind this is often brushed over. Why did people want to look at centaurs, sirens and other fantastical creatures during meals and in their homes? Asking this question of material can reveal not only how the imagery decorating tableware was intimately tied to its purpose – the presentation of food – but also how these objects indicate that novelty was both widely appreciated and consisted of much more than the depiction of hybrid creatures. Throughout the centuries, the audiences of Byzantine images, literary texts and even agricultural manuals were instructed to correlate food and its cultivation on one hand and hybrid creatures on the other. The admixture of unusual ingredients acted as a mark of quality and an agent in producing excitement through novelty not only in the realm of art but also that of food. As early as the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa in his description of a garden compared the mixing of different varieties of fruits and nuts, probably by grafting, to the depictions of hybrids such as centaurs in art.40 The Geoponika includes instructions for growing fruit in unusual shapes, including animals and birds, in ceramic or plaster moulds.41 And a stone slab of the eleventh century now in the Church of San Marco, Venice, that shows plants with leaves or flowers shaped like the heads of beasts and fishes ending in plant-like finials evokes the hybrid combinations displayed in grafted and moulded fruit.42 The imagery of hybrid and exotic creatures on objects of tableware visualises the appraisal also expressed in contemporary texts: that the most elaborate, wondrous and theatrical and therefore most desirable type of dish was that made up of unusual, or unnatural, combinations of ingredients. During his second

39 See for example H. Maguire, ‘The profane aesthetic in Byzantine art and literature’, DOP, 53 (1999), 189–205, 190–7, esp. 192. For more on the depictions of hybrid animals as an exercise in innovation and novelty, see H. Maguire and E. Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 5–29, esp. 11–24. 40 Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. 20.11, ed. tr. P. Maraval, Grégoire de Nysse, Lettres, SC, 363 (Paris, 1990), 264–5. 41 Geoponika, 10:9; ed. H. Beckh, Geoponica sive Cassiani Bassi scholastici De re rustica ecologae (Leipzig, 1895, repr. Berlin, 1994), 272–3. 42 Maguire and Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons, 41.

A Taste for Novelty  29 visit to Constantinople to the court of Nikephoros Phokas II (r. 963–969), the Italian ambassador Liudprand of Cremona (920–972) participated in an imperial banquet where he was served a ‘fat goat (…), elegantly stuffed with garlic, onions, and leeks, and drenched with fish sauce’.43 The dish, bringing together elements taken from earth, sky and sea, was designed to astound and amaze through its masterly blending of opposites.44 This display of culinary inventiveness proved very effective, with Liudprand excitedly reporting back about the quality and novelty of the dish, despite firstly his dislike for fish sauce and secondly his general displeasure with his second visit to Constantinople. This appreciation of creations that bring together different elements or realms in combinations otherwise not found in nature is also evident in middle Byzantine literature. The novel Hysmine and Hysminias, written by Eumathios Makrembolites some time between 1120 and 1150, incorporates seventeen banquets.45 The frequency with which banquets occur in the story highlights the structural and narrative importance of the communal meal and of its theatrical entertainments and fare. The food served at one of the banquets is singled out for particular praise by the narrator and protagonist Hysminias: Τρυφαὶ καὶ πάλιν περὶ τὴν τράπεζαν, οὐκ ἐκ θαλάσσης ἁπλῶς, ὡς οἶδε τρυφᾶν ἠπειρώτης νὴρ καὶ παράλιος, λλ᾽ ὅσας χεὶρ καὶ τέχνη μαγείρων ἐσκεύασεν, ὡς ἰχθυς ἐξ γροῦ, καὶ ὡς ἐκ θαλάσσης ταών; οὕτω πολυτελὲς ἡμῖν τὸ δεῖπνον, οὕτω λαμπρόν, οὕτω χάριεν, ὡς ἡδύνειν καὶ ὀφθαλμοὺς καὶ λαιμόν. Once more there were delicacies on the table, not simply from the land or the sea such as might delight a landsman or a sea-board dweller, but everything that chefs’ hands and skills could devise, such as fish from the land and peacock from the ocean – so luxurious, so brilliant, so charming was the banquet that it was delectable both to the eyes and the gullet.46 Here, nature is turned on its head through the culinary skills of the chefs, described as bordering on the miraculous. This passage reveals the delight that Byzantine audiences both of literary and oral tales and at medieval Byzantine banquets took in the eccentricity, oddity and complexity of the dishes served – the more extraordinary the combination of ingredients, the better. It also indicates that food and its presentation were appreciated and even designed for the sensory stimulation that they provided. The food served at banquets appears to have been disguised

43 Liudprand of Cremona, Embassy, 20, ed. tr. P. Squatriti, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Washington, DC, 2007), 251. 44 Malmberg, ‘Dazzling dining’, 76; I. Cook and P. Crang, ‘The world on a plate: culinary culture, displacement, and geographical knowledge’, Journal of Material Culture, 1 (1996), 131–56. 45 Eumathios Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias, I.8–9, II.12–13, III.4–5 (dream banquet), III.10, V.9–10, VI.1–2, VI.15, VIII.4, VIII.8, VIII.11, VIII.20, IX.3–4, IX.7, IX.16, X.7, X.16, XI.2, XI.18, ed. M. Marcovich, Eustathios Macrembolites De Hysmines et Hysminiae Amoribus Libri XI, Teubner (Munich, 2001), tr. E. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, TTB, 1 (Liverpool, 2012);. 46 Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias, II.13, ed. Marcovich, 21, tr. Jeffreys, 191.

30  A Taste for Novelty frequently as something else – ‘a fish from the land and peacock from the ocean’, as Hysminias says.47 This practice is documented in a letter by Eustathios of Thessalonike in which he describes a dish that he ate in the form of a riddle. The dish consisted of a bird that, in dissimulating its nature as such, produced delight and confusion in Eustathios. Eustathios describes it as borrowing skin, wing bones and legs from the fowl, but with the rest of the dish having no bones at all and appearing to not belong to the realm of birds. The stuffing further excited and astonished him.48 By disguising and dissimulating their nature, these kinds of dishes appealed to the diners’ sense of sight while at the same time deceiving it, with the cognitive dissonance between what one saw and what one knew it to be producing astonishment and pleasure. The presence of composite creatures on ceramic tableware plays an important role in visualising their owners’ attitudes to dining, food and the role of art in relation to eating specifically. Foodstuffs considered as desirable delicacies in themselves could be elevated to the next level through the way in which they were prepared and presented. The mythological animals represented on plates and bowls used at the banqueting table are allegorical representations of the dishes presented during feasts. These would have been made up of delicacies such as hunted game but also other, more exotic animals and ingredients – perhaps even featuring ostrich, the bird shown on the bowl from Corinth. Historical accounts such as Liudprand of Cremona’s and literary texts like the twelfth-century novels feature dishes made up of unusual combinations so it seems likely that the composite creatures represented on objects of tableware are a visual shorthand for this type of food, familiar to the diners from hearsay, literature and even their own experiences. In a letter written by Michael Italikos between 1118 and 1133, the court intellectual invited his contemporary Theophanes to participate in a banquet. At this banquet, Italikos writes, the wine will be poured by Pythagoras and Plato, Aristotle and his school will be responsible for the food and the Stoics for dessert. He adds that the guests will be entertained by music produced by the lyre of Orpheus and by the odes and poetry of Pindar and Sappho. Italikos goes on to describe the different delicacies served at the banquet: boiled and roasted meats, sausages, tarts and milk and sesame cakes. The dishes provided by Theophanes will consist of ‘fish forced to take the form of birds, and birds remodelled into fish, those novel confections and tricks of the new artistry’.49 Italikos emphasises the novelty of the dish, describing the fish as ‘tyrannised’ into the form of birds and to the transformations undergone by the foodstuffs as tricks or bewitchments.50 Ultimately,

47 This is a practice also established in the western medieval world, see for example M.W. Adamson, Food in Medieval Times (Westport, CT and London, 2004), 71–6; M.W. Adamson, ‘Imitation food then and now’, Petits Propos Culinaires, 72 (2003), 83–102; T. Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1995), 104. 48 Eustathios of Thessalonike, Ep. 4, ed. Tafel, 311.42–56. 49 Michael Italikos, Ep. 18, ed. P. Gautier, Michael Italikos: Lettres et discours, AOC, 14 (Paris, 1972), 157, tr. 155. 50 Maguire and Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons, 41. Note the language of political domination and control employed to describe the transformation of the food.

A Taste for Novelty  31 Italikos’s letter follows the Byzantine rhetorical tradition of presenting intellectual pursuits, in this case philosophy and poetry, as more enjoyable than physical delights such as food.51 But at the same time, it emphasises the author’s love for the novelty of dishes manipulated through and forced by the skills of the chef to take a new shape. The understanding implicit in Italikos’s letter is that its recipient shared this attitude. The symbolic significance of the complex and unusual combinations of different food groups in meals presented at banquets is suggested by a passage in the fourth book of the novel Rhodanthe and Dosikles, written by Theodore Prodromos in the early 1130s. During a banquet held for the envoy Artaxanes, a dish consisting of a roast lamb filled with live birds is served. The dish with its mixture of opposites is described as evidence of the pirate king Gobryas’s mastery over nature and, by extension, his military might. The passage in the novel suggests that combined, or hybrid, dishes harboured a quasi-imperial symbolism of power and triumph. The ability to present guests at a banquet with lavish dishes of hybrid ingredients, bringing together separate elements ‘which neither nature nor reason is capable of forming’, put on display the sophistication of the banquet’s host but also his financial and social status that allowed to afford the cooks skilled enough to produce these dishes as well as the ingredients required.52 Together, the art and text of the middle Byzantine period demonstrate an appreciation for novelty. This is played out above all at the dining table through the imagery on the vessels used to serve food and through the food itself, in which unusual combinations of ingredients and the dissimulation of its true nature was particularly appreciated. Considering that the foodstuffs required for such meals as well as the chefs with the culinary expertise to cook them would not have come cheap, the literary and artistic emphasis on hybrid dishes and exotic ingredients highlights the socio-cultural and socio-economic implications of fine dining and its role as a social marker. The fact that depictions of hybrid and fantastical creatures are not limited to works of art and items of tableware made of more expensive materials such as precious metals suggest that the taste for culinary and artistic novelty was not restricted to the rich however. Nor was it limited to the visual arts, with hybridity and novelty a popular feature of middle Byzantine literary compositions. Ceramic bowls and plates prominently displaying harpies and griffins indicate that their owners, viewers and users probably held an understanding of the discourse around the combination of ingredients, such as birds and fishes, and possibly have sought to emulate not only the food served at the banquets of the upper classes but also the cultural and intellectual symbolism employed through the serving of such dishes. The material culture of dining played a central role in displaying and articulating the Byzantine taste for novelty that defined the Byzantine banquet of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The imagery decorating the objects formed a visual counterpart to the staples served at the Byzantine table. But in addition to this, the

51 Bernard, ‘“Greet me with words”’; Chernoglazov, ‘Was bedeuten drei Fische?’. 52 Theodore Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, IV.165, ed. tr. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 71.

32  A Taste for Novelty images of animals both real and fantastical acted as a commentary on the food obtained and the food desired, encoding the properties of foodstuffs considered as luxurious and offensive in their iconography. This, together with the visual and formal qualities of the vessels, turned the ceramic plates and bowls into important vehicles for communication. While most animals depicted on plates and bowls are those found in the markets, forests and pastures of Byzantium, they are intermingled with more unusual and exotic creatures such as sirens and ostriches. The representations of hybridity and allusions to admixtures not found in nature visualise an interest in novelty of the culinary and the intellectual kind, which appears to have been a prominent concern during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This is closely interconnected with wider cultural practices of the period, highlighting that tableware was not just utilitarian but instead played an active role in the formation and dispersion of cultural trends. The configuration of food and its presentation in and through tableware created multivalent, fluid and layered meaning. Food could serve as a commentary on the socio-economic context in which it was consumed, articulate shared social values and signal the aspirations of those who served and ate it. The iconography of food is revealed in medieval Byzantine sources. In the eleventh century, Michael Psellos (1017/8–c.1078) commented in one of his letters on the symbolical and spiritual significance on the food gifts of bread, wine and fruit made during the fasting period. The bread, he writes, symbolises the bread of life, wine rejoices the heart and fruit serves as a reminder of mortality and the ephemeral.53 Changes in ceramic consumption during the middle Byzantine period can inform our understanding of Byzantine society, changes in the perception of and preoccupation with food and the role of tableware in constructing and articulating social and cultural identity. It appears that in a dining context, the senses were deliberately stimulated and confounded. During the middle Byzantine period, dining was high drama and ceremonial transformed simple and even banal acts into theatre. The dramatic presentation and display of food in ceramic and metal bowls and plates sought to produce admiration and awe. Mechanisms of hiding and revealing at work in the tableware produced visual suspense and theatre. The foods served by disguising their nature encouraged those consuming them to question their senses of sight and of taste. The sensory delight produced by the bowls and plates used at table and the food contained in them was compounded by the entertainments that accompanied the Byzantine banquet, from music and dance to acrobatics and rhetoric.

53 Michael Psellos, Ep. 52, ed. Sathas, 283. The meaning attributed to the foodstuffs by Psellos changes from letter to letter, see Karpozelos, ‘Realia’, 27. John Tzetzes discusses the symbolical meaning of the food gift of smoked and pickled fish in letter 39, John Tzetzes, Ep. 39, ed. P.A.M. Leone, Ioannes Tzetzes Epistulae, Teubner (Leipzig, 1972), 58.8–10.

2

The Theatre of Dining Splendour and Performance

In medieval Byzantium, communal meals were held not only at the imperial palace but in houses across the width and breadth of the empire to mark special occasions such as family gatherings, weddings and religious festivals and the name days of saints. In this context, dining was not simply food but multi-sensory theatre, staging the guests and their surroundings by introducing moments of surprise and disruption both planned and spontaneous.1 The carefully orchestrated ensemble of middle Byzantine dining incorporated the guests and their food, the objects on the table, their presentation and the performances that accompanied the banquet, including music, dance and acrobatics.2 A twelfth-century silver lid and a small

1 For an introduction to the senses in Byzantium, see S. Ashbrook Harvey and M. Mullett (ed.), Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium, DOBSC (Washington, DC, 2017). This phenomenon is not limited by period or geography – on the sensory experience at the table in the medieval West, see for example C. Normore, ‘Sensual wonder at the medieval table’, in M. Bagnoli (ed.), A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe (New Haven and London, 2017), 75–83. On the sense of taste in a Byzantine religious context, for example D. Brooks Hedstrom, ‘Monks baking bread and salting fish’, in Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls, ed. Ashbrook Harvey and Mullett, 183–208; T. Arentzen, ‘Struggling with Romanos’s “Dagger of Taste”’, in Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls, ed. Ashbrook Harvey and Mullett, 169–82. On the negative perceptions of sensory (over)indulgence at the Byzantine banquet, see A. Eastmond and L. James, ‘Eat, drink...and pay the price’, in L. Brubaker and K. Linardou (ed.), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, SPBS, 13 (Aldershot, 2007), 175–89, and Chapter 4. On sight, the most extensively discussed Byzantine sense, see R. Betancourt, Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2018); R. Betancourt, ‘Why sight is not touch: reconsidering the tactility of vision in Byzantium’, DOP, 70 (2016), 1–24; A. Lymberopoulou, ‘Sight and the Byzantine icon’, Body and Religion, 2.1 (2018), 46–67; B.V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, PA, 2010); R. Nelson, ‘To say and to see: ekphrasis and vision in Byzantium’, in R. Nelson (ed.), Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000), 143–68. See also D. Kotoula, ‘Experiencing the miracle: animated images and the senses in the burial chapel of the Byzantine saint’, in E. O’Brien and H. Hunter-Crawley (ed.), The Multi-Sensory Image from Antiquity to the Renaissance (London, 2019), 86–106. On the sensorium in religious contexts, see L. James, ‘Senses and sensibility’, AH, 27.4 (2004), 522–37. 2 This is extensively documented and analysed for medieval western Europe, see for example A Feast for the Senses, ed. Bagnoli; M. Montanari, Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table, Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History (New York, 2012); P.P. Bober, Art, Culture DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359-3

34  The Theatre of Dining metal vessel from Berezov offer an impression of the atmosphere created at banquets – a bustling scene, filled with tumbling acrobats, shifting dancers, noisy musicians and astonished diners. Ceramic and metal tableware played a central role in the complex web of the performances and sensory impressions that defined the medieval Byzantine banquet. A fragmentary chafing dish – a type of vessel likely used to serve and heat saucy food at the table – excavated in ancient Corinth and dated to the first half of the twelfth century is decorated with relief figures showing entertainers alongside animals (fig. 2.1). A male figure wearing a pointed hat rests a wind instrument on the vessel’s surviving handle that shows an eagle with folded wings. Beside the musician, a monstrous head stares out at the viewer. On the other side of the creature’s head, an acrobat somersaults across the surface of the chafing dish and over its stoking hole. He is mid-jump: his head is upside down, his arms extended towards the ground. The acrobat’s legs are modelled in higher relief, poking into space almost comically. The cream-coloured surface of the chafing dish is decorated with freely applied splashes of brown and green paint. The design of the chafing dish combines tactile and visual appeal, achieved through the combination of relief decoration with incised lines and dots and the vibrantly contrasting colours on the ceramic surface. This is heightened further through the figures crowding around the vessel’s exterior. The vessel in its physical properties and iconography encapsulates the performances and splendour of the banquet, highlighting that the taste, fragrance and connotations of food were only part of the theatre of dining. It displays two crucial strategies pursued to achieve the dramatic impact of the banquet: first, visual splendour and second, the creation of moments of drama, from suspense to comedy, through the entertainments of music, dance and acrobatics. One of the most important purposes of the vessels used at the Byzantine dinner table was to attract the eyes of diners and to produce sensations of awe. This was achieved first through the visual and physical qualities of the objects and second through the way they were brought to the table. Although pottery had a lower inherent material value than precious metal, the production of ceramics both unglazed and decorated was a more complex and more costly process than often assumed. It is estimated that for an output equivalent to the contents of one kiln or of around 500 mixed, undecorated pots, a minimum of twelve days of labour by three different skilled individuals was needed in addition to around 400 kg of potter’s clay and one tonne of fuel.3 Decorated ceramics required further manpower in the shape of

and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy (Chicago and London, 1999); M. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony (New York, 1976); B. Henisch, Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (London, 1976). 3 This estimate is based on analogy with practices in the Peloponnese around 1900. B. Psaropoulou, Last Potters of the East Aegean (Nauplion, 1984), 123, n.d. 63, 152; H. Blitzer, ‘Koroneika: storagejar production and trade in the traditional Aegean’, Hesp, 59 (1990), 675–711; G. Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies for 9th to 13th century Glazed Wares at Corinth: methodology and social conclusions’, in K. Belke, F. Hild, J. Koder and P. Soustal (ed.), Byzanz als Raum. Zu Methoden und Inhalten der historischen Geographie des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für die TIB, 7 (2000), 153–74, 167–8.

The Theatre of Dining  35

Figure 2.1 Chafing dish with acrobat and musicians, Corinth, 1100–1150.  American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas.

a draftsperson, which increased both the price of the finished product and the cost involved in its manufacture.4 The time spent on the decoration of a glazed vessel was determined by the technique used and by the complexity of its iconography, with a skilled draftsman likely able to decorate no more than six vessels per hour.5 The production of glazes for ceramic vessels was technically challenging, timeconsuming and costly.6 On top of that, glazed wares needed to be fired not once but twice, with each firing at different temperatures. With each firing, the risk of the slip and glaze flaking, running or crackling increased; impurities in the metal oxides used in glazes could render these poisonous. Additionally, the material properties of the glaze meant that vessels could stick together.7 Overall, the process of producing decorated ceramics was a highly skilled and cost-intensive activity, with the results relatively expensive.8 Traces of repair on ceramic tableware i­ndicate

4 For instance in fifteenth-century Italy the involvement of a painter in ceramic production increased a vessel’s price by 30%, see H.McK. Blake, ‘Medieval pottery: technical innovation or economic change?’, in H.McK. Blake, T.W. Potter and D.B. Whitehouse (ed.), Papers in Italian Archaeology (Oxford, 1978), 453–73. 5 Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies’, 168–9. 6 For a breakdown of the costs involved in the preparation of copper and iron oxides for green and red paint, see Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies’, 169. 7 See Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies’, 169, n. 38; V. François, La vaisselle de terre à Byzance: Catalogue des collections du musée du Louvre (Paris, 2017), 46–7. 8 J. Boardman, ‘Trade in Greek decorated pottery’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 7 (1988), 27–31; J. Boardman, ‘The trade figures’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 7 (1988), 371–3. On the estimated average daily wage of a labourer in relation to the cost of storage pithoi during the Byzantine period, see Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies’, 170; M. Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre à

36  The Theatre of Dining the items’ continuous use for longer periods of time and their maintenance and appreciation by their owners.9 The increased popularity of glazed ceramics from the eleventh century onwards is evidenced by archaeological finds in urban contexts such as Corinth and Constantinople in particular and in densely populated agrarian areas such as Boeotia. This indicates that the consumers of these vessels were willing and able to spend larger sums on tableware, with the decorated bowls and plates kept in homes acting as declarations of their owners’ prosperity.10 The growing numbers of glazed ceramics highlight the considerable interest taken in the display of food and the objects containing in addition to the objects’ owners’ improved living standards. The glaze and paint covering these vessels were exactly the point, practically and aesthetically. The glazing of pottery fulfilled a practical purpose, sealing the surface of a vessel to enable it to hold liquids. But it was the aesthetic qualities of glazed pottery that cemented its desirability, with the visual properties of the techniques used in glazed pottery exploited and explored by both the makers and users of ceramic tableware to create the theatre of dining. In some cases, as for a small bowl with the yellow champlevé figure of a female, a monochrome slip was covered by a shiny glaze.11 The glaze transforms the ceramic surface and intensifies the colours of both the clay and its decoration. The reflective surface of the glaze catches glints of light, with the moving specks animating the vessel and the scene depicted on it. The tableware, through its imagery and its glaze, contributed to the spectacle and theatre of dining by heightening the drama through its glistening, lavish appearance. This would have been particularly striking in the evening or at night-time, when the shadows of candles would have increased the contrast of the relief decoration of the dishes, striking surfaces and making shadows appear deeper, so that the figures animated by the light almost seemed to dance, move and project outwards from the body of the object. Other vessels use liberally applied Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle: propriété et exploitation du sol (Paris, 1992), 477; J.C. Cheynet, E. Malamut and C. Morrisson, ‘Prix et salaires à Byzance’, in V. Kravari, J. Lefort and C. Morrisson (ed.), Hommes et richesses dans l’empire byzantin, vol. 2 (Paris, 1991), 339–74, 370; Blitzer, ‘Koroneika’. 9 D. Papanikola-Bakirtzi (ed.), Everyday Life in Byzantium (Athens, 2002), 333, 369; D. PapanikolaBakirtzi, Byzantine Glazed Ceramics: The Art of Sgraffito (Athens, 1999), cat. 14, 17, 75; P.M. Rice, Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook (Chicago and London, 1987), 303–4. See H. Willmott, ‘A group of 17th-century glass goblets with restored stems: considering the archaeology of repair’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 35 (2001), 96–105, 103 for reasons of status and sentiment for repairs. 10 Sanders, ‘New relative and absolute chronologies’, 167; François, Vaisselle de terre, 53. Certain types of ceramics were circulated as luxury products in the medieval Mediterranean and exchanged as gifts: in 804, the governor of Khorasan offered to caliph Harun al-Rashid twenty Chinese vessels ‘of quality’ and 200 additional vessels; in 1171, forty Chinese vessels were given by Salah al-Din to the prince Nur-al Din of Damascus. A. Lane and R.B. Serjeant, ‘Pottery and glass fragments from the Aden littoral, with historical notes’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 80 (1948), 108–33, 100; P. Kahle, ‘Chinese porcelain in the lands of Islam’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Studies, 72 (1940–41), 27–46, 44, n. 33. 11 Kanellopoulos Museum, inv. no. Δ 2272; Everyday Life in Byzantium, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 383, cat. 467.

The Theatre of Dining  37 colour in their decoration and their glaze to highlight certain parts of their imagery and to suggest certain modes of viewing. On a fragmentary bowl in the collections of the Louvre, dated loosely to between the end of the tenth and the early twelfth century, the white slip of the vessel acts as a backdrop for the remaining decoration.12 The central medallion shows four palmettes outlined in black and filled in muted colours. Around the medallion and the body of the bowl circles a ­pseudo-Kufic inscription. The script, like the palmettes, is outlined with black slip. It is coloured in bright alternating shades of ochre and blue. The script’s change in colour appears to signal the end of one letter and the start of the next. Red droplets placed in the upper register of the inscription contrast brightly against the pseudoscript, heightening its masquerade as real script. Small red dots are scattered underneath the inscription and between groupings of letters. Together form and colour create a visual rhythm that imitates the appearance of text and the cadences of oral performance, implying meaning as well as sound. The carefully placed lines and colours on the bowl suggest letters, syllables and even words that are to be viewed, contemplated and ‘read’.13 On a large bowl from Thessalonike, colour is used to subvert traditional modes of viewing rather than structuring the act of looking.14 At the centre of the vessel is a bird, framed by a wide band of triangular shapes and spirals. On most ceramic bowls and plates, this medallion is the central if not the only decorative feature. On the bowl from Thessalonike however, the sgraffito lines incised into the white slip to draw the bird are barely noticeable, eclipsed by the thick lines of green and brown applied to re-trace the framing ornament, which as a result is the visually most prominent element of the bowl’s decoration. Above the green and brown triangular lines and spiral swirls is a thin band of incised spiral lines; the lip of the bowl alternates between white slip and green splotches. On this bowl, colour is applied to turn conventionally ‘secondary’ decorative elements into the primary, most noticeable parts of the imagery. The bowl’s sgraffito decoration recedes visually and is not immediately noticeable. As a result, the conventions of the appearance of ceramic vessels – the expectation of what they look like – are undermined and the unravelling of the imagery requires close looking. Across decorative techniques, the colour and sheen of glazed ceramics was used to create visual interest and suspense. Viewers were invited to decipher the imagery, with its meaning accentuated, altered and subverted through the placement of colour and glaze. The suspense and surprise produced during the viewing of the objects was further heightened through their practical use at table. When used as communal tableware, the dishes employed for eating and drinking became participants in the spectacle of the feast. They passed from one diner to another, promoting physical interaction. At each turn, diners would face a different part of the imagery. Only as food was taken off the plate, out of the bowl or ladled out of the chafing dish

12 Louvre, Objets d’Art, inv. no. OA 7899 [4–25]; François, Vaisselle de terre, 175, cat. 41. 13 On script and pseudo-script and its viewing, see A. Eastmond (ed.), Viewing Inscriptions in the Late Antique and Medieval World (Cambridge, 2015). 14 Benaki Museum, inv. no. ΓΕ 13556.

38  The Theatre of Dining would the central design on the vessel have become visible. Some of the tableware made of precious metal also features intricate designs on the stand of vessels and in hard-to-see parts of their exterior. The deliberate placement of decoration in places where it would have been obscured by food at least some of the time highlights that the objects needed to be handled, moved and turned to be fully appreciated and for their iconographic programme to be seen in its entirety. Items of tableware played a central role in the presentation of food, as historical sources reveal. This was often carefully planned, with material culture supporting and enhancing on one hand the sensory appeal of the novel and elaborate food contained in the vessels and on the other the spectacle of dining. A tenth-century account of a Christmas dinner held at the imperial palace written by the Muslim captive Hārūn Ibn Yahyā reports: When the emperor is seated at his gold table, they bring him four gold dishes, each of which is brought on its own little chariot. One of these dishes, encrusted with pearls and rubies, they say belonged to Solomon son of David (…); the second, similarly encrusted, to David (…); the third to Alexander [the Great]; and the fourth to Constantine. They are placed before the emperor, and no one else may eat from them (…). [F]or the Muslims, many hot and cold dishes are placed on the other tables (…). The dishes, on large silver and gold platters, are then served to the Emperor’s guests.15 The glistening and shining qualities of gold and silver tableware encrusted with gems and pearls were deliberately deployed in banqueting contexts to produce sensations of awe through visual splendour.16 The reflective properties of the materials used for tableware, emphasising colour and decoration, were a determining factor in the use and display of both metal and ceramic tableware. The way in which food was presented to guests at banquets was heavily orchestrated and stage-managed – certainly at the imperial court but also in other contexts.17 In the imperial palace, 15 Ahmad Ibn Rustih, Kitab al-a’lah al-nafisa, ed. A.A. Vasiliev, tr. H. Grégoire and M. Canard, Byzance et les arabes, 2: La dynastie macédonienne (867–959): Extraits des sources arabes (Brussels, 1950), 387–8; tr. A. Dalby, Flavours of Byzantium (Totnes, 2003), 118. 16 Hārūn Ibn Yahyā’s emphasis on the provenance of the vessels and their role in structuring hierarchy is discussed in Chapter 6. 17 The ownership of silver and gold tableware by middle Byzantine individuals in and beyond the imperial sphere is attested by surviving material and historical sources. In the eleventh century, the duke of Antioch Constantine Dalassenos was in the possession of a silver-gilt cup. Between 1000 and 1050, a set of silver plates was made for the use on military campaign for the proedros Constantine the Alan. Around the same time, a nun and widow of the curopalate by the name of Maria gave to her monastery silver and gold tableware. And in the late twelfth century, the ‘treasure’ abandoned by Isaac Komnenos (r. 1184–1191) when abandoning Cyprus during his flight from Richard I of England (1157–1199) included tableware made of gold and silver, bowls and plates and other objects. E. Malamut, ‘Chypre au XIIe siècle’, Επετηρίδα, 36, 2011–12 (2013), 9–50, 20, 22. For the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see G.L. Schlumberger, Expédition des ‘Almugavares’ ou routiers catalans en Orient de l’an 1302 à l’an 1311 (Paris, 1902), 108; Nikephoros Gregoras, Ρωμαϊκής Ιστορίας, XV.3–4, ed. H. Wolf and L. Schopen, Nicephori Gregorae Byzantina historia, CSHB, 1 (Bonn, 1829), 170.

The Theatre of Dining  39 this included not only the vessels used for the presentation of food. Over one hundred silver plates were suspended from the dome of the Magnaura triklinos with additional larger plates and bowls hung from the cornice and the windows of side arches18 Golden tables and couches were prepared for both the emperor and his guests.19 The description of one of these showpieces of dining furniture, a silver table commissioned by Constantine VII, is preserved in the eleventh-century manuscript of the chronicles of Theophanes Continuatus (MS vat. Gr. 167). The table, made of resplendent silver, was inlaid with additional, multi-coloured materials, with the ensemble ‘affording to the guests a greater pleasure than they would have derived [solely] from the savor of the repast’.20 The protocol for imperial receptions and the descriptions of dining furniture and furnishings reveal the visual and sensory excess carefully orchestrated to signal power and wealth. Liudprand of Cremona’s description of a banquet held at the court of Constantine VII in 949 or 950 echoes Ibn Yahyā’s report, describing the use of large silver and gold vessels for the serving of food in the imperial palace. On the day when our Lord Jesus Christ was born in the flesh, nineteen covers are always laid here at the table. The emperor and his guests on this occasion do not sit at table, as they usually do, but recline on couches: and everything is served in vessels, not of silver, but of gold. After the solid food fruit is brought on in three golden bowls, which are too heavy for men to lift and come in on carriers covered over with purple cloth. Two of them are put on the table in the following way. Through openings in the ceiling hang three ropes covered with gilded leather and furnished with golden rings. These rings are attached to the handles projecting from the bowls, and with four or five men helping from below, they are swung on to the table by means of a movable device in the ceiling and removed again in the same fashion.21

18 Constantine Porphyrogennetos, De cerimoniis, 2.15, ed. J.J. Reiske, Constantini Porphyrogeniti imperatoris de cerimoniis aulae byzantinae libri duo, CSHB (Bonn 1829–30, repr. Berlin, 2021), 592, l.7, ed. tr. A. Moffatt and M. Tall, Constantine Porphyrogennetos: The Book of Ceremonies, ByzAus, 18, (Canberra, 2012), vol. 2, 582; C. Angelidi, ‘Designing receptions in the palace (De Ceremoniis 2.15)’, in A. Beihammer, S. Constantinou and M. Parani (ed.), Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Medieval Mediterranean: Comparative Perspectives (Leiden, 2013), 465–85, 474. 19 Constantine Porphyrogennetos, De Cerimoniis, 1.9, ed. tr. Moffatt and Tall, vol. 1, 70. 20 Theophanes Continuatus, Chronographia, VI.23, ed. I. Bekker, Theophanes Continuatus, Ioannes Cameniata, Symeon Magister, Georgius Monachus, CSHB, 33 (Bonn, 1838), 450–1; C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (London, 1986), 208. On colour, brightness and their meaning, see L. James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1996). 21 Liudprand of Cremona, Antapodosis VI.8.148: ‘[Q]uibus in diebus non argenteis, sed aureis tantum vasis ministratur. Post cibum autem aureis vasis tribus sunt poma delata, quae ob immensum pondus non hominum manibus, sed purpura textis vehiculis sunt allata. Apponuntur autem duo hoc in mensa modo. Per foramina laquearis tres sunt funes pellibus deauratis tecti cum anulis depositi aureis, qui ansis, quae in scutulis prominent, positi, adiuvantibus inferius quattuor aut eo amplius hominus per vertibile, quod supra laquea est, ergalium in mensam subvehuntur eodemque modo deponuntur.’, tr. Squatriti, 199–200.

40  The Theatre of Dining Liudprand’s description of showpieces so large and heavy that they needed to be lifted by several men at once highlights the use of precious metal vessels in the context of conspicuous consumption, designed to impress viewers. The meals served at the table of the middle Byzantine host were designed to intrigue, astonish and awe the guests at the feast, be it through the combination of ingredients, visual presentation and the dramatic revealing and display of tableware and food. The imagery of ceramic and metal vessels used at the table often offers visual plays on the context of the banquet, from the food served to the guests and their behaviour. Their decoration in its placement involves theatrical mechanisms of revealing and obscuring, creating at turns suspense and surprise during the consumption of food. The theatre of the banquet extended beyond the dining table itself to include the performances that accompanied and punctuated meals. A fragmentary ceramic dish from Thebes dated to the twelfth century shows a sgraffito figure turning its head to its left, with curly hair that falls to the nape of its neck and dressed in a tight, longsleeved garment.22 With its right hand, the figure plucks the strings of a lute, the neck of which the musician is holding in his left hand. Musicians, alone and in groups, are present on other items of tableware from the same period. A fragment of a sgraffito vessel from Corinth shows an arm plucking a lyre. A ceramic chafing dish dated to the first half of the twelfth century is decorated with the plastic figures of musicians playing wind instruments and drums. A shallow dish from Moscow represents the individual figure of a centaur-musician, while other precious metal vessels show a selection of musicians that comes closer to an orchestra. On the small vessel from Berezov (fig. 2.2), at least twelve of such figures are depicted playing the cymbals, tambourines, string instruments, drums and flutes. A twelfth-century lid that once accompanied a bowl, now lost, represents male musicians playing the cymbals, the flute and the lute in half of the roundels decorating its surface (fig. 2.3). And a twelfth-century bowl in the Hermitage, formerly in the private collection of Alexander P. Basilevsky, includes amongst its arched colonnades the figures of a male musician playing a string instrument and one playing the flute (fig. 6.1). The presence of these performers on ceramic and metal tableware reveals that eating, music and dance were closely interconnected in the creation of the visual splendour and dramatic surprise at the banquet. This applies to both the feasts of the imperial court and to communal meals marking special events and religious feasts in houses across a comparatively broad social spectrum, as the material and cost spectrum of the objects suggests. Written sources, in particular accounts by visitors to the imperial court, highlight the prominence of musicians amongst the entertainments enjoyed by the medieval Byzantines both inside and outside of the dining room and the central role played by sound in creating the overall theatre of the banquet. At the Christmas dinner attended by the Arab captive Hārūn Ibn Yahyā, (…) they bring out what is called an organon. It is a square wooden object in the shape of an oil press, covered with solid leather. In the instrument are 22 Inv no. 5083; Byzantine Glazed Ceramics, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 204, cat. 228.

The Theatre of Dining  41

Figure 2.2 Bowl from Berezov, 1100–1200.  The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: Vladimir Terebenin.

Figure 2.3  Lid of a vessel, 1100–1200.  The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

42  The Theatre of Dining placed sixty copper pipes. The top halves of the copper pipes project above the instrument; where they are visible above the leather they are gilded. You can only see a small part of some of them, as they are of different lengths. On the side of the instrument is a hole in which is placed a bellows like a blacksmith’s. Three crosses are brought out, with two placed at either end of the organ and one in the middle. Two men come in to work the bellows. The master begins to press on the pipes, and each pipe, according to its tuning, sounds the praise of the emperor, while the guests are seated at their tables. Meanwhile twenty men enter with cymbals in their hands, which they play for the duration of the meal.23 In addition to creating an acoustic backdrop for the denouement of the feast itself, music provided a break and source of entertainment between courses. Sound punctuated the ceremony of the meal by announcing its high points and attracting the attention of the guests, heightening the drama of the feast. The sound of music structured the imperial banquet and underlined its ritual aspects through acclamations, led by musicians.24 These acclamations cued the different stages of the meal, such as the arrival of the emperor, the mixing of the wine or the arrival of a new course. The repetitive and formulaic cheers also formed a method of publicly voiced consensus, with the guests prompted to join in the praise of the emperor.25 The instruments that accompanied the acclamations carried an embedded symbolism, as Ibn Yahyā’s remark that each pipe of the organ ‘sounds the praise of the emperor’ reveals. There existed a close connection between the verbal praise of the emperor and the musical accompaniment of banquets, which constituted a nonverbal form of proclaiming support for and acclaim of the emperor. The meaning of musical performances at Byzantine banquets was not limited to triumphal connotations but instead was fluid and even ambivalent. A wide and shallow silver dish in Moscow represents a centaur-musician holding a stringed instrument.26 In Byzantine literature, centaurs were interpreted as a metaphor for excellence in hunting and horsemanship, but they were also characterised as mixanthropos – incomplete, not fully formed beings that were half man, half animal and neither here nor there.27 This admixture signals not only the dual nature, human 23 Ahmad Ibn Rustih, Kitab, ed. Vasiliev, 388–9. Translation from French author’s own. 24 ‘Acclamations’, ODB. Online version, consulted 27/08/2015; N. Oikonomides, Les listes de préséance byzantines des IXe et Xe siècles (Paris, 1972), 203.31–4; Constantine Porphyrogennetos, De cerimoniis, I.75, ed. tr. Moffatt and Tall, vol. 1, 370–1. 25 On political satire, see P. Magdalino, ‘Political satire’, in P. Marciniak and I. Nilsson (ed.), Satire in the Middle Byzantine Period: The Golden Age of Laughter? (Leiden and Boston 2021), 104–26. 26 I.A. Sterligova (ed.), Byzantine Antiquities: Works of Art from the Fourth to the Fifteenth Centuries in the Collection of the Moscow Kremlin Museums (Moscow, 2013), 127, cat. 10. 27 Genesis 89.72–4; Nikephoros Basilakes, Λόγος εἰς τὸν σεβαστὸν κῦρ Ἀδριανὸν τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ σεβαστοκράτορος κυροῦ Ἰσαακίου τοῦ Κομνηνοῦ καὶ αὐταδέλφου τοῦ βασιλεώς κυροῦ Ἀλεξίου τὸν διὰ τοῦ ἀγγελικοῦ σχήματος Ἰωάννην μετονομασθέντα, 9.26–8, ed. A. Garzya, Nicephori Basilacae orationes et epistolae, Teubner (Leipzig, 1984), 32; George of Pisidia, Heraclias, 11.40, PG 92:1625A, ed. A. Pertusi, Giorgio di Pisidia. Poemi, I: Panegirici Epici (Ettal, 1959), 212; Basil Elachistos in R. Cantarella, ‘Basilio Minimo. II.’, BZ, 26 (1926), 1–34, 25.3–9; Theophanes Continuatus, Chronographia, V.6, ed. Bekker, 220.4, ed. tr. I. Ševčenko, Chronographiae quae Theophanes

The Theatre of Dining  43 and animal, of centaurs and other hybrids but also the conflict between these two sides of their being, the orderly and the disorderly.28 Centaurs engaging in music and dance are depicted on a number of middle Byzantine ivory boxes. On the lid of the tenth-century Veroli Casket, centaurs are shown playing wind instruments and flanked by dancing maenads on one side, and stone-throwers surrounding the Rape of Europa on the other.29 Centaurs playing music for groups of dancers appear on a box in Baltimore and are depicted on other Byzantine boxes in a variety of strange and undignified positions, for example viewed from the back and as if struggling to rise to their feet.30 On the ivory boxes, the centaurs and the music performed by them had a humorous role, denoting the subversion of norms and decorum.31 A midtwelfth-century ekphrasis by Manganeios Prodromos describes a tent owned by the sebastokratortissa Eirene embroidered with subjects very similar to those appearing in the ivory and bone caskets and on decorated tableware.32 The verses read, in part: My lady, muse of muses, akropolis of beauty, the porch of your tent is filled with delights. Erotes are plucking strings and quietly strumming the cithara, satyrs seem to play, the centaurs gambol, the muses join in the dance, the nereids are leaping.33 In the poem, as in other images and descriptions of leisure, the presence of musicians is closely tied to performances by acrobats and dancers on one hand and to the animated

Continuati nomine fertur quo Vita Basilii imperatoris amplectitur, CFHB Series Berolinensis, 42 (Berlin and Boston, 2011), 27. 28 In the eleventh century, Michael Psellos, in an allegorical treatise on the sphinx, states that he is concerned not with the appearance of the monster but with its symbolism: the sphinx represents man, who is composed of both rational and irrational natures. Michael Psellos, Τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἀλληγορία περὶ τῆς Σφιγγός, ed. J.M. Duffy and D.J. O’Meara, Michaelis Pselli Philosophica minora, Teubner, I (Leipzig, 1989), Opusc. 44, 158.15–26; H. Maguire, ‘The profane aesthetic in Byzantine art and literature’, DOP, 53 (1999), 189–205, 190–1. 29 A. Goldschmidt and K. Weitzmann, Die byzantinischen Elfenbeinskulpturen des X.–XIII. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1: Kästen (Berlin, 1930), nos. 21, 24, 26, 27. 30 H. Maguire and E. Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 149–51. 31 On humour in Byzantium, see J. Haldon, ‘Humour and the everyday in Byzantium’, in G. Halsall (ed.), Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2002), 48–71; on satire and parody, see Satire in the Middle Byzantine Period, ed. Marciniak and Nilsson. See also S. Tougher, ‘Having fun in Byzantium’, in L. James (ed.), A Companion to Byzantium (London, 2012), 135–45. On profane imagery on ivory boxes and the Veroli Casket specifically, see A. Cutler, ‘On Byzantine boxes’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 42–3 (1984–5), 32–47; J.E. Hanson, ‘Erotic imagery on Byzantine ivory caskets’, in L. James (ed.), Desire and Denial in Byzantium, SPBS, 6 (Aldershot, 1999), 173–84; on satire in art, see H. Maguire, ‘Parody in Byzantine art’, in Satire in the Middle Byzantine Period, ed. Marciniak and Nilsson, 127–51. 32 J.C. Anderson and M. Jeffreys, ‘The decoration of the sevastokratorissa’s tent’, Byz, 64 (1994), 8–18. 33 ‘Δέσποινα, μοῦσα τῶν μουςῶν, ἀκρόπολις τοῦ κάλλους, / τὰ πρόθυρά σου τῆς σκηνῆς πεπλήρωνται χαρίτων. / Ἔρωτες πλήττουσιν χορδάς, σιγῇ κιθαρωδοῦσιν, / δοκοῦσι παίζειν σάτυροι, σκιρτῶσιν ἱπποκράται, / αἱ μοῦσαι συγχορεύουσι, πηδῶσι νηρηίδες (...).’ Anderson and Jeffreys, ‘Decoration’, 11, lines 1–5, tr. 12.

44  The Theatre of Dining movement of centaurs on the other. William of Tyre, describing his visit to the court of Manuel I in the retinue of king Amalric (r. 1163–1174) in 1171, records that [f]rom time to time, on holidays and at leisure moments, the emperor invited the king and his suite to enjoy the recreation afforded by novel entertainments of dignified character such as befitted the exalted rank of both monarchs. At times, various kinds of musical instruments were brought in, from which strains of marvellous sweetness in harmonious measure were evoked for their delight. (…) [C]horuses of maidens sang, and pantomimes of great merit were presented. Yet decorum and good manners were always observed.34 The worry about the loss of decorum fuelled by song and music is implied on the centaur dish in Moscow through the conventional association between centaurs and disorderly movement and the presence of a musical instrument in the centaur’s hands. The Byzantine dinner table is encompassed in this association as a result of the dish having been viewed in a banqueting context, with the link between dining and music perpetuated in contemporary images and texts, and perhaps even used to display food or flowers at the table. Sound and music formed a central component of the slapstick routines beloved by the Byzantines.35 This, coupled with the danger of overindulgence associated with feasting and drinking, meant that sound and specifically music could be seen as agents of disorder and debauchery. And yet unlike his counterparts depicted on ivory boxes, the centaur on the dish is dignified rather than drunk, boisterous or loud: his hair is perfectly coiffed, his stance elegant and his facial expression calm. He is strumming a string instrument. The classical author Aristides Quintilianus (late third or early fourth century) stated that harmonious sound was imperceptible and inaccessible to those of poor character. In his treatise On Music, he writes that sounds are imperceptible to ‘unworthy men most especially (…), while serious and scientifically versed men – albeit rarely – do, in spite of all, partake abundantly of such honour and well being

34 William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, XX.23; ed. tr. E.A. Babcock, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, Records of Civilizations: Sources and Studies, 2 (New York, 1943), 381–2. 35 ‘Carnival’, ODB, online version, consulted 20/09/2015; ‘carnivalesque’ is a term used in the English translations of works by Mikhail Bakhtin, referring to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style through humour and chaos, see M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, 1941); D. LaCapra, ‘Bakhtin, Marxism and the carnivalesque’, in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, 1983), 291–324; P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, 1986); the role of the carnival in western medieval art is discussed in M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992), 143–6. For dressing up and mock ceremonial at the court of Michael III, see Theophanes Continuatus, Chronographia, IV.38, ed. Bekker, 200.15–201.17, ed. tr. M. Featherstone and J.S. Codoñer, Chronographiae quae Theophanis Continuati nomine fertur libri I–IV, CFHB Series Berolinensis, 53 (Berlin and Boston, 2015), 287; J.N. Ljubarskij, ‘Der Kaiser als Mime’, JÖB, 37 (1987), 41–6. On carnivalesque elements such as these in the Ptochoprodromic poems, see M. Alexiou, ‘Ploys of performance: games and play in the Ptochoprodromic Poems’, DOP, 53 (1999), 91–109, 99.

The Theatre of Dining  45 from the almighties’.36 This harmonious sound is what the centaur on the dish is performing, the imagery of the object suggests. This centaur is not an agent of or participant in laughter and disorder, a mixanthropos controlled by his animal side like some of his contemporaries. Instead, the static pose and impassive appearance of the centaur conform with the Byzantine ideals of taxis or orderly behaviour. His music is not rousing or discordant, but the centaur’s controlled strumming of his instrument suggests it to be harmonious and civilising. The social and moral significance of song and music is emphasised in medieval Byzantine textual sources.37 Monastic typika including that of Christodoulos (1091), the Lips monastery (1294–1301) and the Choumnos monastery (c.1374) state that the human choir on earth, singing in a church or monastery, accompanies and mirrors the choir of angels in heaven.38 The perceived relationship between heavenly and earthly voices ultimately went back to the text of the Bible; the topos was picked up by the Church Fathers and church hymnody, affirming its wide-held validity and importance.39 Manuel Bryennios (c.1300) in his Harmonics invokes ‘the assistant who arranged everything that here is visible by invisible arts and in a most perfect way skilfully executed every soul by the proportions of harmonia’, reiterating the belief that earthly harmony and music was the product of divine intervention.40 Since earthly song and music were of a divinely inspired nature, singing – at least in a monastic

36 Aristides Quintilianus, De Musica, 3.20, ed. R.P. Winnington-Ingram, Aristidis Quintiliani De musica libri tres, Teubner (Leipzig, 1963), 120.8–24, tr. T.J. Mathiesen, Aristides Quintilianus, On Music. In Three Books: Translation, with Introduction, Commentary, and Annotations (New Haven and London, 1983). 37 For a brief summary of the religious symbolism of the human voice and instruments such as the flute, see G. Peers, ‘The Byzantine material symphony: sound, stuff, and things’, in Animism, Materiality, and Museums (Amsterdam, 2021), 43–52, 50–1; R. Dubowchik, ‘Singing with the angels: foundation documents as evidence for musical life in monasteries of the Byzantine empire’, DOP, 56 (2002), 277–96. 38 Christodoulos: Rule, Testament and Codicil of Christodoulos for the Monastery of St. John the Theologian on Patmos, Ch. A17, ed. F. Miklosich and F. Müller, Acta et diplomata graeca medii aevi sacra et profana, VI (Vienna, 1890), 59–90, tr. P. Karlin-Hayter, BMFD, II, 586–7; Lips: Typikon of Theodora Palaiologina for the Convent of Lips in Constantinople, Ch. 28, ed. H. Delehaye, Deux typica byzantins de l’époque des Paléologues (Brussels, 1921), 106–36, tr. A.-M. Talbot, BMFD, III, 1273–4; Choumnos: Rule and Testament of Makarios Choumnos for the Nea Mone of the Mother of God in Thessalonike, Ch. B24, ed. V. Laurent, ‘Écrits spirituels inédits de Macaire Choumnos (+ c. 1382), fondateur de la “Néa Moni” à Thessalonique’, Hellenika, 14 (1955), 40–86, 60–71, 76–85, tr. A.-M. Talbot, BMFD, IV, 1452. 39 Isaiah 6:2–3; Luke 2:14; Revelation 4:8–9; St Basil, Homily on Psalm One, tr. Sister Agnes Way, St Basil: Exegetic Homilies, Fathers of the Church Series, 46 (Washington, DC, 1963), 152–3; text of the Cherubic Hymn, in which choir sings “We who mystically represent the Cherubim sing the Thrice-Holy Hymn to the Life-Giving Trinity. Let us put away all worldly care so that we may receive the king of all, invisibly attended by the angelic hosts.” For more on monastic life and singing, see Dubowchik, ‘Singing with the angels’, 281. 40 Manuel Bryennius, Ἁρμονικά, 1.1, ed. Tr. G.H. Jonker, The Harmonics of Manuel Bryennios (Groningen, 1970), 50.7–9; Bryennios here quotes the antique writer Aristides Quintilianus, for more on this, see T.J. Mathiesen, ‘Aristides Quintilianus and the “Harmonics” of Manuel Bryennius: a study in Byzantine music theory’, Journal of Music Theory, 27.1 (1983), 31–47.

46  The Theatre of Dining setting – was a spiritual exercise that could not only ‘join the angelic throngs’ but also summon angelic help and even, according to the 1053 typikon of the Mount Galesios monastery, safeguard against evil and vice.41 The divine or angelic inspiration for song and singing formed the basis of the Byzantine musical tradition as a whole, including secular music.42 It is this civilising, morally and spiritually elevating power of music that is represented on the centaur dish. The calm demeanour of the centaur strumming his instrument suggests that at the dining table, music may be an agent in the maintenance of order and appropriate behaviour. Sound is shown to play a civilising role, turning the animal and instinct into man and intellect. The performance of music during the theatre of the banquet allowed participants to engage in a ‘higher’ form of sensory perception, perhaps to offset the (over)indulgence of taste, smell and touch that could accompany a meal. The spectacle of the banquet incorporated a second type of performance, closely linked to music and sound. A small ceramic bowl from Byzantine Serres dated to the late twelfth century is decorated with champlevé figures, of which only three remain, highlighted by a brightly hued yellow glaze that contrasts with the surrounding earthy tone of the ceramic fabric.43 They surround a central medallion with floral ornament and are shown from the waist up. Their heads are turned to the left, their bodies face the viewer frontally. Each figure rests its left hand and arm on the shoulder of the figure to its left, and its right hand on the upper body of the figure to its right. This creates a sense of movement, with the figures circling the medallion of the bowl in a dance.44 The dynamic imagery of the vessel would have been animated further by the viewer twisting the vessel in their hand, speeding up or reversing the direction of the dance. Dances like the one depicted on this vessel – that is, of a non-ritualised and non-official nature – form part of the narratives of the twelfth-century novels. In a passage from the novel Rhodanthe and Dosikles, the guests of a feast end the night with some raucous entertainment, no doubt fuelled by alcohol. In this more relaxed, social atmosphere, the banquet becomes an occasion for great conviviality that culminates in the performance of songs and dance.45 Such passages suggest that behaviour could and did get rowdy: (…) everyone was dining on magnificent provender, singing sweetly under Stratokles’ direction 41 Galesios: Testament of Lazarus of Mount Galesios, Ch. 196, reconstructed from the Vita S. Lazari auctore Gregorio monacho, ed. H. Delehaye, Acta sanctorum novembris, III (Brussels, 1910), 508– 606, tr. P. Karlin-Hayter, BMFD, I, 162–3; Pakourianos: Typikon of Gregory Pakourianos for the Monastery of the Mother of God Petritzonitissa in Bačkovo, Ch. 14, ed. P. Gautier, ‘Le typikon du sébaste Grégoire Pakourianos’, REB, 42 (1984), 5–145, 19–133, tr. R. Jordan, BMFD, II, 538–40; Phoberos: Rule of John for the Monastery of St. John the Forerunner of Phoberos, Ch. 4, ed. A.I. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Noctes Petropolitanae (St Petersburg, 1913), 1–88, tr. R. Jordan, BMFD, III, 887–9. St Basil, Homily on Psalm One, ed. tr. Way, 152–3. 42 D. Conomos, ‘Change in early Christian and Byzantine liturgical chant’, Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario, 5 (1980), 49–51 and 61. 43 Everyday Life in Byzantium, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 202, cat. 225. 44 On the circle dance, see Koukoules, Βυζαντινών βίος και πολιτισμός, vol. 5 (Athens, 1952), 220–31. 45 P. Roilos, Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (Washington, DC, 2005), 247.

The Theatre of Dining  47 as he tunefully began a splendid song. Immediately Nausikrates got up from the symposium and began a somewhat nautical dance.46 The sailor’s dance performed by Nausikrates, one of the attendees at the banquet, consisted of twisting and turning of a ‘rustic’ character and produced a comic effect with its onlookers.47 The novel Drosilla and Charikles also contains a farcical passage describing how during a celebratory banquet a drunken old woman attempts to execute a Bacchic dance.48 While decorum was highly valued by ecclesiastics as well as the writers of imperial panegyrics, the reality of the middle Byzantine banquet was in all likelihood more debaucherous, comical and disorderly than sources praising taxis and orderly conduct lead us to believe. In images and descriptions of leisure, the presence of musicians appears to be closely tied to performances by acrobats and dancers. This link also exists in the texts describing such performances and the theatre of the banquet. A number of the decorated items of metal tableware represent dancers both male and female. On the small vessel from Berezov, the cropped hair of the strutting figures together with their close-fitting garments consisting of a tunic and trousers mark them out as male. The lid of a vessel, too, shows a male dancer who is taking wide steps through the picture space, with the garment worn on his lower half fluttering behind him and his arms reaching out to the edge of the medallion containing him. The bulbous vessel formerly in the Basilevsky collection depicts in one of its arched fields a female dancer. The dancer is kicking up her left leg, trailed by swirling skirts. In both hands, she is holding ribbons or scarves that she is waving in undulating lines. This imagery and that found on ceramic tableware suggests that banquets could be accompanied by dance performed either by professionals or by the participants of the meal themselves. The presence of dancers could fulfil a range of functions, as explored below, from salubrious entertainment to moral edification and triumphal messaging. One of the most important roles of both the dancers depicted on tableware and the dance that accompanied a banquet was to stimulate the senses of those present. A ceramic plate dated to the second half of the twelfth century, now in Rhodes, represents two figures etched into its now yellowed slip surrounded by dots, floral motifs and vines.49 At the centre of the busy decoration of the plate is a large figure that stretches to the full height of the plate. It is wearing a pointy hat from which tumble curls that fall down the figure’s back. Its clothes consist of a tight tunic with puffed sleeves, a knee-length pleated skirt-like garment and boots. Cross-hatched and parallel lines imbue the garments with a sense 46 ‘οὕτω καὶ πάντες εἱστιῶντο λαμπροῖς σιτίοις·/ ὑπὸ Στρατοκλεῖ λιγυρῶς κεκραγόντες, / ῷδῆς ἀγαθῆς ἐμμελῶς ἡγοθμένῳ· / εὐθὺς δ᾽ ἀναστὰς τοῦ πότου Ναυσικράτης / ὄρχησιν ὠρχήσατο ναυτικωτέραν’. Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, II.106–10, ed. M. Marcovich, Theodori Prodromi De Rhodanthes et Dosicli Amoribus Libri IX, Teubner, 1703 (Stuttgart, 1992), 22, tr. E. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, TTB, 1 (Liverpool, 2012), 39. 47 Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, II.115, 118, ed. tr. Jeffreys, 39. 48 Quoted in full below. 49 Palace of the Grand Master, Rhodes, inv. no.  ΠΧ  1312; Byzantine Glazed Ceramics, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 200, cat. 223.

48  The Theatre of Dining of movement and vitality. In its hand, the figure is holding a harp-shaped stringed instrument that bisects the pictorial space in a diagonal line.50 Next to the instrument is represented on a much smaller scale a second figure. Its body is articulated much more plainly than that of its companion, consisting only of thick brown lines where the slip of the vessel has been scratched away to reveal the clay underneath. The stance of the figure’s legs suggest movement, with one leg kicked out behind the other. The figure’s arms and hands terminate in wavy lines – probably pieces of fabric like the scarves often waved about by female dancing figures. The plate shows the simultaneous presence and symbiosis of music and dance, stressing the multi-sensory dimensions of the Byzantine meal. Here, the scale of the figures represented intimates that it is the dancing that accompanies the music rather than vice versa, with sound perhaps considered primary to sight. The two elements of music or sound and dance or vision are brought together on a ceramic bowl now in Thessalonike, dated 1150–1200.51 Here, a sgraffito figure resembling that of the dancer on the plate from Rhodes is the only decoration of the bowl, placed on its interior at the base of its hemispherical body. The figure is leaping to the left, its arms form a sinuous S-shape. In its hands, the figure is holding small objects, indicated by broadly incised parallel lines. The instruments may be a form of castanets or the sistrum, rattle-like instruments, the sound of which accompanied dance as Byzantine literary sources indicate.52 The presence of both male and female dancers on Byzantine artworks reflects the fairly commonplace late antique and Byzantine practice of having entertainers of both sexes participate in professional, public or ‘semi-public’ performances, such as weddings, festivals and banquets, especially in wealthy houses.53 For example, Book I, chapter 65 of the Book of Ceremonies provides instructions for the ‘dance (…) at the banquet’; the common occurrence of such performances is implied by the concluding note of the previous chapter, stating that ‘on this day dances are not part of the banquet’.54 However, the Byzantine perception of the female dancer was always an ambiguous one, tinged by the concern for the moral safety of the viewer. This is attested not only at an early stage by Procopius’s scathing account of the insalubrious performances by Justinian’s (r. 527–565) wife Theodora but later by pieces of writing such as a twelfth-century commentary on the council of Trullo,

50 Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzi suggests that this is the Byzantine psalterion; Everyday Life, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 201. 51 Thessalonike Museum of Byzantine Culture inv. no. BK 75; Byzantine Glazed Ceramics, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 203, cat. 226. 52 Koukoules, Βυζαντινών βίος, 16, 233–5. 53 R. Webb, ‘Salome’s sisters: the rhetoric and realities of dance in late antiquity and Byzantium’, in Desire and Denial in Byzantium, ed. James, 119–48, 129. On dancing in the streets, during processions and in the aisles of churches, see L. Brubaker, ‘Dancing in the streets of Byzantine Constantinople’, History & Cultures Digital Journal, 11.2 (2021), e014. 54 Constantine Porphyrogennetos, De cerimoniis, I.64, ed. tr. Moffatt and Tall, vol. 1, 293–6. On the triumphal and imperial connotations of dancing, see Brubaker, ‘Dancing in the Streets’, 7–10.

The Theatre of Dining  49 which banned public dancing. In this commentary, the author John Zonaras (d. after 1159) elaborated on dancing women corrupting the viewer, one of the reasons for the ban.55 The continuing association between female dancers and dubious morals is evident, too, in an anecdote from the court of Isaac II Angelos (r. 1185–1195 and 1203–1204), where the court jester makes a joke reflecting the underlying assumption that the ‘dance’ of women present at a court banquet, like the accompanying dishes of food and condiment, was available for consumption. This episode is relayed in the history compiled by the writer Niketas Choniates (1155–1217) charting the period beginning with the death of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081–1118) in 1118 and ending with the events of the autumn of 1207. The text often relates anecdotes about court officials and emperors, more often than not to express Choniates’ disapproval. According to Choniates’ reports, Angelos’ court was characterised by drunkenness and sexual licentiousness56: Once at dinner Isaakios said, “Bring me salt.” Standing nearby admiring the dance of the women made up of the emperor’s concubines and kinswomen was Chalivoures, the wittiest of the mimes, who retorted, “Let us first come to know these, O Emperor, and then command others to be brought in.” At this, everyone, both men and women, burst into loud laughter (…).57 The Greek word for salt is ‘alas’ (ἅλας), and for ‘other women’ ‘allas’ (ἄλλας).58 The passage from Niketas Choniates’ history, while highlighting the normality of the presence of females and female dancers at imperial and aristocratic banquets, reveals the way in which these performers were perceived by their (mostly male) audience. Choniates’ narration also highlights the concern that the entertainments at feasts were conducive to loose morals. The association between music, dancers and prostitution as well as bad rulership is also made in Choniates’ description of Andronikos I Komnenos (r. 1183–1185), who ‘could be seen on fixed days only, as though through a curtain and by very few of the courtesans who were particularly close to them, but any time he was accessible to flute-girls and harlots (…).’59 Despite the questionable morality of female dancers in secular performances, representations of women dancers in middle and Late Byzantine art often occurred alongside religious texts from the Old and New Testaments. The Biblical passages accompanied by illustrations of dancing women are, most frequently, the dance of

55 John Zonaras, Σύνταγμα κατὰ στοιχεῖον, ed. G. Rhalles and M. Potles, Σύνταγμα τῶν θείων καὶ ἱερῶν κανόνων των τε ἁγιων και πανευφημων ἀποστολων, I (Athens, 1852), 2; Webb, ‘Salome’s sisters’, 131–2. 56 Niketas Choniates, Chronographia, V.III.441, tr. H. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, BTT (Detroit, MI, 1984), 242. 57 Choniates, Chronographia, V.III.441–2, tr. Magoulias, 242–3. 58 Haldon, ‘Humour and the everyday’, 70. 59 Choniates, Chronographia, IV.II.321–2, tr. Magoulias, 176–8.

50  The Theatre of Dining Miriam and the Israelite women after the victory of David over Goliath and the dance of Salome.60 Depending on the context, female performers were viewed in a positive light as appropriate and virtuous, as the dance of Miriam shows, or in a negative way as channels to moral corruption, as in the dance of Salome. This suggests that the ambiguous perception of female dancers existed not only in middle Byzantine rhetoric and intellectual thinking but also informed depictions of female performers in contemporary religious art. On the items of tableware discussed here however, the dancers both male and female should be understood primarily as allusions to leisure and the life of luxury lived by some of those beholding the images. This is not a phenomenon unique to decorated tableware or even to the Byzantine empire. Scholarship has focused on the presence of dancers in princely cycles across the Mediterranean, as seen on the ceiling of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, on the Innsbruck dish and on the Monomachos Crown and other artworks embodying the cross-cultural enjoyment of images of aristocratic leisure entertainments.61 When viewed in this context, depictions of dancers would not have prompted an immediate negative association. Instead, they were part of a larger iconographic ensemble that viewers were well accustomed to. However, this does not preclude the possibility of individual viewers perceiving a moral message or nuance to the depiction, since, as I argue, that was the whole point to these artworks – their fluidity in meaning, depending on who saw them, when and where. The third type of performance that formed part of the theatre of the banquet and its representation on tableware was that of acrobatic displays. The chafing dish showing entertainers and animals (fig. 2.1) shows an acrobat somersaulting across the vessel’s surface and around its body. His head is upside down, his arms extended towards the ground. His legs are modelled in higher relief, poking into space almost comically. The decoration of the chafing dish is witty in its design, highlighting the functional features of the vessel, such as the hole for the insertion of fuel to keep the contents warm, in humorous self-referentiality. Acrobats are shown accompanying dancers on the silver and silver-gilt vessels from the Basilevsky collection, the lid of a vessel and the vessel discovered in Berezov, revealing that depictions of dancers and acrobats were part of the visual vocabulary of leisure in medieval Mediterranean art.62 On the Innsbruck dish, an enamelled plate made 60 A. Liveri, ‘Der Tanz in der mittel- und spätbyzantinischen Kunst’, in W. Hörandner, J. Koder and M.A. Stassinopoulou (ed.), Wiener Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik. Beiträge zum Symposium Vierzig Jahre Institut für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik der Universität Wien in Gedenken an Herbert Hunger (Wien, 4.–7. Dezember 2002) (Vienna, 2004), 287–98, 287–8, 292–3. See Cod. Par. gr. 139, fol. 5v; Cod. Lavra B24, fol. 203r; Cod. Lavra B26, fol. 262a; Cod. 13 of the Topkapi Sarayi, fol. 265v; British Library Add. 49753, fol. 146v; Bib. Nat. Cod. Suppl. Gr. 1335, fol. 327r. 61 For discussions of the princely cycle and cross-cultural imagery, see E.R. Hoffman, ‘Pathways of portability: Islamic and Christian interchange from the tenth to the twelfth century’, AH, 24.1 (2001), 17–50. 62 Hoffman, ‘Pathways of portability’; A. Walker, ‘Cross-cultural reception in the absence of texts: the Islamic appropriation of a middle Byzantine rosette casket’, Gesta, 47.2 (2008), 99–122, 102, 110ff. On acrobats as athletes in late antique period, see S. Remijsen, ‘“Blushing in such company?” The social status of athletes in late antiquity’, in D. Brakke and D. Deliyannis (ed.), Shifting Cultural

The Theatre of Dining  51 some time between 1114 and 1144 and presented to an Artuqid ruler as the inscription around its rim reveals, a performer clad in bright clothing is balancing a pole on his head. At the top of the pole, a second entertainer performs a handstand. To either side of the two acrobats are depicted further figures that appear to be providing the musical accompaniment for the performance. A similar arrangement can be seen in the wall paintings in the staircase of St Sophia in Kyiv, built in the 1130s or 1140s, where a group of musicians accompanies a performer balancing a pole with another acrobat on it on his back.63 These images reveal that acrobatic performances were still very much part of the leisure entertainments of the aristocracy in the twelfth century, both in the Byzantine empire and beyond. In the Byzantine empire, acrobats performed in a variety of contexts, from the public displays of the Hippodrome to private domestic settings.64 Together with mimes and buffoons, they formed part of the theatre performances criticised by the canonists in the twelfth century. On these performances, Zonaras (1074–1130) writes Τοὺς πιστοὺς ἡ ἀκρίβεια τῆς εὐαγγελικῆς πολιτείας μὴ ἀνειμένως καὶ διακεχυμένως βιοῦν βούλεται, ἀλλ‘ ὡς πρέπει ἁγίοις. Διὰ τοῦτο οὖν ὁ κανών οὗτος ὅσα διάχυσιν τῇ ψυχῇ ἐμποιοῦσι παρὰ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον, ἐκλύουσί τε καὶ χαυνοῦσι τὸν τόνον αὐτῆς, καὶ πρὸς γέλωτας βρασματώδεις παρανικοῦσι καὶ καγχασμούς, ἀπηγόρευσεν, οἷα εἰσι τὰ τῶν μίμων… ἐνίοτε δ᾽ἕτερ᾽ἄττα τοῖς ἐπὶ κόῤῥης ῥαπίσμασι καὶ ψοφήμασι, γέλωτας ἀπρεπεῖς κινοῦσι, καὶ οἷον ἐκβακχεύουσι τοὺς ἀφελεστέρους ἤ ἀπροσεκτοτέρους. [c]orrect Christian discipline requires the faithful not to indulge in loose and dissolute living, but to live in a manner that befits the saints. Therefore, this canon forbade whatever gives unnecessary merriment to the soul or weakens and enfeebles its [moral] fibers, and whatever causes shaking with laughter and loud guffaws. Of this kind are the actions of the mimes... who incite unseemly laughter with slaps to the temples and loud noises, and who, as it were, incite their more simple-minded and heedless [spectators] to Bacchic frenzy.65 This suggests that one of the roles of acrobats was to provide light-hearted entertainment. In Niketas Eugenianos’s novel Drosilla and Charikles, the two lovers having found each other after their forced separation celebrate their reunion with

Frontiers in Late Antiquity (London, 2012), 537–54. On the ambiguous perception of dancers in medieval Byzantium, see Webb, ‘Salome’s sisters’, esp. 131–2; Liveri, ‘Tanz’. 63 S.A. Vysotskii, Светские фрески Софийского собора в Киеве (Kyiv, 1989). 64 For example, the twelfth-century Madrid Skylitzes manuscript contains an illumination depicting an acrobat on a horse in the Hippodrome. Naked acrobats forming an initial “T” are depicted in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzos manuscript, Turin, University Library, C.I.6, see A. Grabar, ‘Une pyxide en ivoire à Dumbarton Oaks: Quelques notes sur l’art profane pendant les derniers siècles de l’Empire byzantin’, DOP, 14 (1960), 121–46, pl. 35c9. 65 PG 137:693B–C, tr. Maguire, ‘Profane aesthetic’, 200. See also F. Tinnefeld, ‘Zum profanen Mimos in Byzanz nach dem Verdikt des Trullanums (691)’, Byzantina, 6 (1974), 321–43, 337–8.

52  The Theatre of Dining a feast at the house of their host, the elderly Maryllis. After dinner, slightly inebriated, the latter decides to perform a dance for her guests. Οὗτοι μὲν οὖν ἐντεῦθεν ἠσχολημένοι τροφαῖς κρατῆρσιν ἀμφεγαννυντο πλέον. ἡ γραῦς δέ – καὶ γὰρ εἶχε καλὴν καρδίαν – ὅλη φανεὶσα τῆς χαρᾶς καὶ τοῦ πότου ἤγερτο λοιπὸν τῆς καθέδρας ὀρθία καὶ πρὸς τὸ πρᾶγμα δῆτεν ἐσκευασμένη, λαβοῦσα χειρόμακτρα χερσὶ ταῖς δύο ὄρχησιν ὠρχήσατο βακχικωτέραν, φθόγγου κορύζης οὐ μακρὰν ποιουμἐνη χαρᾶς τελεστήν καὶ γέλωτος ἐργατην. Ἔσφαλλε μέντοι θαμὰ συγκινουμένην τὸ συνεχὲς λύγισμα τὴν Βαρυλλίδα, πίπτει δὲ πὰντως ἡ ταλαίπωρος κάτω τῷ συμποδισμῷ τῶν σκελῶν τετραμμένη. ὑψοῖ δὲ θᾶττον εἰς καφαλὴν τοὺς πόδας, καὶ τὴν καφαλὴν ἀντερείδει τῇ κόνει. τοῖς συμπόταις ἐπῆρτο μακρός τις γέλως. Οὕτως ἐκείνη συμπεσοῦσα κειμένη ἡ γραῦς Βαρυλλὶς ἐξεπόρδησε τρίτον τῷ συμπιλησμὸν τῆς κεφαλῆς μὴ φέρειν. So they [Drosilla, Charikles, their friend Kleandros, and Maryllis] then ­busied themselves, and delightedly consumed food and drink. and the old woman – for she was good-hearted – gave herself over to the festivities and the drinking. Then she got up from her seat and, being already prepared for this, took a napkin in both hands and began a somewhat Bacchic dance, producing a small snuffling sound, which initiated festivity and instigated mirth. However, the constant gyrations quickly tripped Maryllis up in her movements and so the poor wretch fell over with her legs in a tangle; she promptly lifted her feet over her head and pushed her head into the ground. Old Maryllis lay where she fell and farted three times, because she could not bear the pressure on her head.66 66 Niketas Eugenianos, Drosilla and Charikles, VII.270–89, ed. tr. J. Burton, A Byzantine Novel: Drosilla and Charikles by Niketas Eugenianos (Wauconda, 2004), 156; tr. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 439.

The Theatre of Dining  53 While Maryllis started her dance with the best of intentions, the decorum of the situation is transformed into hilarity when she tumbles and falls, revealing the humorous element of the narrative. Thus, although banquets could be ritualistic and official occasions, they were not devoid of light-heartedness. The musicians, acrobats and entertainers present showed off the wealth and sophistication of the host but also dispelled boredom by amusing the diners. The comedic role of entertainers is evident in twelfth-century historical sources, such as Choniates’ anecdote about the word play on ‘salt’ and ‘women’ by jesters at the court of Isaac II. Mimes and jesters were the focus of orchestrated humour within the Byzantine court and wealthy households, expected to make fun of everyone, excepting not even the emperor.67 Besides word plays and the wit of jesters, the emperors of the middle Byzantine empire are also reported to have enjoyed the more practical sort of jokes. Evidently, the Byzantines liked physical comedy and buffoonery at their feasts, to such an extent that they had professionals cater for it.68 However, the function of acrobats at feasts was not restricted to comedy and laughter. The entertainers who accompanied the banquet were an important part of the overall effect, with the presence of acrobats designed to divert and impress guests. On the bowl from Berezov, a dancer clad in a knee-length tunic with long sleeves can be seen performing a routine while another performer is strutting across the picture field. These entertainers are joined by a group of acrobats, tumbling about and somersaulting. Performers can be seen displaying similar skills on the lid of a vessel, where acrobats dressed in tabards embroidered with gems are doing handstands and dancers complete the lineup of entertainers commandeered for the pleasure of the viewer. In 949, Liudprand of Cremona paid his first visit to Constantinople, when he was sent to the court of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos as an ambassador. He describes the entertainments he witnessed at the Christmas dinner held at the imperial palace: (…) I omit the shows that I saw there (…); but one alone, on account of its astonishing quality, it will not be unpleasant to insert here. There enters some fellow sustaining on his forehead without the help of his hands a wooden pole that is twenty-four and more feet long (…). Then two naked boys were led in, but girt with short knickers, that is, wearing brief costumes, who climbed up the wooden pole and played around there, and then, clambering back down it with their heads turned upside-down, they maintained the pole so motionless that it appeared rooted to the earth. Finally, after the descent of one, the other, who remained there alone, cavorted up there and left me stunned with even greater admiration. For in some way it seemed possible

67 L. Garland, ‘Imperial women and entertainment at the middle Byzantine court’, in L. Garland (ed.), Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800–1200 (Aldershot, 2006), 177–92, 178. See also P. Marciniak, ‘How to entertain the Byzantines: some remarks on mimes and jesters in Byzantium’, in A. Öztürkmen and E.B. Vitz, (ed.), Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 20 (Turnhout, 2014), 125–48. 68 A. Kazhdan and G. Constable, People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington, DC, 1982), 64.

54  The Theatre of Dining as long as both played, since, although that was marvellous, too, actually by their not unequal weight they steadied the pole they had climbed up. But the one who, by balancing his weight, stayed on top of the pole, where he even played, and then came down unscathed, left me so agape that my admiration did not escape the emperor himself.69 Liudprand’s records are not only valuable for the detail in which they communicate the atmosphere at, appearance of and proceedings in the imperial palace. His chronicles eloquently convey the marvel felt by Liudprand and suggest that this effect of the performance was its main appeal, fully intended to astonish guests. This deliberate seeking out of performances that would lead guests open-mouthed with astonishment and even shock is also outlined in Rhodanthe and Dosikles, on the occasion when the pirate king Gobryas hosts a banquet for the Pissan envoy Artaxanes. To impress and intimidate his guests, the host serves exotic and unusual food and provides a dwarf jester called Satyrion as entertainment: Ἐπεὶ δ᾽ἐπέλθοι καὶ παρασταίν μέσον, Ἀρταξάνου βλέποντος ἐντρανεστέρως, εἰς γυμνὸν ὤθει τὸν τράχηλον τὴν σπάθην, καὶ κρουνὸς ἐξέβλυζεν εὐθυς αἱμάτων, καὶ νεκρὸς εἰς γῆν ἄθλιος Σατθρίων κεῖται πρὸ πάντων, ἐκλελυμένος φρένας. When he [Satyrion] entered and stood in their midst, with Artaxanes looking on very attentively, he thrust his sword into his naked neck, and immediately a fountain of blood bubbled out, and the unhappy Satyrion lay dead on the ground in front of them all, having gone out of his mind.70 While Artaxanes breaks into tears and starts wailing, Gobryas, the orchestrator of the whole performance, goes up to Satyrion and says: ‘Man, (…) arise and live.’71 Immediately, the seemingly dead jester gets up and starts to play a song on his lyre.72 In this case, the jester is not only the entertainment provided for laughs and dramatic suspense but also fills in as the musician. Here, the carefully coordinated display is intended to intimidate Artaxanes, sent to give the pirates an ultimatum, by showcasing the power of the host. Through his display, Gobryas aims to demonstrate that his pirate lord Mistylos can bend the laws of nature by rearranging

69 Liudprand of Cremona, Retribution, VI.9, ed. Squatriti, 200. 70 Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, IV. 226–31, ed. Marcovich, 63, tr. Jeffreys, 73. 71 ‘“ἄνθρωπε,” φησίν, “ἐξανάστα καὶ βίου”’, Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, IV.237, ed. Marcovich, 64, tr. Jeffreys, 73. 72 Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, IV.239–41, ed. tr. Jeffreys, 73.

The Theatre of Dining  55 and transforming it and can even master death, bringing an apparently dead entertainer back to life.73 Just like the other two forms of entertainment examined in this chapter, that is music and dance, the performances of acrobats had a layered significance that spanned from the humorous and even indecorous to triumph and power. The medieval Byzantine dining table was a locus for suspense, animation and delight. The theatre of the banquet was staged through the material splendour of dining and the performance of both the presentation of bowls and plates and of the entertainers present in dining spaces. Ceramic and metal tableware played a central role in the experience of dining by inspiring awe, subverting expectations and encoding and decoding the meaning of music, dance and acrobatics. The visual properties of the objects viewed and as such used at the table were deliberately exploited by their makers and users to produce moments of drama, with visual splendour created through colour and shine employed to attract and direct the viewer’s gaze. The theatrical presentation of the objects highlighted and even exaggerated their splendour. Many ceramic and metal vessels depict entertainers and activities that featured prominently in Byzantine dining spaces and in Byzantine civic life more generally. The music and song performed to accompany feasts were a form of leisure entertainment but held a deeper and complex symbolism. In an imperial context, music and acclamations connoted victory and triumph and represented the continuous (re)affirmation of and assent to the ruling emperor. Music also held the potential of both moral downfall and of retribution: it could lead to the loss of decorum, so valued by the Byzantines, and to the descent of festivities into disorder; but it could also denote intellectual, moral and spiritual attainment. Music was frequently accompanied by the performance of dancers as texts and images reveal. Dances of both an official and unofficial nature are depicted on ceramic and metal vessels, attesting to the importance of this type of performance at banquets. The perception of male and female dancers in the middle Byzantine empire is ambiguous, ranging, depending on context, from leisure and pleasure to moral corruption and military triumph. A similar ambivalence is found in the attitudes towards acrobats, the third form of entertainments present at the banquet. The depictions and textual accounts of these three types of performances – music, dance and acrobatics – reveal that they were popular entertainments that were deliberately deployed to heighten the drama of the banquet. They also highlight that, like a good piece of theatre, the performances surrounding the middle Byzantine dinner table could produce both comedic effects and morally elevating results. This duality reveals the ambivalent and fluctuating perception of entertainers.

73 Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, IV.243ff, ed. tr. Jeffreys, 73.

3

Word, Image and Intellect Rhetoric and Display at Table

The theatre of the banqueting table extended from the objects on the table and the performers surrounding it to the banqueters themselves. Rhetorical performances were an important component of communal eating. They offered participants an opportunity to exhibit their learning and to apply it to the imagery on the artworks surrounding them, encouraging display and discussion. The interpretation of the decoration of tableware would vary depending on who was looking at it and their personal knowledge and experience. A common feature of the decoration of items of ceramic tableware and of the precious metal vessels is the combination of often seemingly disparate imagery that combines narrative images drawn from a range of sources and that spans both the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ and the absence of identifying features that facilitate an interpretation of the image.1 The bowls, dishes and lids are decorated with engravings, repoussé images and, in some cases for the metalwork tableware, inscriptions, combining different textures and techniques of pottery and metalwork and the visual tools of word and image to stimulate the viewer’s eye and mind.2 Their imagery emphasises music, dance and acrobats, and displays power and prowess: the vessels are decorated with images of fish, birds, animals and monsters; courtly entertainments; warriors; portraits of rulers and saints; and couples placed in a bucolic setting. Several of the vessels combine a number of these elements, including secular images of leisure with images of saints, resulting in complex ensembles that defy a single interpretation. The imagery found on Byzantine tableware is, as this brief account suggests, not cohesive. Yet, the study and interpretation of these vessels encounters the same problem: the difficulty in understanding and identifying their meaning. The decoration on the tableware, both ceramic and metal, is complex and in many cases ambiguous, complicating attempts at studying them. One of the questions that these objects pose is how their images, which seem disparate and incongruent both in their specific meaning and in their

1 The labelling of the artworks will be used self-consciously as a tool for study, and the dishes will be studied alongside secular as well as religious artworks. 2 On the concept of poikilia, see B.V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, PA, 2010), 139–43; B.V. Pentcheva, ‘Moving eyes: surface and shadow in the Byzantine mixed-media relief icon’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 55/56 (2009), 222–34. DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359-4

Word, Image and Intellect  57 relation to one another, operate together. Do the individual objects present coherent and singular interpretations and meanings? Or do the scenes depicted on the objects stand on their own, as vignettes that carry meaning unrelated to the image on either side of them that produce a general flair rather than a specific meaning, as previous scholarship has argued in relation to ivory boxes?3 And how can the often polyphonic and polyvalent imagery on the vessels be brought together, if at all? To address these questions, it is necessary to reintroduce the objects of tableware in their original viewing context: a domestic and largely secular context, including but not restricted to that of the dinner table.4 The artworks present during the feast played a crucial part in fostering another aspect of performance at the banquet, that of its discursivity. Moreover, the open-ended, intellectually challenging character of the banquet, while being aided by the works of art involved in it, also influenced the imagery of the objects themselves. The decorated tableware contains noteworthy parallels to another art form practised in the Byzantine empire – that of rhetoric. Rhetoric formed one of the major disciplines of Byzantine education, and eloquence and knowledge of the school of rhetoric were essential for an administrative career. Rhetorical performances had an established place in state and church ceremonial and also penetrated into the semi-public setting of the theatron and the private space of the home.5 The presence and function of rhetorical performances in the setting of the banquet can elucidate the relationship between rhetoric and the decorated items of tableware. Rhetorical strategies can offer a way of interpreting ambivalent images on objects about which we know little. A deep ceramic plate from Corinth dated to between 1130 and 1160 is covered with a pinkish slip into which a scene has been incised (fig. 3.1). This shows at the centre a man riding on a horse, his arms outstretched. He is wearing a long-sleeved garment articulated with incised spiral-shaped motifs, perhaps denoting armour. His horse is adorned with straps and tassels. Next to the man’s left hand is depicted a bird, which is almost as large as the man’s upper body. This suggests that the bird is of importance to the scene depicted, though its function is unclear: at first sight, it seems to be a bird of prey used by the mounted man for hunting. Yet, it is not perching on the man’s hand, as birds in images of hunting usually do, but rather is depicted as standing behind it – its legs reach far below the man’s outstretched hand, almost to the hindquarters of the horse. Nor does the bird appear to be a bird of prey: its beak is short and pointed rather than long and curved; its legs long and graceful rather than short. The bird’s claws, which may have identified it as a bird of prey, have been lost to damage. Underneath the hind legs of the horse at the centre of the plate is visible the upper half of a hare that is holding a branch in its mouth. Its long ears and body are decorated with curled lines that suggest fur. It is

3 A. Cutler, ‘On Byzantine boxes’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, 42–43 (1984–85), 32–47. 4 L. Frentrop, ‘The art of dining in eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium’ (PhD thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2016), esp. 19–58. 5 ‘Rhetoric’, ODB, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195046526.001.0001/ acref-9780195046526-e-4674?rskey=5udM5h&result=4671 (2005, accessed 25 January 2016).

58  Word, Image and Intellect

Figure 3.1 Plate with rider and angel, Corinth, 1130–1160.  American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas.

moving across the pictorial space in the opposite direction to the rider and the bird, animating the scene and imbuing it with a sense of movement. Facing the horse is a second bird, perhaps a peacock. It appears to be holding a round object in its beak, though it is not clear what kind of object this is. Finally, in the top left corner of the scene is shown a male figure, on a slightly smaller scale than the rider. This figure, too, is wearing a long-sleeved garment with scribbles that may indicate armour; the pattern continues down his legs to suggest armoured legwear or boots. In his left hand the figure holds a staff terminating in a cross. Above the figure’s shoulders are leaf-like shapes that have been interpreted as wings, leading to the figure’s identification as an archangel.6 The figure however is not identified as, for example, Gabriel, nor is its purpose in the scene clear. What does it all mean? The content of this narrative image – the hunter, the hare (the prey?), the birds and the archangel – does not go back to a single, if any, recognisable textual source. Another ceramic bowl from Corinth depicts a siren standing on the back of an ostrich, turned towards a fish facing sideways (fig. 1.4). In addition to the quite literal exoticism of some of the imagery, it is also baffling in its eclecticism. The polyvalent imagery is not limited to ceramic plates and bowls but also occurs on tableware made of other materials. A bowl discovered near the town of 6 For example D. Papanikola-Bakirtzi (ed.), Byzantine Glazed Ceramics: The Art of Sgraffito (Athens, 1999), 27, cat. 3.

Word, Image and Intellect  59 Berezov is intricately decorated with incised and relief images. The small vessel, less than twelve centimetres high and twenty centimetres wide, is decorated on its outside with a rim depicting running animals circling the vessel in pursuit of one another, interspersed by trees that anchor the scene in a landscape. Underneath the rim, tiers of small, tightly stacked medallions show dancers, musicians and servants, and the image of an isolated female banqueter in the top row alongside birds, felines and hybrids in the lower rows of medallions. The inside of the vessel bears an incised image of St George on horseback.7 In its decoration, the bowl brings together different colours and textures of metal—silver, silver-gilt and niello, and raised and incised—and a broad range of subject matter, only gradually revealed through using, handling and moving the vessel. But what, then, is the relationship between a banquet and a warrior saint; the warrior saint and the real and fantasy animals; or the banquet and the varied images of vegetal and animal life depicted on the bowl? Are the animals, including the sirens, allusions to or representations of the symbolism of nature and the garden, the hunt and the food served at the banquet, symbols of power, or even the guests themselves?8 And how do we explain the unusually prominent position of the single female figure wearing imperial garments represented at the heart of the banquet, distinguished from attendants and performers through her dress and manner of depiction? The ambiguity of Byzantine art and imagery has been noted as an intrinsic part of the empire’s culture, where ‘we should not expect consistency or a limited range of signification in an image’.9 The lack of specificity ‘should alert us to a mentality that set little store by the denotation of specifics and consequently one that is unlikely to offer factual information in response to modern, deterministic inquiry’.10 Although the images on ceramic and metal tableware may not have been invested with meaning by their makers, or even by all of their users, intellectual and rhetorical practices prevalent in medieval Byzantium make it likely that the imagery took on a life, and significance, of its own in the hands of the objects’ viewers. While this could have allowed for the objects to be purely ‘decorative’, with no meaning or function at all attached to the images they carried, it enabled those wanting the images to tell a

  7 The medallions on the bowl can be no bigger than 1.5 centimetres high and 1.5 centimetres wide, as the vessel is 11.7 centimetres high and 18.5 centimetres wide at its widest and includes between twenty and twenty-five medallions in the largest decorative tier; A. Bank, Byzantine Art in the Collections of Soviet Museums (Leningrad, 1985), 310. V.P. Darkevich, Светское искусство Византии: Произведения византийского художественного ремесла в Восточной Европе X–XIII века (Moscow, 1975), 78–99; Frank Althaus, Mark Sutcliffe, Peter Stewart, and Antony Eastmond (ed.), The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity (London, 2006), 169.   8 On the garden and nature, see H. Maguire, Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (Oxford, 2012); H. Maguire, ‘A description of the Aretai palace and its garden’, The Journal of Garden History, 10.4 (1990), 209–13; A. Littlewood, H. Maguire and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Byzantine Garden Culture, Papers Presented at a Colloquium in November 1996 at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC, 2002); C. Barber, ‘Reading the garden in Byzantium: nature and sexuality’, BMGS, 16.1 (1992), 1–20.   9 A. Cutler, ‘Sacred and profane: the locus of the political in Byzantine art’, in A. Iacobini and E. Zanini (ed.), Arte profana e arte sacra a Bisanzio (Rome, 1995), 315–38, 320. 10 Op.cit., 320–1.

60  Word, Image and Intellect story to project their own knowledge onto the object and to explore it discursively, with these two practices not mutually exclusive.11 The meaning of the images fluctuated based on the context or grouping they are viewed in and the experiences and knowledge the viewer, quite literally, brings to the table. The lack of fixed meaning was precisely the appeal of such imagery. The audience’s engagement in the display of skill and intellect was a central part of the theatre of the banquet and crucial to its processes of communication and social structuring. A shallow dish from Vilgort and the almost identical vessel found in Chernihiv consist of concave fields radiating from the vessels’ centre, which depicts a couple surrounded by animals on its inside (fig. 3.2). A number of ceramic vessels such as a plate from Corinth display similar iconography, showing couples in an outdoor setting. On the outside of the vessels from Vilgort and Chernihiv, the concave fields carry relief images of pairs of birds, hybrids and other animals and inlaid depictions of armed figures on horseback; the inside of the concave fields likely once contained further images, now lost.12 The alternating relief and incised images on the vessels’ outside offer different modes of reading the imagery, either as a band of connected images or as depicting two different narratives or concepts. While in this case, the imagery seems to evoke tropes of battle and hunt alongside harmonious images of (marital?) togetherness, the decoration of the shallow vessels from Vilgort and Chernihiv is not entirely unambiguous. The central couple depicted on the vessels can be identified with a number of candidates, as discussed below, with both negative and positive connotations – so which potential couple are we to read them as? And how are we to make sense of the apparently incompatible coexistence of conflict and battle and peace and harmony on the objects?13 Two of the figures on the vessel from the Basilevsky collection can plausibly be identified as Alexander the Great based on iconographic elements; the identity of the remaining characters remains open to question.14 Some of them may be more general allusions to the atmosphere of the banquet and the leisure activities enjoyed by the Byzantine elite; others appear oddly specific but cannot be identified due to the absence of inscriptions and fairly generic iconography.15 The bowl includes two images of a man fighting a lion. The man, clad in a short tunic with billowing drapery flowing behind him and displaying a beardless face, is grasping the lion’s mouth to force it shut. The scene, it has been suggested, shows Samson battling a lion; Alexander the Great and Herakles are other, equally plausible, identifications.16 Here, the polyva-

11 See also A. Cutler, ‘Synphrasis’, in Thirty-Sixth Annual Byzantine Studies Conference: Abstracts of Papers (Philadelphia, PA, 2010), 24–5, 24. 12 Darkevich, Светское искусство, 16–59. 13 In light of the near-identity of the vessels from Vilgort and Chernihiv, I will treat them here as though a single vessel, referring only to the vessel from Vilgort throughout but extending the questions and conclusions applied to it to that from Chernihiv. 14 Darkevich, Светское искусство, 72, Fig. 94 and 74, Fig. 96. 15 Darkevich, Светское искусство, 73, Fig. 95. 16 A. Walker, The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Middle Byzantine Imperial Power, Ninth to Thirteenth Centuries C.E. (Cambridge, 2012), 114; Bank, Byzantine Art, 310–11. For a description of Digenes Akrites’ dining chamber, whose iconographic scheme includes

Word, Image and Intellect  61

Figure 3.2  Vessel with a couple and animals, 1100–1200. 9 × 27 cm. Photo: author.

lence also noticed in the vessels discussed above applies particularly to individual figures that elude a single or specific identification and interpretation, rather than, as for the bowl from Berezov, to how the different elements of the imagery are to be read together. A flat and shallow silver dish in the Hermitage, discovered in 1925 in a rural location near Vilgort in the Ural Mountains and attributed to twelfth-century Byzantium, displays a central raised roundel at the bottom of the vessel as its main decorative feature. The roundel depicts two figures, a woman on the left and a man on the right, surrounded by animals. The male is portrayed with a beardless face, an indicator of his young age, and upon his head rests a crown. He is dressed in a knee-length tunic belted at the waist and has rolled up his sleeves to his elbows; he is also wearing a cloak that he has flung over his shoulders. On his feet, he is wearing knee-high boots or laced-up sandals. His clothing as well as his accessories imply that he is of an aristocratic, if not royal, background. However, the figure is not placed in a courtly context – he is surrounded by birds, foxes and hares, and is seated on a rock together with his female companion. The male is plucking a harp; the female figure to his side appears to be listening to his tune, raising her finger to her lips to silence the animals surrounding them. The dish lacks inscriptions, leaving the identity of the figures open to interpretation. The arrangement of the figures, their dress and their actions resemble that of the depiction of David and Melodia in the tenth-century Paris Psalter. The formal

Samson, Alexander the Great and Joshua, see E. Jeffreys (ed. tr.), Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions, Cambridge Medieval Classics, 7 (Cambridge, 1998), G 7.60ff.

62  Word, Image and Intellect similarity between the couple on the dish and the depictions of King David during his life before his rule, which harks back to late antique paintings of mythological figures such as Io and Orpheus, warrants the question whether the figures on the metal dish are to be understood as David and Melodia.17 King David represented a range of royal and imperial virtues, and as such was often imitated or chosen as a model by Byzantine rulers.18 But, despite embodying a number of virtues and characteristics that were often applauded in imperial panegyrics, David’s qualities as a husband were certainly not amongst them. In a period where the lawfulness of marriage was a predominant concern in Byzantium, the image of David presents the viewer with an ambiguous model of rulership and virtue, comprising characteristics to both emulate and avoid.19 Similarities in dress, pose and iconography between the dish and other portrayals of King David and Melodia suggest that this was one of the readings intended for the identity of the male figure. However, the lack of inscriptions and layered iconographic references complicate attempts at determining a fixed and single identity for the figures depicted. In addition to the identification with the Old Testament king David, scholars have suggested that the male figure depicted here is Digenes Akrites, the romantic hero of the eponymous tale of the adventures of a Byzantine-Arab borderlord.20 The first half of this epic probably took its origin in an oral form in the tenth century; its second half, ‘the romance of Digenes’, was probably composed in the eleventh or twelfth century.21 The epic experienced widespread and enduring popularity and reflects the changing social and cultural landscape of the middle Byzantine period. It tells the story of a borderlord, Digenes, the child of an Arab emir and a Christian noblewoman. In the tale, Digenes is portrayed as leading an active life and as hav17 For more on King David before his rule and the sources for the imagery, see A. Eastmond, ‘“It began with a picture”: imperial art, texts and subversion between East and West in the twelfth century’, in D. Angelov and M. Saxby (ed.), Power and Subversion in Byzantium: Papers from the 43rd Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham, March 2010, SPBS, 17 (London, 2013), 73–85, 82; H. Maguire, ‘The art of comparing in Byzantium’, ArtB, 70 (1988), 88–103, 93–4; A. Cutler, ‘A psalter from Mâr Saba and the evolution of the Byzantine David cycle’, Journal of Jewish Art, 6 (1978), 39–63, 39; A. Cutler, ‘The Psalter of Basil II’, Arte Veneta, 30 (1976), 9–19, 17; K. Weitzmann, ‘The survival of mythological representations in Early Christian and Byzantine art’, DOP, 14 (1960), 43–68, 67–8. 18 For a detailed explanation of this suggestion, see Eastmond, ‘“It began with a picture”’; A. Cutler and N. Oikonomides, ‘An imperial Byzantine casket and its fate at a humanist’s hands’, ArtB, 70.1 (1988), 77–87. 19 A. Kazhdan and G. Constable, People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington, DC, 1982), 71. 20 Darkevich, Светское искусство, 266–7; another possible identification for the male figure could be Orpheus, the iconographic forerunner of David; R. Beaton, The Medieval Greek Romance, 2nd edn (London, 1996), 32. 21 For the recent discussion regarding the date of the earliest manuscript version of Digenes Akrites, see C. Kupane and B. Krönung (ed.), Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond, Brill’s Companions to the Byzantine World, 1 (Leiden and Boston, 2016); A.J. Goldwyn and I. Nilsson (ed.), Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook (Cambridge, 2018). On orality, see C. Messis and S. Papaioannou, ‘Orality and textuality (with an appendix on the Byzantine conceptions)’, in S. Papaioannou (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature (Oxford, 2021), 241–72, esp. 253–4.

Word, Image and Intellect  63 ing a competitive character.22 Through his military exploits and courage, Digenes corresponds to and embodies the ideal of the courageous knight of notable lineage. Romantic exploits are a recurring topos of the epic poem, as is the theme of the hunt, both of which can be seen depicted on the inside and outside of the dish from Vilgort. However, Digenes, too, is a character not without flaws. His tale, which articulates the Byzantine courtly, chivalric ethos that matured in the twelfth century, also portrays honour and shame in Byzantine society.23 After marrying his love interest, only referred to as ‘the Girl’ throughout the text, Digenes sins by conducting extra-marital affairs and, in some versions of the text, murdering the women he committed adultery with.24 After his transgressions, Digenes and his wife move on to a meadow where they build a rural palace and live a quasi-nomadic lifestyle.25 The meadow is populated by swaying trees, exotic perfumes and fertile plants. The outdoor, harmonious setting of the figures on the dish from Vilgort fits such idealised bucolic scenery. If the image on the dish is identified as representing Digenes and his female companion, it would offer a representation of the ideal twelfth-century male, characterised by courage and military successes, and a portrayal of matrimonial harmony and aristocratic pastimes. But at the same time, if the scene was identified as showing the developments immediately following Digenes’ adultery, it could function as a reminder of temptation and sin. The ambiguity of the meaning of this image is further heightened by the scenes surrounding it on the vessel. While the decoration that once may have adorned the inside of the dish is now lost, its outside is made up of concave fields decorated with relief images of pairs of animals in a vegetal setting alternating with inlaid depictions of armed riders. The pairs of animals on the outside extend the image of harmonious co-existence (and pairing off) found at the centre of the dish; yet, the armed riders, whose weapons are pointing at the real and fantastical animals, disrupt and threaten the peaceful imagery and complicate its reading. This cursory discussion reveals that the iconography on the dish from Vilgort – and, by extension, that of an identical dish from Chernihiv – is vague in its meaning and allows identification with a range of characters, including King David, Orpheus and Digenes Akrites. Additionally, even if the figures’ identity could be tied to a single one of these characters, the latter are morally ambiguous figures that could be interpreted both in a positive and negative manner. The clue to the meaning of the imagery of this dish specifically and the decorated tableware presented in the houses of medieval Byzantines lies in the rhetorical performances and strategies that were familiar to Byzantine audiences. At the medieval Byzantine banquet, pursuits of a more intellectual kind such as rhetoric, literature and oral performances contributed significantly to the theatrical

22 Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, G 4.70–71; D. Ricks, ‘The pleasure of the chase: a motif in Digenes Akrites’, BMGS, 13 (1989), 290–4, 290. 23 P. Magdalino, ‘Honour among the Romaioi: the framework of social values in the world of Digenes Akrites and Kekaumenos’, BMGS, 13 (1989), 183–218, 185, 188. 24 Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, G 6.796–8, G 4.528–30. 25 Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, G 7.

64  Word, Image and Intellect effect of the entertainment at feasts.26 Oral performances were part of the fabric of Byzantine society, deeply engrained in the academic training of young Byzantines; central to ceremonial and ritual; and part of empire’s classical heritage. In late antique culture, a number of literary works attest to a well-established ideal of educated and erudite conversation on literary and philosophical topics at the dinner table.27 The principle of convivial conversation where the host and guests engaged in mutual displays of their education and culture – in other words, their paideia – was an accepted and well-established one. Paideia, the traditional education of the elite in the Graeco-Roman world, was highly standardised in its components, and was as much a training in ways of behaving in a particular mode of social interaction as in specific knowledge. This is reflected in the dual use of the term to denote culture as well as education. Paideia as a form of cultural and social engagement fostered specific modes of viewing art.28 Art in the late antique dining room, including woven wall hangings, silver tableware, floor mosaics and statues, could play a key role in stimulating the type of conversation considered desirable.29 Middle Byzantine tableware prompted a similar mode of viewing and exploration. Learning, rhetoric and erudite conversation influenced the viewing and interpretation of the medieval Byzantine vessels, which were made for and gained their meaning through viewing in the social, semi-public context of the dining table and through the discursive exploration of their imagery.30 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, rhetoric was part of the general education of Byzantines, as well as a career path for the intellectual literati that worked both as teachers and as commissioned rhetors for the elite of the empire. Rhetoric played a crucial role in the official arena of government: communications, law-giving and

26 For more on this, see William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, XX.23; ed. tr. E.A. Babcock, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, Records of Civilizations: Sources and Studies, 2 (New York, 1943), 381–2; Theodore Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, II.105– 10, IV.226–31, E. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, TTB, 1 (Liverpool, 2012), 39, 73; Liudprand of ­Cremona, Retribution, VI.9, ed. tr. P. Squatriti, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Washington, DC, 2007), 200; Niketas Choniates, Chronographia, V.III.441–2, tr. H. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, BTT (Detroit, 1984), 242–3; Kazhdan and ­Constable, People and Power, 64. 27 For example Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales, ed. François Fuhrmann, Plutarque: Oeuvres morales, IX (Paris, 1978), 2: Propos de Table, IV–VI; Athenaeus, Δειπνοσοφισταί, ed. tr. C.B. Gulick, The Deipnosophists, Loeb, 204 (Cambridge, 1927–41); Macrobius, Saturnalia, ed. R. Kaster, Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3 vols., Loeb, 510–12 (Harvard, MA, 2011). 28 R. Leader-Newby, Silver and Society in Late Antiquity: Functions and Meanings of Silver Plate in the Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Aldershot, 2004), 123–4. See also F. Bernard, ‘Asteiotes and the ideal of the urbane intellectual in the Byzantine eleventh century’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 47.1 (2013), 129–42. 29 R. Leader-Newby, ‘Personifications and paideia in late antique mosaics from the Greek east’, in E. Stafford and J. Herrin (ed.), Personification in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium (Aldershot, 2005), 231–46. 30 On the survival of the classical tradition in Byzantine literature, see H. Hunger, ‘The classical tradition in Byzantine literature: the importance of rhetoric’, in M. Mullett and R. Scott (ed.), Byzantium and the Classical Tradition. University of Birmingham Thirteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies 1979 (Birmingham, 1981), 35–47.

Word, Image and Intellect  65 litigation and, above all, ceremonial.31 Besides official rhetoric, the writers and thinkers of the empire explored other, new avenues and literary genres during the period of Komnenian rule.32 It was against this background that literary fiction in the form of the romance and of Lucianic satire and a new genre of comic begging poetry emerged in the mid-twelfth century.33 Audience and readership played an important role in the patronage and literature of the twelfth century, with many types of literature composed for oral presentation before a theatron, a term that implies a live audience in front of whom a creation is performed before being fixed in a written form.34 Margaret Mullett termed the Byzantine society a ‘profoundly performative and residually oral’ one, where rhetoric relied heavily on an audience in order to fulfil its social function and establish the communication that was one of its fundamental roles.35 This oral character of Byzantine rhetoric was intimately connected to the way in which rhetors were trained: the schools where they received their education required lectures, school texts, progymnasmata and schedographic exercises; and at the end of their studies, the budding rhetors had to demonstrate their skills in the augural lectures in the theatres of the capital, for which they improvised on scenes and little dialogues. Thus, rhetoric in Byzantium had an established role in the spectacle of display.36 Although many surviving commissions stem from the imperial court, it is worth bearing in mind that the court was not the only venue, and imperial events not the only occasions, where and when recitations were delivered. Churches and private houses, sermons, family rites of passage and even impromptu gatherings all provided a context for what was known as ‘theatre’: the performance of a text to an audience.37

31 P. Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge, 1997), 335–6. 32 On Hellenism in Byzantium, see G. Page, Being Byzantine: Greek Identity before the Ottomans (New York, 2008); A. Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 2007); A. Kaldellis, ‘Historicism in Byzantine thought and literature’, DOP, 61 (2007), 1–24; N. Metallinos (ed.), Byzantium: The Guardian of Hellenism (Montreal, 2004). 33 Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 11–12. 34 For the debate surrounding literacy and readership, see L. Garland, ‘Psalmody and Socrates: female literacy in Byzantium’, in N. Bronwen and L. Garland (ed.), Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society (Farnham, 2013), 57–76; T.D. Ivanova-Sullivan, ‘Interpreting medieval literacy: learning and education in Slavia Orthodoxa (Bulgaria) and Byzantium in the ninth to twelfth centuries’, in R. Begley and J. Koterski (ed.), Medieval Education (New York, 2005), 50–67; N. Oikonomides, Society, Culture and Politics in Byzantium (Aldershot, 2005); Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 167; M. Mullett, ‘Aristocracy and patronage in the literary circles of Comnenian Constantinople’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Byzantine Aristocracy IX to XIII Centuries, BAR International Series, 221 (Oxford, 1984), 173–201, 180. 35 M. Mullett, ‘Rhetoric, theory and the imperative of performance: Byzantium and now’, in E. Jeffreys (ed.), Rhetoric in Byzantium: Papers from the Thirty-fifth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Exeter College, University of Oxford, March 2001, SPBS, 11 (Aldershot, 2003), 151–70, 153–4. 36 Op.cit., 153. 37 Magdalino, Empire of Manuel, 336–7; for descriptions of the careers and performances of middle Byzantine authors, see H. Hunger, Die hochsprachlich profane Literatur der Byzantiner, I (Munich, 1978), 70, 210–11.

66  Word, Image and Intellect Amongst the literary innovations of the twelfth century were the romances, a genre that suddenly appeared in the middle of the century and that had not been practised since late antiquity. Four twelfth-century romances survive, complete or in parts, and were written between the 1130s and 1180s by intellectuals that worked in the nexus of the imperial court.38 While the romances of the twelfth century give no clue in their writing to the kind of reception their authors envisaged for them, the slightly earlier ‘proto-romance’ Digenes Akrites contains indications that it may have been written for oral delivery, or that the oral version of the epic tale was later fixed in writing.39 It seems plausible that not only the story of the border lord Digenes but the romances ‘proper’, too, may have been performed in front of an audience. Many of them were probably composed for patrons placed within the circles of the imperial court, which had a tradition of hosting performances of nonreligious texts commissioned by its members.40 The oral performance of the novels and other works need not have been limited to the imperial theatron or literary circles. The physical setting of the rhetorical theatre goes beyond the ‘salons’ and can often be deduced from the title of the works recited, from allusions in the text, or from the ceremonial context. Imperial encomia, for example, were delivered either in palace throne rooms, or, in the case of ‘popular’ acclamations, in courtyards and public places. The composition of theatrical audiences must have varied according to the occasion, but one factor was a constant in all theatra: they were occasions for the celebration of logos – learning and eloquence – as well as lordship, both of which are important themes in the romances. The themes and subject matter of the novels would have made suitable accompaniments to a banquet: feasting itself is a prominent topos in the novels, often constituting dramatic or humorous high points and structuring and advancing the narrative. In the romances, banquets offer occasions where characters display their hospitality; indulge in flirtation; enjoy entertainment in the shape of wine, dance and song; discover secrets and hidden identities; and demonstrate their power and prowess.41 Because of the prominence of feasting in the medieval novels, they would have possessed a topical relevance for performances during banquets, whether delivered as a whole or in instalments to maintain the suspense. While listening to the story, the effect of which could have been heightened by musical interludes and the appearance of performers at the right moment, the guests at the banquet might have seen the behaviour described in the romances – the flirtation, the showing off, the banter – reflected in their immediate vicinity. With its emphasis on performance and entertainment, the context of the banquet was ideally suited for the presentation of literary works. These oral performances, including but not limited to the novels, were not only prompted by the desire to 38 Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 12–13. 39 Op. cit., 17. 40 P. Roilos, Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (Washington, DC, 2005), 13; Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 7, 10. 41 In the novel Hysmine and Hysminias, written by Eumathios Makrembolites in the 1140s, the characters sit down for seventeen communal meals. Eumathios Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias, I.8–9, II.12–13, III.4–5 (dream banquet), III.10, V.9–10, VI.1–2, VI.15, VIII.4, VIII.8, VIII.11, VIII.20, IX.3–4, IX.7, IX.16, X.7, X.16, XI.2, XI.18.

Word, Image and Intellect  67 display skill or the need to secure commissions. The speeches, poems and riddles presented to the Byzantine audiences in many cases constituted a direct response to unique and special occasions. Examples of specific responses are the speech given by Eustathios of Thessalonike upon the wedding of the children of Manuel I Komnenos in 1179 or 1180; the progymnasmata written to flatter a specific emperor; or the wedding or funerary poems commemorating the important life events of specific individuals.42 As major occasions such as births, weddings and funerals would have been accompanied by banquets, both in private and in imperial households, these would have presented an opportunity for the literati to present their work celebrating and commenting upon the event while they had an audience eager to be entertained contained in a concise space, ensuring maximum exposure. Besides responding to a certain event, the performances of rhetors could also be composed as a reaction to or as commentary on a work of art, a building or the surroundings in which they were presenting their piece. Through the site-specific, situational and event-specific character of these oral performances, rhetoric, song, dance, acclamation, gesture and architectural space and its decoration would complement one another and result in a carefully orchestrated ensemble, stimulating to both the senses and the intellect of the audience.43 But although artworks on all scales could serve as direct prompters for the delivery of a rhetorical piece, the relationship between art and ekphrasis was never a straightforward, direct one.44 Amongst the surviving descriptions are ekphraseis of palace decorations, including those of the dining halls in the imperial complex, as well as pieces describing the decoration of the lavish gold and silver vessels used during imperial banquets.45 This suggests that during banquets, rhetoricians who wished to demonstrate their inventive and rhetorical skills could and would perform pieces that commented on the material surroundings of the feast, including the decorated tableware present. Surviving middle Byzantine texts indicate that precious tableware was recognised

42 Eustathios of Thessalonike, Λόγος I, ed. P. Wirth, Eustathii Thessalonicensis opera minora: magnam partem inedita, CFHB, 32 (Berlin, 2000), 170–81; Manganeios Prodromos, Poem 11.145, ed. S. Bernardinello, Theodori Prodromi De Manganis, SBNG, 4 (Padua, 1972), 79. 43 Mullett, ‘Rhetoric’, 153. 44 L. Brubaker, ‘Pictures are good to think with: looking at Byzantium’, in A. Milonopoulou (ed.), L’écriture de la mémoire: la littéralité de l’historiographie. Actes du IIIe colloque international philologique “EPMHNEIA”, Nicosie, 6–7–8 mai 2004 (Paris, 2006), 221–52, 237; L. James and R. Webb, ‘To understand ultimate things and enter secret places: ekphrasis and art in Byzantium’, AH, 14.1 (1991), 1–17. 45 See MS Marc. Gr. 254, fol. 180r, tr. C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (London, 1986), 228; MS Marc. Gr. 254, nos. 315 and 333; ed. M.P. Lambros, ‘Ο Μαρκιανος Κωδιξ 524’, Νέος Ελληνομνήμων, 8 (1911), 3–57, 123–92; F. Spingou, ‘Words and artworks in the twelfth century and beyond: the thirteenth-century manuscript Marcianus gr. 524 and the twelfth-century dedicatory epigrams on works of art’ (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2012); Theodore Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, IV.331–411, IV.342–3; ‘καλῶς τῷ σοφῷ λιθοξόῳ καὶ μυρίας δέδεκτο μορφὰς εἰκόνων’, ed. M. Marcovich, Theodori Prodromi De Rhodanthes et Dosicli Amoribus Libri IX, Teubner, 1703 (Stuttgart, 1992), 67; H. Maguire and E. Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 57; S. Malmberg, ‘Dazzling dining: banquets as an expression of imperial legitimacy’, in L. Brubaker and K. Linardou (ed.), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, SPBS, 13 (Aldershot, 2007), 75–92, 77; Magdalino, Empire of Manuel, 473, 475.

68  Word, Image and Intellect as a type of object worthy of attention and discussion by its viewers. A manuscript now in Venice contains a description of a gold vessel, discussed in Chapter 6, that depicted the successful campaign by Manuel I against Sultan Masud of Iconium (r. 1116–1156). Other accounts from travellers, visitors and court members dating to as early as 900 and as late as the end of the middle Byzantine period attest to the fact that the lavish tableware at the imperial court piqued the interest of its viewers, through its sheer material value and splendour and by means of its carefully orchestrated imagery. Far from being ignored, being purely utilitarian or fading into the background during the banquet, decorated tableware played an important role in the way the host constructed and presented the drama of the feast as well as his own identity. Precious metal and ceramic decorated tableware would have been engaged in the overall performance of the banquet, on a physical level by partaking in the serving of food and drink and being passed around, and on an intellectual level by being involved in the performances given during the banquet. By forming the subject of aesthetic and rhetorical exploration of the decoration and the meaning of the vessels, the tableware became an integral part of the theatre and sense of wonder that was sought after and promoted at the lavish feasts of the medieval Byzantine elite. By opening the objects up to discussion, their imagery too, became less fixed in meaning and more open to interpretation. This was partially caused by the communicative nature of the banquet and its performances, and partially in response to unique phenomena in Byzantine rhetoric. Rhetoric – be it individual works or ekphraseis on tableware specifically, or secular medieval Greek literature and rhetoric as a performance more generally – functioned and entertained on a level beyond tragedy, comedy and narrative suspense. It also aimed to appeal to its audience by consciously evading singularity. This could be singularity of meaning, where a specific and definite significance is intended for the text, or singular referentiality, wherein the rhetorical piece refers to a single cultural, literary or artistic genre. These types of singularity could be dispensed with by the exploration of riddles, the exploitation of the potential ambivalence of language, the insertion of extra-textual references and by means of openness to interpretation. The ability of rhetors to transform things and manipulate the elusiveness of the signifier is expressed in a passage from John Tzetzes’ Chiliades: (…) for this is a trait of a rhetorical and double-tongued man: to employ things and names and similarly all the rest as praise as well as invective according to expediency.46 Tzetzes illustrates here the nature of rhetoric as ‘double-tonguedness’, or amphoteroglossia. According to Tzetzes, the rhetor who expresses different, even

46 ‘Τοῦτο γὰρ ῥήτορος ἀνδρὸς καὶ ἀμφοτερογλώσσου, / καὶ πράγμασι καὶ κλήσεσι καὶ τοῖς λοιποῖς ὁμοίως / πρὸς ἔπαινον καὶ ψόγον δὲ κεχρῆσθαι συμφερόντως.’ John Tzetzes, Χιλιάδες, ed. P.A.M. Leone, Ioannis Tzetzae Historiae (Naples, 1968), 7.299–301.

Word, Image and Intellect  69 contradictory ideas by employing the same word is double-tongued.47 Some writers wove hidden meanings into their texts that could only be understood by certain members of their audience; others employed irony to speak with double meaning. The embedding of multiple meanings and the ambivalence of twelfth-century literature was a means of intellectual play, creating an interactive exchange between the rhetor and his audience.48 Double-tonguedness involved the rhetor’s ability to adapt the same words and ideas to different literary contexts, and, correspondingly, to invest them with totally opposite functions and meanings.49 The multiplicity of registers that rhetors had access to was partially inherent to the function of rhetoric as an interactive genre where works are focused by the speaker on the addressee, thus changing with every recipient and occasion.50 The ambivalence of rhetoric was promoted not only in learned Greek pieces, but also in the vernacular forms that emerged from within the court circles in the course of the twelfth century as part of a new confidence in language as a means of exploring multiple levels of expression and signification, rather than as an end in itself.51 The dual meaning of text and word manifested on one hand in the twofold referentiality to the main heritages of medieval Byzantium, Christian and pagan; and on the other hand in the use of literary tropes and devices such as allegory, wordplay and puns. The eleventh-century rhetorician John Sikeliotes defined allegory as ‘that kind of discourse that by means of a certain idea refers enigmatically to a different idea when it is self-sufficient and distinctly preserves its hidden meaning’.52 As such, allegory could be used as a type of extra-textual reference, where one thing was said openly but another implied – with the possibility of being never revealed or becoming a decidedly fixed meaning, therefore existing on two semantic levels simultaneously. Michael Psellos and John Tzetzes, amongst others, wrote allegorical works in the eleventh and twelfth centuries respectively, revealing the currency of this intellectual register in the middle Byzantine period and its status as a rhetorical game.53 The polyvalence of some of the imagery found on contemporary tableware – such as dancers, who connoted both triumph and moral corruption – forms the visual equivalent to the ambiguity embedded in rhetorical works. The combination of apparently unconnected elements in the iconography of individual dishes – for example a siren, an ostrich and a fish on a bowl from Corinth – highlights that it was the significance of both individual elements 47 Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, 29–30. 48 L. Neville, Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios (Cambridge, 2012), 32. 49 Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, 30. 50 Mullett, ‘Rhetoric’, 153. 51 M. Alexiou, ‘Ploys of performance: games and play in the Ptochoprodromic Poems’, DOP, 53 (1999), 91–109, 91. 52 John Sikeliotes, ed. C. Walz, Rhetores Graeci ex codicibus florentinis mediolanensibus monacensibus neapolitanis parisiensibus romanis venetis taurinensibus et vindobensibus, 6 (Stuttgart, 1834), 221.10–13. 53 John Tzetzes, Allegories on Odyssey, in H. Hunger, ‘Johannes Tzetzes: Allegorien zur Odyssee (Buch 1–12)’, BZ, 49 (1956), 249–310, 254.28–34; Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, 117, 122.

70  Word, Image and Intellect and overall schemes that shifted, fluctuated and evaded singularity. The imagery on ceramic and metal tableware by presenting visual riddles to be solved invited its viewers to demonstrate their paideia, apparently continuing the late antique tradition of art in the dining room acting as a springboard for conversation. Riddles were popular in the medieval period – referring to western medieval culture, Michael Camille attributed the fluidity and evasiveness of meaning in art and text to the ‘betwixt and between beloved of riddle-riddled popular culture’.54 This applies to Byzantine culture, too: the composition of riddles was popular in the Greek Middle Ages, and Makrembolites himself has been credited with a collection of riddles, although his authorship is not uncontested.55 Other prominent middle Byzantine literati who composed riddles were John Geometres, Christopher of Mytilene, John Mauropous, Michael Psellos and Theodore Prodromos.56 The number of literati that dabbled in this rhetorical genre attests to the popularity of riddles with writers and audiences alike.57 The currency of riddles in middle Byzantine culture indicates that Byzantine audiences would have been well acquainted with the contemplation of layered meanings, expressed both overtly and implicitly through tools such as riddles and allegories. In order for both the riddle and the allegory to be effective, it was important for the text to retain an element of obscurity and opacity, thereby rendering access to the intended meaning difficult.58 By investing texts with opacity, Byzantine rhetors appealed to firstly the protagonists of their story and secondly the readers to employ their interpretative skills to unlock meaning. In Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias, the idea of riddle composition and deciphering is connected with the description and interpretation of a number of painted personifications. The series of personifications begins with the depictions of the cardinal virtues painted on the wall of the garden of Hysminias’ host, Sosthenes, in Aulikomis.59 On the first day after his arrival in the city as a herald of Zeus, Hysminias and his friend Kratisthenes explore their hosts’ marvellous garden. The two friends contemplate and describe the images of four ‘maidens’, dressed in tunics in different colours – one

54 M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992), 27. 55 See also S. Beta, ‘An enigmatic literature: interpreting an unedited collection of Byzantine riddles in a manuscript of Cardinal Bessarion (Marcianus Graecus 512)’, DOP, 68 (2014), 211–40. It has even been suggested that Eumathios Makrembolites’ twelfth-century novel Hysmine and Hysminias consists of an extensive riddle or allegory, on both the ‘micronarrative’ and ‘macronarrative’ levels, with no single ‘solution’. Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, 140, 142. 56 See ‘Riddle’, ODB http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195046526.001.0001/ acref-9780195046526-e-4691?rskey=ObU4ja&result=4691 (accessed February 12, 2016). 57 See for example Eustathios of Thessalonike’s description of a meal that consisted of a bird that did not seem to be a bird at all; Ep. 4, ed. T.L.F. Tafel, Eustathii metropolitae Thessalonicensis opuscula (Frankfurt am Main, 1832), 311.42–56. 58 Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, 141; A. Stone, ‘Eustathios and the wedding banquet for Alexios Porphyrogennetos’, in W. Mayer and S. Trzcionka (ed.), Feast, Fast or Famine: Food and Drink in Byzantium, ByzAus, 15 (Brisbane, 2005), 33–42, 39. 59 On this ekphrasis, see P. Chatterjee, ‘Viewing and description in “Hysmine and Hysminias”: the fresco of the virtues’, DOP, 67 (2013), 209–25.

Word, Image and Intellect  71 even wears military dress – and distinguished by their crowns, made of pearls, roses and gems; accessories, including ‘a most delightful sphere’ for one, a helmet, shield and lance for the next, and scales and flames for the last; and hairstyles as well as by their demeanour. The narrator states that this is what the women looked like; what their role was and who they were we sought rather diligently to discover. Then we notice some writing above the maidens’ head, an iambic line divided into four and giving the maidens’ names; it went like this: “Prudence, Fortitude, Chastity and Justice.” Then we discussed the women’s appearance and we comprehended what till then had been incomprehensible to us (…).60 Following their identification of the four Virtues by means of reading the short epigram, Hysminias and Kratisthenes are able to interpret the appearance and symbolic details of the four figures in detail. Consequently, the apparently static personifications acquire a dynamic function that instigates an interpretive discourse.61 Hysminias admires the painter’s skill and the imaginary objects devised by the painter’s intelligence, but boasts that the obscurity and ambiguity of the images are no match for him: I can grasp, craftsman, your riddle, I can grasp what you have done, I can immerse my mind in yours; even if you are Sphinx, I am Oidipus; even if you utter riddling prophecies from the Pythia’s hearth and tripod, I am your priestly attendant and I can interpret your riddles.62 This passage of the novel highlights not only the currency of obscurity and ambiguity, but also the protagonists’ – and by extension, the audience’s – willingness, even desire, to address and solve riddles in both text and image. It seems likely that such intellectual and rhetorical exercises were also pursued at the dining table, including when looking at objects of tableware. Embedding and reading multiple meanings in a text was a means of intellectual play, creating a layering of significance or humour, as well as a means of criticising without exposing oneself to censure.63 Multi-layered meaning occurred in works of the twelfth century such as the novels and the Ptochoprodromic poems, which are full of bilingual jokes, doubleentendres and puns, with language operating on a double level. Consequently, however it was achieved, double-tonguedness was an important feature of intellectual culture of the twelfth century, manifest in rhetorical works produced during this period and embedded in the thought pattern of their audiences. 60 Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias, II.1–2.6.7, esp. II.6.1–2, ed. M. Marcovich, Eustathios Macrembolites De Hysmines et Hysminiae Amoribus Libri XI, Teubner (Munich, 2001), 12–13, tr. Jeffreys, 185. 61 Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, 146. 62 Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias, II.7.5, II.8.2, ed. Marcovich, 17–18, tr. Jeffreys, 188–9. 63 Neville, Heroes and Romans, 32.

72  Word, Image and Intellect The courting of ambivalence and interest in double-tonguedness were not limited to the literature of the middle Byzantine period; they also extended to its art. This was due in part to the Byzantines’ love of riddles, polyvalence and obscurity; in part to Byzantine image reception, where ekphraseis stood in tension between suggesting a specific reception by the audience, using clichés, tropes and stereotypes, and constituting an individual reaction; and in part to deliberate interpretative gaps left by the Byzantine beholder.64 While mainly a tool in the pursuit of intellectual pleasures, rhetorical analyses of images could also be deployed as subtle means of critique. Andronikos I Komnenos set up a portrait of himself outside the church of the Forty Martyrs in Constantinople, an image now only known through the description by Niketas Choniates. In this portrait, Choniates states, the emperor is represented not as a ruler but as a labourer, dressed in simple clothes and holding a sickle. With this image, Choniates went on, ‘Andronikos instructed the passers-by and made conspicuous to those who wished to understand the lawless deeds he had perpetrated in putting to death the heir and winning for himself both his throne and his wife’.65 From Choniates’ description, the image appears to have been designed to subvert the power and authority of the emperor. The subversion and critique does not lie in the image itself; rather, it is embedded in the author’s description of what was probably a real image. The misinterpretation, in all likelihood deliberate, occurred in Choniates’ description and interpretation, not in the creation of the image itself. The historian’s description retained the elements of the portrait but inverted their meaning, resulting in more of a parody of the image than a description of it.66 Here, an image that was in itself intended to convey a clear message was transformed in its meaning by means of the deliberate ‘misunderstanding’ of the viewer. This shows that, even when on the part of the patron and the artist there was a clear intended message, Byzantine viewers could and would misconstrue the message of such works, be it through unawareness of the artwork’s iconography or through deliberate omissions and interpretative gaps in their reception of the image.67 Although fluid readings of artworks could occur at the interpretative level because of misconstructions of the objects’ imagery, changing meanings could also

64 H. Maguire, ‘Truth and convention in Byzantine descriptions of works of art’, DOP, 28 (1974), 113–40, 114; for more on conscious misunderstandings of Byzantine art as a means of subversion, see A. Eastmond, ‘An intentional error? Imperial art and “mis”-interpretation under Andronikos I Komnenos’, ArtB, 76.3 (1994), 502–10; Eastmond, ‘“It began with a picture”’. 65 Niketas Choniates, Chronographia, IV.2.332, ed. J.L. van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae Historia, CFHB, 11 (Berlin, 1975), 332.22–34; tr. Magoulias, 183. 66 Eastmond, ‘“It began with a picture”’, 131, 134, 138. See also H. Maguire, ‘Parody in Byzantine art’, in P. Marciniak and I. Nilsson (ed.), Satire in the Middle Byzantine Period: The Golden Age of Laughter? (Leiden and Boston, 2021), 127–51. 67 Maguire for example has discussed a tenth-century epigram by John Geometres, which described not a real person but a work of art, which showed a musician surrounded by a calm seascape. The poet failed to identify the aquatic musician, suggesting three identities for the figure. This may be because the imagery used was deliberately non-specific; see H. Maguire, ‘Epigrams, art, and the “Macedonian Renaissance”’, DOP, 48 (1994), 105–15.

Word, Image and Intellect  73 be the result of conscious decisions made during the design and conception of the artwork. The objects’ openness to interpretation could be achieved by employing tools similar to those used in rhetoric. In the case of many of the decorated ­middle Byzantine vessels discussed here, this is achieved by the lack of specificity i­ntroduced into their imagery. The shallow dish from Vilgort displays an image of a couple that lends itself to a range of identifications and interpretations, including King David and Melodia and Digenes Akrites and his wife. As already discussed, the dish is not unique amongst middle Byzantine tableware in terms of the difficulty in determining a single and specific meaning for its imagery. The twelfthcentury silver-gilt vessel discovered in Berezov is decorated with tightly stacked rows of relief and incised medallions that crowd the vessel’s outside with images of dancers, musicians, animals, hybrid monsters and less immediately identifiable figures. On the inside of the vessel is the depiction of a mounted figure, accompanied by an identifying inscription that reveals him to be St George, the popular military saint. In contrast, none of the other figures on the dish are adorned with a ‘label’, including the central figure seated at a banquet table, whose imperial costume might otherwise suggest that this figure is a specific individual or possibly a virtue or personification. But, unlike the image on the Berezov dish, both imperial portraits and personified virtues in middle Byzantine art were usually accompanied by identifying inscriptions. For example, on the Crown of Constantine IX Monomachos (r. 1042– 1055), a diadem-like crown made up of individual enamel panels, Constantine is represented accompanied by his wife Zoe (r. 1028–1050) and her sister Theodora (r. 1042–1056). They are in turn flanked by the personified virtues of Humility and Truth, both of whom are identifiable because of the names inscribed next to the figures.68 Although the vessel from Berezov and the Monomachos Crown were made at different times, for different audiences and articulate different ideas, artworks such as the crown reveal that the labelling of imperial portraits and personifications in middle Byzantine art was an established practice, raising the question of the significance of the absence of inscriptions. On the Monomachos Crown, the inscriptions are used to reinforce the specific reading of the artwork’s imagery. In contrast, the lack of identification on the Berezov dish and objects such as the ceramic vessels depicting figures commonly identified as Digenes Akrites and the vessel showing what may be an archangel points away from a specific meaning or portrait, obscuring the identity of the arguably central figure of the iconographic arrangement, thereby complicating rather than clarifying the meaning of the object’s imagery. The Berezov vessel perhaps deliberately renders its meaning opaque. The 68 See E. Kiss, ‘The state of research on the Monomachos Crown and some further thoughts’, in O.Z. Pevny (ed.), Perceptions of Byzantium and Its Neighbors (843–1261), The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia (New York, 2000), 60–83; H. Maguire, ‘Davidic virtue: the Crown of Constantine Monomachos and its images’, Jewish Art, 28.4 (1997), 117–23; N. Oikonomides, ‘La couronne dite de Constantin Monomaque’, TM, 12 (1994), 241–62; R. Cormack, ‘But is it art?’, in J. Shepard and S. Franklin (ed.), Byzantine Diplomacy: Papers from the Twenty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, March 1990, SPBS, 1 (London, 1992), 219–36.

74  Word, Image and Intellect pictorial strategy of omitting identifications is more or less routine on middle Byzantine ceramic tableware, too. Some objects show generic figures that need not be labelled, such as musicians and dancers, but others appear to refer to specific stories but with their precise nature never revealed. This makes it plausible that vessels produced in this medium similarly left the significance of their imagery open-ended on purpose. The vessel from Vilgort depicts a couple placed in a bucolic setting and absorbed in making music. Again, any kind of hint concerning the identity of the figures is absent. In contrast, a compositionally very similar image in the tenth-century Paris Psalter depicting a female seated on a rock next to a male figure plucking a lyre has been rendered explicit in its meaning by the addition of writing, identifying the figures as the personification of Melodia and the biblical King David. The indirect transposition of the iconographic scheme from the manuscript to the bowl and the loss of a clear identification of the figures in the process could suggest two things: either that by the twelfth century the image was part of a well-known repertoire of iconographic types so that it did not need labelling, or that the image was deliberately ambiguous in avoiding references to a specific character or story.69 There are a number of equally plausible identifications of the characters, including King David. However, no identification appears more plausible or convincing than another, with each possible interpretation elucidating a new meaning or facet to the image. Similarly, the bowl from the Basilevsky collection contains twelve individual scenes and is lacking any kind of identifying inscriptions accompanying the figures represented. Two of them can be identified as Alexander the Great; the identity of the remaining characters is uncertain. Again, has identification been suspended here because, to the middle Byzantine viewer, the meaning of the object was glaringly obvious? Or is this part of a deliberate attempt to complicate and multiply the meaning of the artwork? During the late antique period, one of the central reasons for the absence of inscriptions from images was to expand their range of reference.70 This left the image open to interpretation; inscriptions were added if the creator of the image wished to prioritise a particular meaning out of

69 It has been suggested that the image of David playing his instrument has its roots in Late Roman and Early Christian images of Orpheus and his lyre, a motif invested with a Christian significance. The motif of Orpheus survived into middle Byzantine art, where it could carry both positive and negative associations. In addition to occurring in a number of illustrated versions of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzos, the singer is also found on ivory boxes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries such as one in the Louvre that shows him half-naked, plucking a lyre. The concurrent survival and depiction of the iconographically similar images of David composing the psalms and Orpheus playing his lyre suggest that this iconography was well-established, but also that it referenced distinct types and scenes, a fact that may have warranted a labelling of the images. K. Weitzmann, Greek Mythology in Byzantine Art (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 89, 156, fig. 172; Sister Charles Murray, Rebirth and Afterlife: A Study of the Transmutation of Some Pagan Imagery in Early Christian Funerary Art (Oxford, 1981); A. Cutler, Transfigurations: Studies in the Dynamics of Byzantine Iconography (University Park, PA and London, 1975), 45–6. 70 Maguire and Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons, 139; H. Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies: Saints and their Images in Byzantium (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 100–45.

Word, Image and Intellect  75 the range of possible interpretations.71 The imagery on the vessels from Corinth, from Vilgort and from Berezov and their numerous relatives not discussed here incorporate a return to one of the main reasons behind the absence of inscriptions, a fact integral to the meaning and function of the image, and in itself a sign requiring explanation: the simultaneous implication of multiple interpretations, favoured over a single meaning. Medieval Byzantine dinner parties were spaces and occasions for communication and performance. The spectacle of the banquet included acrobats, musicians and jesters, but the meals revolved around intellectual pleasures as much as physical ones. Rhetoric was one means of delivering the more highbrow amusements pursued by the individuals at the banquet table. This could be achieved through the performance of literary works, but the feast also strove to stimulate the individual into practising its own skill and expertise in rhetoric by inviting it to discuss a range of topics in the most convincing and sophisticated way. The discursive nature of the banquet’s entertainment fostered the communal character of the meal.72 The dishes used for drinking and eating could themselves become participants in the communicative spectacle of the feast. On one hand, they would pass from one diner to another, prompting physical interaction; on the other, they could stimulate discussion by leaving their subject matter open to analysis. This ‘lack of meaning’ and non-specificity of the artworks in question are a meaning or end in themselves. Similarly to rhetoric, art explored multiplicity of meaning by employing a ‘vocabulary’ able to express more than one thing at a time where the image or signifier could harbour layers of referentiality and more than one signified. The intellectual exploration of the artwork was as much part of its function as the aesthetic pleasure derived from looking at it. There was possibly no single or definite solution to the question of the significance of an image. This polyvalence, deliberately embedded in the objects discussed here, means that it is possible to explore more than one meaning to be inferred from the artworks. Instead, the objects evoked wider, more general concepts or layered references in their imagery that were intimately tied to contemporary culture. And the artworks also employed processes known to their audiences through rhetoric and literature, such as riddles and allegories. The use of allegory, far from being unusual, was a typical phenomenon in an era when symbolism became a widespread way of thinking and not merely a game for refined intellects.73 This is why many of the images on the vessels do not prompt one interpretation in favour over another, thereby complicating the possibility of determining the identity of the figures definitely.

71 Maguire and Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons, 139–41, 143; the second type of anonymity aimed to increase operative effectiveness, because the absence of an inscription could imply the invocation of more than one supernatural agent. An example of this is the early Byzantine motif of the holy rider. 72 N. Oikonomides, ‘The contents of the Byzantine house from the eleventh to the fifteenth century’, DOP, 44 (1990), 205–14; J. Vroom, ‘The changing dining habits at Christ’s table’, in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, 191–222. 73 V. Zalesskaya, ‘Art of the middle Byzantine period’, in Road to Byzantium, ed. Althaus, Sutcliffe, Stewart and Eastmond, 125.

76  Word, Image and Intellect The impossibility of the latter is caused by the intrinsic double-tonguedness of the artworks and inherently part of their appeal and function. Developments in twelfth-century secular art were intimately tied to other changes and innovations of Byzantine culture in the twelfth century. Both art and rhetoric strove to exploit double-tonguedness and polyvalence as tools to obscure meaning, demonstrate skill and exercise analysis. The perceived relationship between art and rhetoric, and the view of rhetoric as an art form in itself, is indicated by the self-conscious artistry employed in twelfth-century texts. The contemporary obsession with artistry and artifice is also evident in the frequency and the variety of references to the visual arts made in those works. The twelfth-century novels contain descriptions of objets d’art, such as fountains, automata and wall paintings, which take traditional indulgence in ekphrasis to new extremes: they celebrate the triumph of art over nature and highlight the writer’s own craftsmanship.74 In the case of the novel Hysmine and Hysminias, the works of art are also central to the narrative in that its whole theme and chronological structure are mapped out in an imaginary cycle of garden mural pictures.75 Twelfth-century literature also contained elaborate metaphors in which the author compares himself to a painter, or represents Nature, Love and the emperor as artists of their own accomplishment, revealing a heightened interest in nature and its domination through art and artifice.76 An example of the author’s increased self-awareness and self-consciousness occurs in one of the many banquets attended by the characters of the novels.77 Panagiotis Roilos proposed that a scene in Rhodanthe and Dosikles describing a banquet should be viewed as an indirect glorification of the power of art in general and Prodromos’s own literary art in particular. In the description of this banquet, Prodromos demonstrates a ‘unique dexterity’ in combining indirect references to his contemporary reality with subtle allusions to literary tradition. By creating what Roilos called ‘an intricate nexus of multi-layered extra-textual and intertextual allusions’, Prodromos invested the passage with a complex amphoteroglossia that functioned on several levels at the same time so that ‘[c]ulinary art, rhetoric, court poetry, religious poetry, mime and ceremonial rituals are all combined and subordinated to the author’s orchestrating and parodying creative art.’ 78 Consequently, middle Byzantine individuals were acutely aware of the role that artifice played both in the visual and the rhetorical arts, bridging the gap between two mediums and bringing out the similarities between them. The exploitation of their resemblances was a two-way system, with rhetoricians designating themselves

74 Magdalino, Empire of Manuel, 396–7. 75 Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias, II.2–11 and IV.4–18, ed. Marcovich, 12–20 and 37–35, tr. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine Novels, 185–90 and 201–7. 76 Magdalino, Empire of Manuel, 397; see also P. Magdalino, ‘Eros the king and the king of “amours”: some observations on “Hysmine and Hysminias’’’, DOP, 46 (1992), 197–204. 77 For discussions of authorship and authorial self-awareness, see A. Pizzone (ed.), The Author in Middle Byzantine Literature: Modes, Functions, and Identities, ByzArch, 28 (Boston and Berlin, 2014). 78 Roilos, Amphoteroglossia, 253.

Word, Image and Intellect  77 as artists and painters, and with patrons, makers and viewers of artworks exploring the objects through rhetorical tools, most notably those of ambiguity and polyvalence. The fact that Prodromos chose the banquet as the narrative setting for his demonstration of artistic and literary skill and the layering of allusions and meanings suggests that not only did there exist a close perceived link between art, artifice and rhetoric, but also that the feast constituted an appropriate moment for this correlation to unfold and come into its full effect during the performance of the banquet. Rhetoric and rhetorical displays played an intrinsic role in Byzantine life, with erudition and paideia highly valorised. Twelfth-century Byzantine culture was permeated by rhetorical performances, games and strategies. Rhetorical performances were part of the theatre of the dining context, with riddles, ekphraseis and presentations of poems or speeches being woven into the fabric of banquets. The rhetorical performances at banquets stimulated the guests’ interaction with the artworks present by being informed by their imagery and encouraging a particular mode of viewing them. This, in combination with the comparison of art and text established and promoted in rhetorical works, transformed the objects viewed at the table and the pieces performed in the dining context into participants of the theatre and performance of the banquet. This spectacular nature of dining can be viewed in the artworks present at the banquet, but also influenced the imagery of these objects, promoting a double-tongued, polyvalent decoration that stimulated discussion, displays of rhetorical skill and intellectual contemplation.

4

Bad Taste

Around the body of a ceramic chafing dish found in the forum of Corinth during the ongoing excavations of the city, figures are rendered in plastic relief (fig. 4.1). They show, on one side, a male figure wearing armour next to a ‘monstrous head’. Next to it is a musician holding a drum in front of his body; because of damage to the vessel, he has lost both his head and his lower legs. To his side are the remains of another figure, although significant damage to this part of the vessel, too, means that we can no longer identify it. On the other side of the vessel, a cartoonish trumpeter appears to be resting his instrument on the head of the figure making up one of the two handles. Next to the musician are two further figures, though these, too, have suffered substantial losses so that making out what they are is difficult. The first is probably a musician holding a wind instrument. Of the second only two incised triangular shapes survive. Their similarity to the ears or horns of the monstrous trumpet on the other side of the vessel suggests that a similar creature was depicted here. A figure covering its nose and eyes with its hands forms one handle of the dish, mirrored by a second fragmentary handle on the opposite side in the shape of a head. The figures on the handles have been identified as ‘monkeys holding their noses’.1 In western Europe, monkeys were understood as representations of the sense of taste and human sin during the later middle ages. The perceived connection between the monkey and the sense of taste and human sin was referred to in encyclopaedias, bestiaries and hunting manuals and explored in visual sources from around the twelfth century onwards.2 Monkeys make appearances (even if rarely) in the art and literature of the medieval Byzantine empire but, unlike in medieval western imagery, are not imbued with a clear moral symbolism.3 Though the

1 E. Dauterman Maguire, ‘Ceramic arts of the everyday life’, in H. Evans and W. Wixom (ed.), The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261 (New York, 1997), 255–7, 257. 2 Other animals associated with the sense of taste in the medieval west were deer, bears, pigs, raven; see M. Pastoureau, ‘Le bestiaire des cinq sens (XIIe–XVIe siècle)’, Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società, 10, I cinque sensi (2002), 133–45, 142, 144. For the story of the mother monkey carrying her two young, interpreted as a metaphor for sin and usury, see H.W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1952), 32–3, 80–1, 239–59. 3 On zooarchaeology, see H. Kroll, Tiere im Byzantinischen Reich: Archäozoologische Forschungen im Überblick, Monographien des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, 87 (Mainz, 2010); DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359-5

Bad Taste  79

Figure 4.1 Chafing dish with musicians and monsters, Corinth, 1000–1210. 13.8  × 17.8  cm. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas.

monkey appears in some cases to have been associated with vice, there is no direct connection made between apes and the sense of taste in Byzantine visual and textual sources.4 Even if the handles of the vessel from Corinth would not have been understood as allusions to the shaky moral ground on which diners found themselves, the medieval Byzantine art of dining explored bad taste – that is, the connection between the act of eating, its sensory dimension and its inherent moral danger – in other ways. The imagery on the vessel from Corinth, such as trumpet-like monsters that may be read as the trumpets signalling the end of time at the Second Coming, acts as a shorthand allusion to the Last Judgement. Abbreviated versions of the Last Judgement are also depicted on other objects of metal and ceramic tableware, along with depictions of the

V. Onar, H. Alpak, G. Pazvant, A. Armutak, N. Gezer Ince and Z. Kiziltan, ‘A bridge from Byzantium to modern day Istanbul: an overview of animal skeleton remains found during metro and Marmaray excavations’, Istanbul Universitesi Veteriner Fakultesi Dergisi, 39.1 (2013), 1–8, 8. On depictions of monkeys in manuscripts, see J.C. Anderson, ‘The illustration of Cod. Sinai. Gr. 339’, ArtB, 61.2 (1979), 167–85, 176, figs. 18a and 18d; Z. Kadar, Survivals of Greek Zoological Illumination in Byzantine Manuscripts (Budapest, 1978); A.W. Byvanck‚ ‘De geillustreerde Handschriften van Oppianus‘ Cynegetica‘, Mededelingen van het Nederlandsch historisch Instituut te Rome, 5 (1925), 34–64, 34ff. Monkeys appear in Sinai. Cod. Gr. 339, fol. 122v and 223r; Turin, National University library, Cod. C.I.6, fol. 9r; Paris BN gr. 64, fols. 1r–8; Parma, Bib. Palatina 5; Barberini Psalter Vat Barb gr 372, fol. 142v. 4 ‘Physiologos’, ODB. On the monkey, the Latin redaction of the Physiologos (fourth or fifth century) says ‘Habuit enim initium, finem autem non habet (hoc est caudam); in principio autem fuit unus ex archangelis, finis autem eius nec invenitur. Beneque simius, non habens caudam, sine specie enim est; et turpe in simio, non habentem caudam; sicut et diabulus, non habet finem bonum.’ Physiologos, ch. 25, ed. F.J. Carmody, Version Y of Physiologus, University of California Publications in Classical Philology, XII.7 (Berkeley, CA, 1941), 121.

80  Bad Taste consequences of sin and invocations for the owner’s divine protection. This highlights the place at the Byzantine dining table of concerns for the soul in the afterlife. But why would guests at the middle Byzantine banquet want to contemplate their mortality and the state of their soul during a dinner party? And how did material culture encourage such actions? Food, as is regularly remarked across disciplines and periods, is more than simply sustenance. In medieval Byzantine thought it could, depending on an individual’s humoral disposition, be the difference between life and death. Beyond causing physical well-being or illness, food and the way it was eaten revealed good and bad character. While food consumption was heavily controlled in religious contexts and restricted during times of fasting, which spanned nearly half of the calendar year, art and text suggest that food, eating it and tasting it were enjoyed and celebrated by Byzantine individuals. It was this enjoyment of food that posed a risk to an individual’s moral and physical wellbeing: the sense of taste was not only a vehicle for enjoyment but also for damnation. To avoid giving in to temptation, diners were encouraged to contemplate their actions and their consequences. In the same manner as the texts and images that the medieval Byzantines consumed, the imagery on items of tableware acted as a starting point for meditations on death and penance. Images of animals devouring or regurgitating human body parts functioned not only as reminders of the Last Judgement, but also of the actions and vices that could grant an individual a spot in hell’s VIP punishment zone. At the dining table specifically, this could cover a range of behaviours – from gossiping to flirting with someone else’s wife – but, most imminently, negative behaviours related to food and drink. This could include not respecting dietary rules around fasting, excessive drinking and, worst of all, gluttony. In the Timarion, an anonymous pseudo-Lucianic satirical dialogue probably composed in the twelfth century, the eponymous hero tells his friend the story of his visit to the underworld after he dies a hideous death.5 Following a visit to Thessalonike to celebrate the feast day of St Demetrios, Timarion falls ill. The cause for this is revealed when two ‘shadowy, dusty-looking creatures’ come to take Timarion to Hades following weeks of illness, described in graphic detail, and discuss his fate. One says: ‘This is the man who lost the fourth of his constituent elements by vomiting up all his bile. He cannot be allowed to go on living (…).’6 In the assessment of the creature, Timarion’s illness, its diagnosis and its result are based on the theory that the body contains four elements or humours: blood, phlegm and black and yellow bile. These four humours needed to be kept in balance to ensure good health, as the second-century Roman medical writer Galen explained. Galen’s works were copied and circulated from the writer’s lifetime well into the second millennium and were certainly known in the medieval Byzantine empire, being

5 The text survives in MS Cod. Vat. Gr. 87. 6 Timarion, ed. M. Hase, Notes et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale, 9.2 (Paris, 1913), 125–268; ed. R. Romano, Timarione (Naples, 1974), 13, tr. B. Baldwin, Timarion: Translated with Introduction and Commentary, BTT (Detroit, MI, 1984), 51.

Bad Taste  81 quoted in works by Michael Choniates and Michael Italikos.7 In fact, the Timarion itself features the writer: when Timarion bumps into Theodore of Smyrna (d. after 1112) during his tour of Hades, he complains about his unfair fate; in response, Theodore offers to consult the expertise of the medical writers to argue Timarion’s case for return to the world of the living.8 Galen, he says, is unfortunately busy revising his book on the difference between fevers.9 As (the real) Galen writes, the four humours need to be delicately balanced to ensure the physical and emotional well-being of individuals: It seems that health is characterised by the equality and symmetry of these humours. When they are deficient or increasing contrary to what is necessary either as regards quantity, quality, shifting of position, irregular combination, or putrefaction of things that have been spoilt, diseases occur. Just as it has been said that diseases happen as a result of an excess of the humours so health returns by the removal and by the addition, and by the thinness and thickness of the humours, and generally through their mildness and symmetry.10 According to Galen, diet and exercise were the most effective ways of controlling and balancing the humours.11 Galen’s On the Properties of Foodstuffs and middle Byzantine works that built upon this such as the eleventh-century Treatise on the Properties of Foodstuffs by the doctor and scientist Symeon Seth list the properties of different kinds of foodstuffs and their effects on the humours and health of an individual.12 They allow to identify which foodstuffs to consume and which to avoid to address an individual’s humoral disposition. The entries also list the medicinal properties or dangers of each foodstuff.

  7 A. Mavroudis, ‘Ο Μιχαήλ Ιταλικός και ο Γαλήνος’, Hellenica, 43 (1993), 29–44; P. Bouras-Vallianatos, ‘Galen’s reception in Byzantium: Symeon Seth and his refutation of Galenic theories on human physiology’, GRBS, 55.2 (2015), 431–69, 431. On Galenic manuscript tradition until the early fourteenth century, see N. Wilson, ‘Aspects of the transmission of Galen’, in G. Cavallo (ed.), Le Strade del testo (Bari, 1987) 47–64.   8 Timarion, 23ff., tr. Baldwin, 57ff.; ‘Theodore of Smyrna’, ODB. For a commentary on Galen in the Timarion, see F.-O. Touati (ed.), Maladies, médecines et sociétés. Approches historiques pour le présent (Paris, 1993), 129–35, 132–3; E. Konstantinou, ‘Die byzantinische Medizin im Lichte der Anonymen Satire “Timarion”’, Βυζαντινά, 12 (1983), 159–81, 173.   9 Timarion, 29, tr. Baldwin, 61–2. 10 Galen, On Humours, 19.491K, after M. Grant, Dieting for an Emperor: A Translation of Books 1 and 4 of Oribasius’ Medical Compilations with an Introduction and Commentary (Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1997), 5. 11 For a summary of the different cures listed by Galen, see Grant, Dieting for an Emperor, 6–7. 12 Symeon Seth, Σύνταγμα κατὰ στοιχείων περὶ τροφῶν δυνάμεων, ed. B. Langkavel, Simeonis Sethi Syntagma de alimentorum facultatibus (Leipzig, 1868; repr. 1969); ed. tr. M.E.P.L. Brunet, Siméon Seth médecin de l’empereur Michael Doucas; sa vie, son oeuvre. Première traduction en français du traité ‘Recueil des propriétés des aliments par ordre alphabétique’ (Bordeaux, 1939); for a study of the textual tradition of Symeon Seth, see G. Helmreich, Handschriftliche Studien zu Symeon Seth (Ansbach, 1913); on Seth’s reception of Galen, see Bouras-Vallianatos, ‘Galen’s reception’.

82  Bad Taste According to humoral theory, Timarion’s affliction with an excess of black bile, which brings on his fever, could simply be the consequence of the time of the year when he visits Thessalonike – October. Autumn, as Galen writes in On the Natural Faculties, was the season where black bile was usually in excess.13 But an excess of black bile could also be caused by environmental, dietary, hygienic or other lifestyle factors. The dietary causes of an excess of black bile could include starvation diets, irregular eating habits, eating hurriedly and eating when upset or anxious. Frustratingly, the lack of detail in Timarion’s retelling of his (mis)adventures does not allow us to establish with some degree of certainty the cause of his illness and subsequent death – and his eventual resurrection. The importance of numerous proponents of humoral theory in the story and the familiarity which medieval Byzantine audiences would have had with dietary regulations and the effects of food on the humours and physical well-being makes it likely that the text’s audience could have speculated as to what brought on Timarion’s illness and that one of the conclusions was – he ate the wrong thing for dinner.14 If having the wrong thing for dinner could kill you, could eating it the wrong way send you to hell? Behaviour at the dinner table was regulated through explicit rules and implicit social codes. The fourteenth-century typikon of the monastery of St DemetriosKellibara in Constantinople states: Let there be only one table, one sort of food, one sort of drink. Let there be one time to partake of them, not some at one time, others at another. No one should eat in a special place or be served special fare (…). This is what indicated progress in community life.15 The appropriate behaviour of monks during mealtimes and display of equal status were indicative, as the Kellibara typikon outlines, of spiritual growth.16 Unlike

13 Galen, On the Natural Faculties, 2.9. 14 For medical knowledge and its place in Byzantine education, see Michael Psellos, Lexicon of Medical Terms, ed. Boissonade, in I. Bekker (ed.), Anecdota Graeca, 1 (Berlin, 1814), 233–41; Anonymous, On the Nature of Man, ed. J.L. Ideler, Physici et medici graeci minores (Berlin, 1841–2), 303–4; Psellos, Πονήμα Ἰατρικόν, ed. Ideler, 203–43; see ed. Ideler, 328–58 for poems by Archelaos, Hierotheus and Theophrastus; Prodromos, The Executioner or Doctor, ed. G. Podestà, ‘Le satire Lucianesche di Teodoro Prodromo’, Aevum, 21 (1947), 3–25; on descriptions of illness in Byzantine epistolography, see M. Mullett, ‘The classical tradition in the Byzantine letter’, in M. Mullett and R. Scott (ed.), Byzantium and the Classical Tradition. University of Birmingham Thirteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies 1979 (Birmingham, 1981), 75–93, 90. 15 Kellibara II: Typikon of Andronikos II Palaiologos for the Monastery of St. Demetrios-Kellibara in Constantinople, Ch. 4, ed. P. Meyer, ‘Bruchstücke zweier typika ktetorika‘, BZ, 4 (1895), 45–8, with corrections by G.N. Hatzidakis and E. Kurtz, ‘Zu den Bruchstücken zweier Typika’, BZ, 4 (1895), 583–4, tr. G. Dennis, BMFD, IV, 1508. 16 On the hierarchical structure and contents of monastic mealtimes, see for example Lips: Typikon of Theodora Palaiologina for the Convent of Lips in Constantinople, Ch. 29, ed. H. Delehaye, Deux typica byzantins de l’époque des Paléologues (Brussels, 1921), 106–36, tr. A.-M. Talbot, BMFD, III, 1274; Ptochoprodromika, Poem 3, ed. tr. H. Eideneier, Ptochoprodromos: Einführung, kritische

Bad Taste  83 for the monastic context, the rules that governed Byzantine banquets went largely unwritten. We can however get an insight into them by looking at the objects that accompanied the banquet, some of which display the ideal dinner guest, and at the texts that facilitate the objects’ interpretation. The images on objects of tableware acted as reminders to adhere to the behavioural and moral codes of dining. A more direct and public display of crime and punishment related to eating was practised in monasteries. Acts considered as deserving of public punishment included the breaking of ceramic table or cooking ware, forgetting to season food or cooking it for too long or too short, spilling ingredients, letting food go off, chattering or laughing during a meal (rather than listening to the readings) and getting up from the table too early.17 When a monk or nun broke ceramic vessels including tableware, their public punishment involved the damaged vessel as a signifier of the misbehaviour committed.18 The monastic penitential of Theodore of Stoudios outlines that a monk who broke a clay pot was to be punished by either performing up to 300 prostrations or by standing in front of the monastic community in the refectory with the sherds of the broken pot in his hands until he was forgiven by his peers.19 In the eleventh-century vita of St Neilos of Rossano, a young monk is punished for breaking a pot after overfilling it and letting the contents boil too strongly by tying the sherds of the pot around his neck and then standing in the monastic dining hall.20 Tableware then could be both the subject of bad dining behaviour and a sign of its punishment. At the centre of the imagery of the twelfth-century metal vessel from Berezov is the top row of medallions, which depicts a banquet. This is presided over by a figure distinguished from the surrounding figures in the same row by its dress, pose and demeanour (fig. 4.2). The figure’s pose is frontal, its face shows no emotion and its behaviour is calm and subdued. Around the figure’s shoulders is wrapped a loros, as indicated by the bands of dot-punched decoration that imitate the jewel incrustation of this item of clothing; underneath, the figure is wearing a tunic also decorated with jewels and pearls. On top of its loose and flowing hair, the figure wears a crown incised with square decorations topped by three small triangular projections. The shape of the crown and the hair style worn by the banqueter ­gender the figure as a female.21 The figure is associated with the highest strata of ByzanAusgabe, deutsche Übersetzung, Glossar, Neograeca Medii Aevi, 5 (Cologne, 1991), IV.139–75, partial translation to English in M. Alexiou, ‘Ploys of performance: games and play in the Ptochoprodromic Poems’, DOP, 53 (1999), 91–109. 17 Theodore of Stoudios, Poenae monasteriales, A36–9, 40, 41–4, 46; PG 99.1733–48, 99.1737–40. 18 A.-M. Talbot, ‘Mealtime in monasteries: the culture of the Byzantine refectory’, in L. Brubaker and K. Linardou (ed.), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, SPBS, 13 (Aldershot, 2007), 109–25, 121. 19 Theodore of Stoudios, Poenae monasteriales, A40, A46; PG 99.1737 and 1740. 20 Vita of St Neilos the Younger, ch. 28, ed. G. Giovanelli, Βίος καὶ πολιτεία τοῦ ὁσίου πατρὸς ἡμῶν Νείλου τοῦ Νέου (Grottaferrata, 1972), 75. 21 Rank was displayed visually through ceremonial and dress, see P. Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge, 1997), 180ff; S. Malmberg, ‘Dazzling dining: banquets as an expression of imperial legitimacy’, in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, 75–92,

84  Bad Taste

Figure 4.2  Bowl from Berezov, detail: banqueter.

tine society by the imperial garments it is clad in, and the portrait incorporates the virtues associated with this role. The emperor was thought to embody the ideal of taxis or order, expressed in imperial portraits through a static, frontal and unperturbed pose.22 These characteristics, Byzantine literature explained, corresponded to and were indicative of emotional equilibrium, calm demeanour and appropriate behaviour. They are expressed in the banqueter’s unmoving pose, which contrasts starkly with the animation of the figures surrounding her, including the tumbling

83; J.L. Ball, Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting (New York, 2005), 1–2, 11, 16. On gendered, female crowns, see M. Emmanuel, ‘Hairstyles and headdresses of empresses, princesses, and ladies of the aristocracy in Byzantium’, ΔΧΑΕ, 17 (1993), 113–20; M. Parani, Reconstructing the Reality of Images: Byzantine Material Culture and Religious Iconography (11th–15th Centuries) (Leiden, 2003), 29, 37ff; C. Hilsdale, ‘The social life of the Byzantine gift: the Royal Crown of Hungary re-invented’, AH, 31.5 (2008), 602–31, 614. On the gendering of gestures in imperial and non-imperial imagery, see L. Brubaker, ‘Gender and gesture in Byzantine images’, in A. Olsen Lam and R. Schroeder (ed.), The Eloquence of Art: Essays in Honour of Henry Maguire (London, 2020), 47–70. 22 H. Maguire, ‘Style and ideology in Byzantine imperial art’, Gesta, 28.2 (1989), 217–31, 221–7; H. Maguire and E. Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, 2007), 135. See also Psellos’s description of Constantine IX’s immutable endurance of ceremonial despite illness and pain, in Michael Psellos, Χρονογραφία, VI.127ff, ed. tr. E. Renauld, Psellos: Chronographie ou Histoire d’un siècle de Byzance (976–1077), 2, Livres VI et VII (Paris, 1928).

Bad Taste  85 acrobats and whirling dancers. The vessel offers two alternative models of behaviour: stasis and movement, order and disorder, and human and (as suggested by the rest of the vessel’s decoration populated by birds, felines and hybrids) animal. Unlike the attendants and performers represented on the vessel from Berezov, the banqueter placed amongst them is a vision of orderly, calm and virtuous behaviour – characteristics essential not only in government but also at the dinner table, as the object’s imagery seems to suggest. The ideal diner was to eat and drink in moderation and maintain appropriate behaviour. The reprehensibility of behaviour that fell short of these standards is clear in contemporary sources. Niketas Choniates describes John of Poutze, a steward in Manuel’s government whom he labels a ‘miser’, as impulsive and greedy. He tells of how, one time, seeing greens in a bowl of brine, Poutze ignored his attendants’ reminders that food was waiting for him at home and ‘insisted on satisfying his craving. Greedily grabbing the bowl containing the meal (…), he lowered his head with his mouth wide open, gulped down the juice in one draught, and gluttonously devoured the greens’.23 Overeating as well as poor eating manners – in Poutze’s case, the downing of the meal in one go – were used as defining features of bad character as early as the Roman period, when for example the emperor Vitellius is described by Suetonius as both delighting in inflicting physical harm and as having a ‘boundless appetite’.24 Similarly, the culinary greed that forms a topos of the descriptions of Poutze and other individuals was to be understood as an indicator of other, worse character flaws. Poutze was generally disliked by his contemporaries and known for his gluttony and stinginess.25 Food and how it was eaten could reveal the underlying character and moral qualities (or lack thereof) of individuals: in the spiritually beneficial tales, the men and women that are described as particularly virtuous often only live off a limited amount of food, whether this be a bowl of beans that lasts a lifetime or the fruit carried to them by birds. In contrast, those that ate uncontrollably or greedily were also considered to be morally corrupt. A (misplaced) fondness for food and drink and excessive consumption of both featured in Choniates’ accounts and criticisms of rulers including Isaac II Angelos and Manuel I Komnenos. According to Choniates, the court of Isaac II was characterised by drunken revels, and the author describes Manuel, on whom he was ambivalent, as indulging in luxuries and recreation: ‘If one carefully observed how much he relished savoury dishes and enjoyed the playing of the small lyre and cithara with harmonious singing, one would have said that he had grown up only in such amusements and that pleasure was the primary purpose of life (…).’26

23 Niketas Choniates, Chronographia, II.II.57, II.III.113–15, tr. H. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, Byzantine Texts in Translation (Detroit, 1984), 33–4, 64–5. 24 Suetonius, Vitellius, 13.2–3, 14.1, tr. J.C. Rolfe, Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars, 2, Loeb, 38 (Cambridge, MA, 1914). 25 L. Garland, ‘The rhetoric of gluttony’, in W. Mayer and S. Trzcionka (ed.), Feast, Fast or Famine: Food and Drink in Byzantium, ByzAus, 15 (Brisbane, 2005), 43–56, 47. 26 Choniates, Chronographia, II.VII.206, tr. Magoulias, 117.

86  Bad Taste In addition to eating in respectable quantities and with appropriate behaviour, the good diner was to consume alcoholic beverages in moderation. Symeon Seth in his entry on the properties of wine highlights that drinking too much can lead to changes in behaviour, turning wise men into fools and cowards into false heroes: Wine not only acts on the body, but it reveals strange changes in the soul. It makes happy, it renders hopeful, courageous, and well disposed. One may see numerous cowards who gain courage by drinking wine and who become well-disposed, and the silent and wise who speak uncontrollably. (…) Some become more honest because of wine. “Wine and truth”, says a proverb.27 Eustathios of Thessalonike goes even further in his speech composed for the occasion of the wedding of Manuel’s heir, Alexios Porphyrogennetos, to Agnes, a daughter of Louis VII of France (r. 1137–1180) in 1179 or 1180. In his oration, the archbishop clearly contrasts those who knew how to drink prudently and stay composed, and those who drank with reckless abandon, governed by their bodily impulses. Οἷον γάρ τι χρῆμα καὶ ὁ οἶνος ἀμφοῖν συμποσίοιν ἐπεχωρίαζεν ἐπὶ χέρσου καινότερον ναυστιλούμενος· ἁλιάδες γάρ, μᾶλλον μὲν οὖν προθμεῖα εὐρύστερνα, ὁποίας ἂν καὶ τὰς ἐεικοσόρους νομίσειέ τις, ἑκατέρωθεν τῆς εὐωχίας νενεωλκημένα ἵσταντο καὶ φόρτος αὐτοῖς οἶνος (ἡδὺς μὲν αὐτός, ἡδῦ δὲ καὶ τὸ συμπόσιον, οὗ χάριν κεχορήγητο), οὐ δαιτρὸν πινόμενος, εἴποι ἂν ἡ ποίησις, οὐδὲ κατὰ τ῀ον παρ᾽ αὐτῆς κιρνάμενον ζωρὸν φιλοτήσιον, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἂν ἑκάστῳ τῶν ἀνακεκλιμένων βουλομένῳ εἴη, τοῖς μὲν σωφρονέστερον, ὅσοις ἔμελεν ἑαυτῶν τε εἶναι καὶ τῆς τοῦ πράγματος θαυμασιότητος καὶ ἔχειν λογίζεσθαι κατὰ νοῦν ὀρθὸν τὰ θαυμασίως γινόμενα καὶ μὴ μόνης εἶναι γαστρός, τοῖς δὲ αὐθαδέστερον, ὅσοις ἑνὸς ἦν χρεία τὸ ἀπελθεῖν μὴ κουφότερον ἔχουσιν, ἀλλὰ πεφορτίσθαι πέρα τοῦ μετρίου, ὡς εἰ καὶ ἀποθήκας εὐρύναντες ἐταμιεύοντο τὸ ποθούμενον· For seafaring vessels (…) stood docked on both sides of the feast and their cargo was wine (sweet, like the symposium for which it furnished delight), which was not drunk in allotted portions, as the poem says, nor, in the manner of the cup of friendship, mixing the pure wine with water, but just as every one of those who were reclining wished it. Some were more prudent, those to whom it was important to be in control of themselves, and partake of the wonder of the affair, and to be able to contemplate the proceedings with their mind correctly and not to be governed by their bellies alone; but others were more headstrong, those who needed only one thing, to go away more heavy and be loaded beyond measure, being served with what they desired by widening their stomachs as if they were barns.28

27 Symeon Seth, Σύνταγμα, omicron 65–80. 28 Eustathios of Thessalonike, Λόγος Ι, ed. P. Wirth, Eustathii Thessalonicensis opera minora: magnam partem inedita, CFHB, 32 (Berlin, 2000), 170–81, 176.16–27, tr. A. Stone, ‘Eustathios and

Bad Taste  87 Excessive drinking and excessive eating are closely connected in Eustathios’s speech, an assessment echoed in his remarks on the occasion of the feeding of the populace of Constantinople that followed the imperial wedding banquet: ὄτι καὶ ἐχρῆν εὐτραπελίαν τότε περιπολάζειν συμποσιακήν, καὶ τὰ ἐδώδιμα διὰ πάντων ἤρχοντο καὶ οὐδείς, ὃς μὴ τὰ ἐς κοιλίαν ἔμφορος ἦν καὶ τὰ ἐκτὸς ἀχθοφορικός, τοῦ δὲ οἴνου καὶ ἀπέβλυζον οἱ πλείους κατὰ τὸν Ὁμηρικὸν νήπιον, οἷς μέχρι καὶ αὐτοῦ, εἰπεῖν, τοῦ στόματος πεπλήρωντο· οὐ γὰρ ἔστεγου οἱ τῆς φύσεως ἀσκοὶ τὸ πλεονάζον, ἀλλ᾽ ἐξέπτυον τὸ περιττον· And edible things came first among all, and there was no one who was not loaded with those things in his belly and also burdened by them externally. A large number of them also spewed forth wine like the stupid fool in ­Homer’s poem, of whom it may be said that they had been filled up to their very mouths. For the wineskins provided by nature did not contain their excess, but they cast forth the surplus.29 Eustathios’s oration eloquently speaks to the expectations held by medieval Byzantine peers regarding dinner table behaviour. Restraint and moderate consumption of food and drink were valued. Excessive eating and drinking and loss of control were discouraged and disapproved of, associated with vulgarity and self-indulgence.30 In light of contemporary rhetoric about the (over)consumption of food and drink, the representation of orderly and rational behaviour, contrasted with movement and the implied loss of control, on the vessel from Berezov is particularly significant. The vessel is small, measuring 11.7 cm high and 18.5 cm across at its widest, with a narrow circumference and bulbous body. It once had a foot, of which only a crushed edge remains. The shape of the vessel suggests that its most likely use at the dining table was that of a cup for the consumption of wine. While too small to contain elaborate dishes, the capacity of its body would have made a generous container for beverages.31 As a drinking vessel, it could have been passed around the table from one feaster to the next, reinforcing the atmosphere of community identity and conviviality as well as the discussion and intellectual competition that the imagery of the object sought to stimulate. The vessel presents two alternative models of behaviour, the orderly and the disorderly, the good diner and the bad diner. It offers its audience the opportunity to identify with either, but ultimately encouraged its viewers to stay aloof and in control, as modelled by the banqueter, as a witness rather than a participant in the debauchery that could accompany a lavish banquet. Maybe we could even read the vessel as a humorous prediction of the wedding banquet for Alexios Porphyrogennetos’, in Feast, Fast or Famine, ed. Mayer and Trzcionka, 33–42, 39. 29 Eustathios of Thessalonike, Λόγος Ι, ed. Wirth, 176.11–15.; tr. Stone, ‘Eustathios and the wedding banquet’, 39. 30 Garland, ‘Rhetoric of gluttony’, 45, 47. 31 On cups, see W. Woodfin, ‘Within a budding grove: dancers, gardens, and the enamel cup from the Chungul Kurgan’, ArtB, 98.2 (2016), 151–80.

88  Bad Taste how the banquet will end. As a wine cup, it was itself an agent in the creation of the chaos that it depicts. It plays upon its own double nature as an active instigator of inebriation and even excess and as a warning sign of the consequences. Knowing what to eat and knowing when to stop were crucial to the Byzantine individual’s image and reputation. Having uncultivated taste could be a synonym for poverty, whereas overeating and inebriation were seen as the indicators of moral corruption. In addition to revealing whether an individual was of a good or bad character, food consumption in itself could constitute a sin. In the middle Byzantine apocalyptic tales, their respective protagonist is guided around the other world by the archangel Michael and shown different groups of sinners and their punishments. These were some of the best-known texts of their time and were not written for the rich and powerful but for individual and local communities, as suggested by the types of sin they warn against.32 These tales, which include the Theotokos apocalypse and the Apocalypse of Anastasia and were written between the tenth and twelfth centuries, are relatively graphic in their description of punishments of the sinners and the pain that they experience, which are narrative devices to warn the stories’ audiences against committing such sins. Most of the sins consisted of activities that could compromise the functioning of a local community, such as fornication, theft, slander and quarrelling. But interestingly, they also point out sins that revolve around eating. In the Theotokos apocalypse, the audiences are warned against breaking their fast early and drinking too much; the apocalypse of Anastasia instructs to ‘observe the feast days of the saints’ and practise dry fasting – that is, no cooked food, no oil and only measured amounts of bread and water.33 It also includes eating meat or cheese on Wednesdays and Fridays on its list of dos and don’ts, along with breaking fast on feast days before having received Communion and, for monks and priests’ wives, drinking wine to excess.34 The observance of feasts and fasts in particular is a hallmark of the medieval Greek apocryphal corpus: the Letter that Fell from the Sky, the Didaskalia and the Chrysostomic Apocalypse as well as the Theotokos and Anastasia apocalypses all assert fasting and observance of Sunday as the core actions of the Christian life.35 The Anastasia apocalypse also warns that going to church and receiving Communion after drinking strong liquor will also land one in a river of fire.36 This reflects the dietary regulations imposed on medieval Byzantine society – including fast days, and no 32 Baun, Tales from another Byzantium: Celestial Journey and Local Community in the Medieval Greek Apocrypha (Cambridge, 2007), 3, 129. 33 Apocalypse of the Theotokos, ed. M.R. James, Apocrypha Anecdota: A Collection of Thirteen Apocryphal Books and Fragments Now First Edited from Manuscripts (Cambridge, 1893), 109–26, Ch. 12, tr. Baun, 394; Anastasia, Ch. 14, tr. Baun, 403. 34 Anastasia, Ch. 14:25–8, Ch. 26, Ch. 30, tr. Baun, 403, 406, 407. 35 Didaskalia of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Ch. 7, ed. F. Nau, ‘Une didascalie de Notre-Seigneur Jésus Christ’, ROC, 12 (1907), 225–54, 233–4; Chrysostomic Apocalypse, Ch. 18, ed. F. Nau, ‘Une deuxième apocalypse apocryphe grecque de Saint Jean’, RevBibl, 11 (1914), 209–21, 217; Baun, Tales from Another Byzantium, 349. 36 Anastasia, Ch. 26, Ch. 30, tr. Baun 406–7.

Bad Taste  89

Figure 4.3 Bowl of Theodore Tourkeles, Byzantium, 1000–1100.  The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Svetlana Suetova.

cheese, meat or eggs on Wednesdays and Fridays – which highlights a concern with getting these regulations accepted and implemented by the laity and, to a lesser extent, the religious community. Decorated objects of tableware vividly illustrated what happened to those that perpetrated a sin, whether related to the table or not. A small silver vessel dated to the tenth century depicts a condensed version of imagery of the Last Judgement and expresses the owner’s wish for penitence and forgiveness (fig. 4.3). Around the vessel’s body, beasts are shown with human bodies and body parts in their jaws. The bottom of the vessel displays fish and birds with human body parts and snakes in their jaws and beaks. Inside the vessel, a medallion depicts St Theodore and around its rim a prayer is incised to petition for the blessing of its owner, Theodore Tourkeles.37 The role of the saint and prayer on the vessel and the emphasis placed on intercession as well as on protection was to protect the vessel’s owner both on earth and in his afterlife. The vessel, which makes visible contemporary ideas about punishment, Last Things and salvation, presents a fragmentary image of the Last Judgement designed to stress the importance of heavenly justice and to remind its viewer to remain virtuous.38 This kind of imagery, unusual though it is,

37 +Κ[ΥΡΙ]Ε ΒΟΗΘΗ ΤΟΝ ΔΟΥΛΟΝ ΣΟΥ ΘΕΟΔΟΡΟΝ ΤΟΥΡΚΕΛΗΝ, ‘O Lord, help Thy servant Theodore Tourkeles’. 38 L. Frentrop, ‘Protection and salvation: an eleventh-century silver vessel, its imagery, and its function’, BMGS, 42.1 (2018), 26–44.

90  Bad Taste

Figure 4.4 Bowl with head of feline and human hand, Corinth, 1150–1200.  American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas.

is not restricted to precious metal vessels. Several sherds of middle Byzantine pottery found in Corinth display animals, from felines to wolves and hares, that have been identified as holding body parts in their mouths – though in some cases, we are probably looking at tongues instead of human limbs. A yellow-glazed ceramic bowl with a low stand depicts the head of a feline holding a human forearm in its mouth surrounded by swirls and vegetal motifs, which may be decorative or carry a magical or apotropaic meaning (fig. 4.4).39 As on the silver vessel belonging to Theodore Tourkeles, this kind of imagery can be interpreted as a visual shorthand for the moment when the sea and earth bring forth the dead upon the Second

39 On apotropaic and magic significance of such imagery, see Maguire and Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons, 65; H. Maguire, ‘Profane icons: the significance of animal violence in Byzantine art’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 38 (2000), 18–33, 24; H. Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies: Saints and their Images in Byzantium (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 124–6; On the protective function of beasts such as dragons, sphinxes, and serpents in combination with epigraphy on a monumental scale, see A. Eastmond, ‘Other encounters: popular belief and cultural convergence in Anatolia and the Caucasus’, in A. Peacock, B. De Nicola and S. Nur Yildiz (ed.), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Farnham, 2015), 183–213.

Bad Taste  91 Coming, an event described in the book of Revelation.40 The image of the feline head is placed at the bottom of the ceramic bowl, hidden by whatever the vessel may have contained – until the moment when it was emptied, at which point the image would be a stark reminder of not only the finality of food and food supply but also of life. But why was it important to be reminded of sin, death and the Last Judgement at the dinner table? What consequences could eating have on an individual’s body but also, and more importantly, on its soul? Though to a modern audience thinking about sin and death at the dinner table may seem odd, this is not unusual for the middle Byzantine period – the contemplation of death was an important cultural practice at the time, in particular during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Edifying or ‘spiritually beneficial’ tales were a popular genre of stories designed to teach basic moral lessons and were circulated continuously throughout the centuries. They presented short, simple and vivid stories, accessible to different and broad audiences. In these stories, an individual is often revealed as endowed with holy powers and divine favour, usually as a reward for the virtuosity they demonstrate. This individual instructs the person retelling the encounter – and by extension the audience – in how to atone for sins and obtain God’s favour, and in many cases dies a blissful death at the end of the story. These stories were designed, to encourage purposeful meditation on death and the so-called ‘Last Things’, as an aid to repentance and preparation for good death.41 Another literary genre that flourished during the middle Byzantine period was that of apocalyptic tales of the Other World, where a character tours the underworld. These narrate visionary journeys through otherworldly places of blessed reward and terrible punishment. The apocalypses, widely consumed and widely known, reflect non-elite images and attitudes and were important moral guidelines and cautionary tales to their audiences. Dreaming of death and resurrection also seems to have occurred frequently to medieval Byzantines, based on the Dreambooks that offer up interpretations for different kinds of dreams. Death, resurrection and dead people clock up a total of seventeen entries in a collection of six Dreambooks or oneirokritika – exceeding, for example, entries for dreams of bathing, houses and teeth.42 Church decoration and icons depicting the Last Judgement and the punishment of sinners and the vivid descriptions of the Bible further encouraged such meditations. The practice of thinking about death and penitence extended beyond the church to the domestic setting generally and the dining table specifically. The images on the vessel of Theodore Tourkeles and the pottery from Corinth show scenes of resurrection and punishment, with human body parts being eaten (or regurgitated) by fish, felines and other monsters. Here, the emphasis is on the consequences of

40 Revelation 20:11–15. 41 See J. Wortley, The Spiritually Beneficial Tales of Paul, Bishop of Monembasia, and of Other Authors (Kalamazoo, MI and Spencer, MA, 1996). 42 S. Oberhelman, Dreambooks in Byzantium: Six Oneirocritica in Translation, with Commentary and Introduction (Aldershot, 2008), 64, 100, 103, 122, 126, 139, 144, 149, 150, 157, 159, 172, 180.

92  Bad Taste sin rather than the specific acts that led there in the first place. This is a pronounced contrast to contemporary monumental depictions of the Last Judgement, which reflect the social realities of the community that viewed them and include a wide range of sins, from agricultural theft to gossiping females and monastic avarice. The absence of allusions to specific behaviours and acts may be the result of the spatial constraints presented by bowls and plates. Imagery of the Last Judgement was developed for depiction on the walls of a building, where it enveloped the viewer and was the most effective in its emotional and physical affectivity.43 Instead, the walls of bowls and plates measuring no more than twenty-five centimetres at most in diameter required the artist to develop almost emblematic signs that can be deciphered by the audience as allusions to and depictions of otherworldly reward and punishment.44 At the same time, the animals and monsters of the Second Coming and otherworldly punishment are depicted on these objects in the act of ingesting or vomiting out human arms, legs, hands and feet. This presents a link to the activities of the dining table on one hand, and to tropes associated with Christ, Hades and the Anastasis on the other. By representing scenes of vivid physical pain and punishment that were fluid in their specificity, the tableware used in the medieval Byzantine world encouraged reflections on mortality and on one’s own behaviour, admonishing the viewer to stay on the path of moral virtue. Viewers are invited to interpret the imagery as depicting punishment for any and all kinds of sin, perhaps depending on the context in which the object was viewed but also the viewer’s most recent personal transgression, still fresh in their mind. This included the specific acts and behaviours associated with the dining table that were considered as inappropriate and even impermissible. A twelfth-century illumination in a manuscript of The Heavenly Ladder of John Klimakos (born c. 579) displays the conceptual link between the thinking about death and the act of and dangers of eating. The Heavenly Ladder prescribes to its monastic audience how to attain salvation and avoid damnation in thirty steps. The sixth rung of the heavenly ladder is the practice of remembering death, with the treatise stating that ‘[j]ust as bread is the most necessary of all foods, so the remembrance of death is the most essential of all works’.45 This highlights the importance of the remembrance of death to the sustenance of the monks’ minds by equalling it to the importance of the consumption of food for the sustenance for their bodies. It also further highlights the close conceptual link between musings on death

43 For a detailed discussion of Last Judgement imagery and its response to individual communities, see N. Bhalla, Experiencing the Last Judgement, SBCH, 1 (Abingdon and New York, 2022). See also N.P. Ševčenko, ‘Some images of the Second Coming and the fate of the soul in middle Byzantine Art’, in R. Daly (ed.), Apocalyptic Themes in Early Christianity (Brookline, MA, 2009), 250–72. 44 On the emblematic use of Last Judgement imagery as internalised imagery and a mnemonic tool, see Bhalla, Experiencing the Last Judgement, 163–5. 45 Ὡς πασῶν τροφῶν ὁ ἄρτος άναγκαιότερος, οὕτως παςῶν ἐργασιῶν ἡ τοῦ θανάτου ἔννοια John Klimax, Scala paradisi, PG 88:793C, ed. tr. C. Liubheid and N. Russell, John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent, The Classics of Western Spirituality (London, 1982), 132. Step 6 ‘De memoria mortis’, in John Klimax, Scala paradisi, PG 88:793–802, tr. Luibheid and Russell, 132–5.

Bad Taste  93 and sin and the act of eating. The lessons of the monastic treatise were rendered pictorially in icons and illuminations, with their visual language emphasising different nuances of the text including the connection between the ‘Last Things’ and eating.46 The illumination of Sinai Cod. Gr. 418, fol. 166v accompanies the chapter on ‘Insensibility’ and shows at its centre a monk torn between a semi-circular table laden with food and the contemplation of hell and paradise. The monk is moving towards the table and has one arm stretched out to reach for the fare presented to him, a large bowl placed centrally on the table and smaller individual settings surrounding it. His other hand is reaching towards his face, his head turned back over his shoulder. His gestures express his apprehension that is stopping him in his tracks. His hesitancy is caused by vignettes of otherworldly punishments, toward which his head is turned, modelled on Last Judgement imagery. Red and black compartments show skulls, while above them flowers the garden of paradise. In this image, the monk – and its monastic viewer – are faced with a binary choice: give in to culinary temptation and endure damnation, or abstain and be admitted to paradise. The contemplation and recollection of such images acted as a visual and mnemonic tool to moderate one’s behaviour, and almost as a visual guide – skip the dessert and go to paradise. Why were food and eating considered as potentially dangerous in a Byzantine context, with those transgressing represented as ending up in Hades? The offences associated with food and eating ranged in type and gravity, from punishable offences in monastic refectories to overindulgence and, worst of all, gluttony. Gluttony as the excessive consumption of food and drink is intimately tied to the sense of taste and the lack of restraint in exploring the sensory delights offered by it. The acts of eating and tasting could produce pleasure and even desire. As such, the sense of taste could be a dangerous agent of sin. As the delicacies mentioned in letters written by intellectuals in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the elaborate dishes served at imperial banquets as well as in fictional works demonstrate, the Byzantines did not only consider certain things as pleasant-tasting but even sought these out – despite the potentially dangerous nature of indulging and overindulging in food. The status of the sense of taste in Byzantium was a complex and

46 For eighth- to tenth-century manuscripts of the Heavenly Ladder, see T. Popova, ‘The most ancient Greek manuscript of the Ladder of John Climacus’, Scrinium, 12.1 (2016), 368–74; for middle Byzantine illuminated manuscripts of the Heavenly Ladder, see N.P. Ševčenko, ‘Monastic challenges: some manuscripts of the Heavenly Ladder’, in C. Hourihane (ed.), Byzantine Art: Recent Studies, Essays in Honour of Lois Drewer, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 378; Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 33 (Princeton, NJ, 2009), 39–62; K. Corrigan, ‘Constantine’s problems: the making of the Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus’, Word & Image, 12 (1996), 61–93; J. Martin, The Illustration of the Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus (Princeton, NJ, 1954). For icons, see A. Damianos, ‘The Icon of Divine Ascent in form and colour’, in S. Brooks (ed.), Byzantium, Faith and Power (1261–1557): Perspectives on Late Byzantine Art and Culture (New York, 2007), 335–41; K. Manafis (ed.), Sinai: Treasures of the Monastery of Saint Catherine (Athens, 1999), 155, fig. 24. John Klimax, Scala paradisi, PG 88:631–1164.

94  Bad Taste complicated one, spanning both the sublime and the filthy.47 On one hand, physical and sensorial experience could reveal greater truths about the divine and Paradise, as expressed in a fourth-century hymn by Ephrem the Syrian: Let us see those things [God] does for us every day! How many tastes for the mouth! How many beauties for the eye! How many melodies for the ear! How many scents for the nostrils! Who is sufficient in comparison to the goodness of these little things?48 The argument that experiencing one’s surroundings and specifically the liturgy through the senses, including taste, can produce knowledge of not only the world but also the holy is reiterated by St John of Damascus in the eighth century in his treatise defending the use of icons.49 This argument was of particular relevance to the liturgical act of the Eucharist and its spiritual importance.50 The sense of taste could reveal hidden truths not only in the realm of religion, but also in that of medical treatment. Galen suggested that tasting a patient’s sweat would allow to make a more accurate diagnosis.51 Romanos the Melodist (d. ca. 560) identified two different tastes – sweet and bitter – in his hymn ‘On Fasting’, with each of these associated with a symbolic value.52 Sweet taste represented spiritual goodness but also skilful rhetoric, and bitter taste wickedness.53 The identification of sweet taste with spiritual goodness took its root in Psalm 33:9: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is sweet’. In his sermon on the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) invoked this Psalm to describe Christ as ‘honey in the mouth, melody in the ear’ and declaring that Christ ‘took the flesh for those who know the flesh to teach them

47 On the sense of taste more generally, see for example C. Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste (New York, 1999). 48 Ephrem the Syrian, Hymni de Virginitate, 31.16, tr. K. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York, 1989), 401; ed. tr. E. Beck, Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Virginitate, CSCO, 223–4, Scriptores Syri, 94–5 (Louvain, 1962), 94–5. 49 John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, 3.24, tr. D. Anderson, St. John of Damascus: On the Divine Images; Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images (Crestwood, NY, 1980), 79. 50 B. Caseau, ‘Experiencing the sacred’, in C. Nesbitt and M. Jackson (ed.), Experiencing Byzantium: Papers from the 44th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Newcastle and Durham, April 2011, SPBS, 18 (London and New York, 2013), 59–77. 51 Galen, On the Preservation of Health, 4.4 (6.251 K), after T. Arentzen, ‘Struggling with Romanos’s “Dagger of Taste”’, in S. Ashbrook Harvey and M. Mullett (ed.), Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium, DOBSC (Washington, DC, 2017), 169–82. 52 For a detailed discussion of Romanos the Melodist and the tastes of sweet and bitter, see Arentzen, ‘Struggling with Romanos’s “Dagger”’, 173–8. 53 Arentzen, ‘Struggling with Romanos’s “Dagger”’, 174; R. Fulton, ‘“Taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps. 33:9): the flavor of God in the monastic West’, The Journal of Religion, 86.2 (2006), 169–204.

Bad Taste  95 to taste and know the spirit’.54 The sermon associates pleasant and sweet taste with Christ and reiterates that religious elements can be experienced through the senses of touch and taste, thereby revealing spiritual truths. Sweet taste was also used as a metaphor for quality and goodness of another kind, namely for the skilful use of pleasant words. In the eleventh century, the poet Christopher Mitylenaios composed a poem for an acquaintance who had sent him some sweets as a gift. In the poem, he compares words (and by extension rhetoric) to the sweet taste of the biscuits and to the popular feast of the Brumalia.55 Mitylenaios says: Ἐκ ῤημάτων με δεξιοῦ, μὴ πεμμάτων ἐμοὶ γὰρ ἡδὺ βρουμάλιον οἱ λόγοι, ὡς προσκυνητῆ καὶ λατρευτῆ τοῦ λόγου, τῶν δὲ σταλέντων πεμμάτων τίς μοι λόγος; λοιπόν γε τοίνυν σύ, γλυκὺς Νικηφόρος, ἀφεὶς τὸ πέμμα καὶ πλατύνας τὸ στόμα τὰ δ᾽οὔατα γλύκαινε καὶ μὴ τὸ στόμα, ταῖς ἡδοναῖς τέρπων με τῶν σῶν ῥημάτων. Greet me with words, not with biscuits! Words are for me a sweet broumalion, As I am a devotee and a worshipper of words. But what do I gain by the biscuits you’ve sent me? So, my sweet Nikephoros, Leave those biscuits and open your mouth, To sweeten my ears, and not my stomach, By entertaining me with the pleasures of your words.56 Here, Mitylenaios not only describes rhetoric as sweet-tasting, but even appears to suggest that the taste for language or logos is a taste in the aesthetic sense, acquired and appreciated as a result of education.57 Yet, the sense of taste was often placed at the bottom of the hierarchy of senses and sense perception. Taste, being experienced through the mouth, requires proximity and ingestion – and, by extension, defecation, with the close link between the sense of taste and bodily urges further 54 M. Bagnoli, ‘The materiality of sensation in the art of the late Middle Ages’, in M. Bagnoli (ed.), A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe (New Haven and London, 2017), 31–63, 39. 55 ‘Brumalia’, ODB; E. Nonveiller, ‘The “Broumalia” festivities from Rome to Byzantium: continuity or ideological reinvention?’, Diogenes, 9 (2020), 5–16. 56 Christopher Mitylenaios, Poem 115, ed. E. Kurtz, Die Gedichte des Christephoros Mitylenaios (Leipzig, 1903); tr. F. Bernard‚ ‘“Greet me with words”: gifts and intellectual friendships in eleventh-century Byzantium’, in M. Grünbart (ed)., Geschenke erhalten die Freundschaft: Gabentausch und Netzwerkpflege im europäischen Mittelalter. Akten des internationalen Kolloquiums Münster, 19.-20. November 2009, Byzantinische Studien und Texte (Berlin, 2011), 1–11, 3. 57 Bernard ‘“Greet me with words”’, 4.

96  Bad Taste increasing the sense’s perceived baseness.58 Individuals living in the medieval Byzantine world clearly enjoyed food and eating – but do the connotations of the sense of taste mean that, in a Byzantine context, enjoying food is wrong? The acts of eating and tasting could lead to pleasure and even desire, and consequently were thought of as possible precursors to the sin of gluttony.59 Taste, then, straddled both the dangers of gluttony and sin and the delights of heaven.60 The association of eating and tasting with gluttony but also with sexual excess and with females goes back to Eve, who brought sin into the world by caving to her desire for the forbidden fruit in Garden of Eden.61 An eleventh- or twelfth-century ivory box in the Walters Art Museum displays a fragmented narrative of the Fall (fig. 4.5).62 The majority of the sides of the box have lost their carved panels; its front displays three images framed by rosette strips. The narrative segment of the Biblical story depicted on this side of the box begins on the right side with the temptation of Eve.63 In the centre of the panel stands the nude figure of Eve turned towards the tree on the left side of the panel. Around the tree trunk is coiled the snake, with its head approaching Eve’s face to whisper tempting promises. In response, Eve is raising her left hand with its palm facing the viewer and the right to her face, with the index finger pointing at her lips. The gesture indicates that Eve is contemplating the words of the snake. It also highlights her mouth, emphasising that the desire for and act of eating, and by extension the sense of taste, played an active role in the Fall. This connection is articulated in texts such as Romanos the Melodist’s hymns: While the nature of the tree is not bad, the partaking in it will be a cause of harm for you, for it has a hidden whetstone of thoughts and a dagger of taste; so if you eat from it, you throw away forgiveness and eternal life.64

58 See R. Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Cambridge, 2005), 61–71; S. Stewart, ‘Remembering the sensorium’, in D. Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford and New York, 2005), 59–69. 59 Evagrios of Pontos, Ad Monachos, sections 6, 11, 38, 82, 97, 102, tr. J. Driscoll, The Ad Monachos of Evagrius Ponticus: its Structure and a Select Commentary (Rome, 1991), 13–15. 60 See for example Caseau, ‘Experiencing the sacred’; M.B. Cunningham, ‘Divine banquet: the Theotokos as a source of spiritual nourishment’, in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, 235–44. 61 C. Classen, ‘The witch’s senses: sensory ideologies and transgressive femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity’, Empire of the Senses, ed. Howes, 70–84. 62 See also H. Maguire, ‘Other icons: the classical nude in Byzantine bone and ivory carvings’, The Journal of the Walters Art Museum, 62 (2004), 9–20. 63 This is labelled ‘OΦΙΣ OMIΛΩNT (?) EYA’, ‘the serpent speaking to Eve’. 64 ‘ἡ οὑσία τοῦ ξύλου γὰρ ἔστι μὲν οὐκ ἄχρηεστος, / ἡ δὲ τούτου μετουσία σοὶ γενήσεται / βλάβης αἰτία, ἔχει γὰρ τοῦτο / ἀκόνηνλογισμῶν ἐγκεκρυμμένην καὶ γεύσεως μάχαιραν· / ἂν φάγῃς οὖν ἐκ

Bad Taste  97

Figure 4.5 Ivory box with scenes from the Fall of Adam and Eve (front), 900–1100.  The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Acquired by Henry Walters, 1926.

Works of art depicting the Old Testament narrative of the Fall usually mark Eve out as the one responsible for the expulsion from Paradise, stressing the perceived role of woman as an agent in moral corruption – associated generally with weakness of character, that is, giving in to temptation, and in some cases specifically with the desire to eat and taste.65 Culinary excess in women was perceived as a precursor to other, more grave sins. As a result, writers encouraged a dietary restriction for females in particular. In one of his letters, the fourth-century Biblical exegete and translator Jerome (345–420) advised young women on the rules according to which virgins of the church ought to live, urges extreme frugality in food and the avoidance of wine: ‘Let the food be vegetables and wheaten bread and occasionally a little fish (...) let her meals always leave her hungry’.66 In other letters, he declares

τούτου, / ἀποβάλλεις τὴν [ἄφεσιν καὶ] ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον.’ Romanos the Melodist, Hymn 51, 7.5–10, ed. tr. Arentzen, ‘Struggling with Romanos’s “Dagger”’, 170. 65 For example Gregory of Nazianzos, Homily 13, PG 44:1053B. See A. Eastmond, ‘Narratives of the Fall: structure and meaning in the genesis frieze at Hagia Sophia, Trebizond’, DOP, 53 (1999), 219–36, 223–6; J.A. Phillips, Eve: The History of an Idea (New York, 1984); H. Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. 1 (London, 1963). 66 St Jerome, Ep. 107.10, tr. V. Grimm, ‘Fasting women in Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity’, in J. Wilkins, D. Harvey and M. Dobson (ed.), Food in Antiquity, Studies in Ancient Society and Culture, 2nd edn (Exeter, 1995), 225–40, 234

98  Bad Taste that women ‘are intemperate as to the amount of food they take’ and that they ‘care for nothing but their belly and its adjacent members’.67 This implication that the sense of taste and its indulgence are to blame for the expulsion from paradise is repeated in the panel on the left side of the front of the box, which shows the transgression of Adam.68 Adam is depicted walking away from the tree on the left of the image. In his right hand he is holding a branch while his left hand is raised to his mouth, with Adam eating the fruit. At the centre of the box, underneath a lock, a smaller plaque shows Adam after the Fall sitting with his head resting on his hand in an expression of grief. The iconography and arrangement of the images on the box suggests that eating in inappropriate or forbidden ways and the sensory act of tasting could lead directly to sorrow and disaster. The gestures of pointing at the mouth are not repeated in all ivory boxes that depict the story of Adam and Eve, though many of them do suggest that eating comes before the Fall.69 The connection between eating, taste and sin is expressed on a ceramic fragment of a plate from the early twelfth century (fig. 4.6). A wide band of decoration runs along the edge of the plate, consisting of egg-shaped medallions framed by lines that merge into foliate scrolls offset against a stencilled background. In one of the medallions sits a naked figure with long hair, with his head lowered and his head in his hand. Next to him sways a tree. This is the iconography commonly employed to depict Adam after the Fall, as on the box from the Walters. It is unclear what the rest of the plate showed, with the fragmentary neighbouring medallion showing an animal scene. The presence of Adam, and Adam after the Fall at that, on an item of tableware is significant. It establishes a clear visual and conceptual link between what is shown – the consequences of giving in to the temptations of taste – and what the object is used for – the presentation of food at the table. By displaying the effects of sin in a way that appealed to the viewer’s emotions but also with visceral affectivity, this kind of image participates in wider visual and cultural practices of using images as a deterrent against specific behaviours and as an incitement to correct one’s behaviour while there still is time. Here, the transgression referred to is specifically associated with the dining table, with the image acting as a warning sign against gluttony and overindulgence in food and drink. Sensory perception could be dangerous. To avoid temptation but also to ensure appropriate behaviour, dining in medieval Byzantium was dominated by norms, from what to eat and not to eat to how to eat it and when to eat it as well as concerning manners at the table. Frameworks were put in place to counteract the potentially morally harmful character of food and taste. One of these measures, I propose, was the imagery on the tableware that was viewed and used during meals. Some imagery on ceramic and metal vessels alluded to the pleasures and potential dangers of dining and overindulgence, as is the case for the chafing dish from Corinth. The less specific imagery of sin and punishment on objects such as the vessel of Theodore Tourkeles and the ceramic fragments from Corinth illustrated what happened to

67 St Jerome, Ep. 22.17, 22.29, tr. Grimm, 234–5. 68 This is labelled ‘Η ΠΑΡΑΒΑΣΙΣ ΑΔΑΜ‘ 69 See for example the eleventh-century box in the Cleveland Museum of Art, inv. no. 1924.747.

Bad Taste  99

Figure 4.6 Fragment with Adam after the Fall, Corinth, 1059–1210.  American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas.

those that perpetrated a sin, whether related to the table or not. Eating something one shouldn’t eat and eating when one shouldn’t eat were presented to audiences of medieval Byzantine literature as digressions that could land one in Hell suffering painful tortures. Taste then was the ‘mother of all vice’.70 In the Byzantine world, eating and drinking could be both dangerous and temptations that led to eternal punishment. And one of the worst things one could be was a glutton. Based on the eastern tradition that ranked sins by their gravity, the fourth-century monk and ascetic Evagrios of Pontos proposed a system of eight vices or sinful desires. Gluttony was the first and most dangerous of the vices outlined by Evagrios.71 In depictions of the Last Judgement, the damned are headed up by the rich man who would not share his food with Lazarus and as a punishment is forever consumed by fire. Some of the damned ‘roasting away’ in the fires of hell also look to be overweight.72 The figure depicted the most commonly as fat was Hades, and the Old Testament describes him as ravenous and insatiable.73 Medieval Byzantine

70 Gregory of Nyssa, De virginitate, ed. tr. M. Aubineau, Grégoire de Nysse, Traité de la Virginité: Introduction, texte critique, traduction, commentaire, index, SC, 110 (Paris, 1966), 504–10. 71 Evagrios of Pontos, Ad Monachos, sections 6, 11, 38, 82, 97, 102, tr. Driscoll, 13–15. 72 A. Eastmond and L. James, ‘Eat, drink...and pay the price’, in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, 175–89, 179. 73 Isaiah 5:14; Proverbs 27:20.

100  Bad Taste images of the Anastasis depicted Hades as a pot-bellied man lying on the ground, while Christ’s cross pierces his stomach. A tenth-century ivory with the Crucifixion represents Hades lying at the feet of the Virgin and St John the Theologian, with the cross impaled in his stomach. An inscription next to the figure labels the scene ‘the cross implanted in the stomach of Hades’.74 Hades’ complaints and subsequent regurgitation of the dead are often described in Byzantine hymns.75 Hades, the biggest and baddest of them all, is shown in Byzantine images and texts as also being the biggest glutton – and if that is not a warning shot, I do not know what is. To uphold social expectations regarding behaviour at banquets, middle Byzantine individuals had recourse to a variety of tools that could aid them.76 These included idealising portrayals of rulers and heroes and contemporary rhetoric, some humorous and some damning, which aligned greed and gluttony with bad character. By pointing out what was frowned upon, writers and critics created a negative ‘anti-model’ or anti-type. Through the negative values attached to such behaviour, audiences were confronted with the creation and display of the behaviour that ought to be adapted instead. The desired demeanour and manners were not only promoted through rhetoric, they were also visualised during the banquet by means of the tableware. While gluttony was considered a grave sin and overindulgence could indicate corrupt morals, minor misbehaviours at the dinner table caused the condemnation by peers more than eternal damnation. The criticism of individuals’ eating habits was not only the vehicle for an easy joke. Overindulgence was perceived as an indicator of a bad and rapacious government. Eating and drinking, tableware and taste carried a symbolic value in Byzantium and could reveal the moral character of an individual. The decorated tableware of the middle Byzantine period fashions the ideal behaviour at the dinner table. While feasts were central to an individual’s relations with the outside world, manifesting the host’s power and establishing and maintaining relationships through the communal consumption of food, banquets also had a great relevance to the individual’s relationship with and perception of itself. In addition to being both the cause and the signifier of misbehaviour related to food consumption, domestic vessels could also serve as a ‘measure of man’s character’.77 In saints’ lives dating to between the eighth and tenth centuries, vessels made from a range of materials including ceramic, glass and gold and serving

74 Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. No. 17.190.44; The Glory of Byzantium, ed. Evans and Wixom, 151–2, cat. 97. 75 Romanos the Melodist, Hymn 25.3.5–6, ed. P. Maas and C.A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi cantica: Cantica genuina (Oxford, 1963), 189. 76 On the communication of social and personal values on medieval Samanid epigraphic pottery, see O. Pancaroğlu, ‘Serving wisdom: the contents of Samanid epigraphic pottery’, in R. Kessler (ed.), Studies in Islamic and Later Indian Art from the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 59–75. 77 S. Gerstel, ‘The sacred vessel and the measure of a man’, in A. Cutler and A. Papaconstantinou (ed.), The Material and the Ideal: Essays in Medieval Art and Archaeology in Honour of Jean-Michel Spieser (Leiden, 2007), 149–156, 149.

Bad Taste  101 functions from cooking pots to cups often represent the site of miracles occurring.78 The hagiographic sources also use the vessel as a metaphor for the human soul and body: in the Life of Ioannikios, a paralysed woman is compared to ‘a damaged vessel’; in the Life of Elias Spelaiotes, a priest giving communion is able to judge the character of those taking communion through spiritual sight.79 He ‘would see the faces of some brightened and radiating light and others darkened and blackened like the burned soot of a cookpot’.80 Individuals of bad character are described as ‘vessel[s] of evil’ while those of good character – predominantly the saints whose life story is being told – are labelled ‘useful’ and ‘chosen’ vessels and receptacles.81 Metaphors of human strength and weakness as vessels occur in sources beyond the lives of saints, too. Niketas Choniates tells of how Manuel I Komnenos ‘realised that the Roman forces were unequal to the task of standing up against the western armies, that they were like earthen cookpots striking cauldrons’.82 An ivory box in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome dated to 898–900 carries an inscription declaring ‘Your soul, o emperor, is a treasury of sublime gifts and a vessel [full] of divine goods’.83 The metaphors using vessels and in particular cooking and dining vessels to describe human character, physical strength and even faith are pervasive in middle Byzantine literature, suggesting that they were a well-known topos to the audiences of these texts. The familiarity with such comparisons would have allowed viewers to interpret vessels such as the chafing dish from Corinth and the tenth-century silver vessel depicting a shorthand version of the Last Judgement as analogies to virtue and vice, and in particular good and bad behaviour relating to food consumption and table manners. Much like contemporary texts, the imagery on the vessels instructed by fear. Decorated tableware vividly reminded its viewers of the consequences of their sins, depicting shorthand versions of the Last Judgement to stress the bodily nature of

78 A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Συλλογὴ Παλαιστίνης καὶ συριακῆς ἁγιολογίας (St Petersburg, 1907, repr. Thessalonike, 2001), 193, lines 4–5; E. Kurtz, Zwei griechische Texte über die Hl. Theophano, die Gemahlin Kaisers Leo VI (St Petersburg, 1898), 22. 79 AASS Nov. 2.1:356C. 80 AASS Sept. 3:855B. 81 L. Carras, ‘The Life of St Athanasia of Aegina: a critical edition with introduction’, in A. Moffatt (ed.), Maistor: Classical, Byzantine and Renaissance Studies for Robert Browning, ByzAus, 5 (Canberra, 1984), 199–224, 212, lines 8–14; A.-M. Talbot (ed.), Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, Byzantine Saints’ Lives in Translation, 1 (Washington, DC, 1996), 142, 266; A.-M. Talbot (ed.), Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints’ Lives in English Translation, Byzantine Saints’ Lives in Translation, 2 (Washington, DC, 1998), 258, tr. D. Sullivan; St Luke of Steiris, Bios kai politeia kai merikē thaumatōn diēgēsis tou hosiou patros hēmōn kai thaumatourgou Louka tou neou tou en Helladi keimenou, ed. tr. C. Connor and W. Connor, The Life and Miracles of Saint Luke of Steiris: Text, Translation and Commentary, The Archbishop Iakovos Library of Ecclesiastical and Historical Sources, 18 (Brookline, MA, 1994), 34; AASS Nov 2.1:385C. 82 Choniates, Chronographia, ed. van Dieten, 199.31–5. 83 + Θησαυρ[ὸ]ς δώρων ὑψηλῶν, αὐτοκράτορ, / ἡ σὴ ψυχὴ καὶ σκεῦος θείων χρημάτων. A. Cutler and N. Oikonomides, ‘An imperial Byzantine casket and its fate at a humanist’s hands’, ArtB, 70.1 (1988), 77–87, 82.

102  Bad Taste the punishments undergone by those who had depraved manners or morals, at table and beyond. The contemplation of death and the fate of the soul was an important cultural practice during the middle Byzantine period. It extended to the dinner table, where individuals had to be mindful of the consequences of eating on not only their body but also their soul. While the imagery on medieval Byzantine tableware does not specify any sins committed, with viewers prompted to recall their personal and individual transgressions, there were specific acts and behaviours associated with the dining table that were inappropriate and even impermissible. In a monastic context, these were defined in texts that included monastic typika and the lives of saints, with transgressions resulting in the public punishment of the offender. In the monastery refectory, tableware played a central role in the committing and the display of certain transgressions. In a secular context, images on tableware and textual sources reveal the reprehensibility of the excessive consumption of food and drink, along with other behaviours that were considered as undesirable at table. The visual and intellectual culture of dining encouraged banqueters to follow positive role models to encourage social cohesion and stability. To excessive consumption of food and drink, middle Byzantine literature attached moral connotations that revealed an individual’s character. The apocalyptic tales in circulation during the period reflect the dietary restrictions imposed on individuals living in medieval Byzantium, highlighting that the act of eating in itself could constitute a sin that would go punished in the afterlife. The sense of taste was not only a vehicle for sensory pleasure and even divine cognition but also for gluttony. The perceived link between the sense of taste and the sin of gluttony ultimately goes back to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, with both text and image laying the blame for the expulsion from paradise firmly at the feet of Eve. This is indicative of the gendered perception of taste and the susceptibility to moral corruption and sensory excess, but also of the dangers inherent in sensory perception more generally. To counteract the dangers of falling into the sin of gluttony, Byzantine diners had recourse to a range of norms and tools to stay on the path of moral fortitude. One of these was the imagery presented to diners on tableware. In addition to acting as a visual aid to righteousness, vessels of tableware were used as a rhetorical topos to metaphorically represent good character. The depictions of fragmentation and resurrection warned their viewers against sins and vices associated with the dining table, the context in which the objects were viewed. And paradoxically, if they avoided excessive consumption of food and drink and followed the prescriptions around eating and diet, what awaited the blessed was yet another dining table: at the end of her tour of the other world, the nun Anastasia is shown to Paradise, where she sees ‘a prepared table’.84 Whether the dietary and behavioural rules at that table were more relaxed, the apocalypse does not say.

84 Anastasia, Ch. 38, tr. Baun, 421.

5

Manly Men, Heroic Hunters

A ceramic fragment in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dated to 1200–68, depicts a horse and rider (fig. 5.1).1 The fragment belongs to a bowl produced in Port Saint Symeon (now al-Mina/Samandag, Turkey), the main port of Antioch. It is made of terracotta with a green glaze over slip; the decoration is incised with a stylus in the sgraffito technique.2 The bowl from the Met displays the hallmark features of Port Saint Symeon Ware: the background of the vessel is a creamy yellow, streaked with brown on the left-hand side and with green on the right. The incision lines in the slip reveal the red-brown fabric of the vessel underneath. The edge of the bowl is outlined by a pattern that serves as a framing device. The man on horseback depicted at the centre of the bowl is cut off from his waist; of his horse, only the head remains visible. The man is wearing a tunic and armbands, his hair is scraped back. In his left hand, he is holding a labarum; in his right, the reins of his horse. His facial expression is grim, though that is not unconventional for Byzantine art. What is unusual about this bowl and its ‘relatives’ such as the objects discussed here is that until around the eleventh century images of males in Byzantine art tended, loosely put, to fall into two categories: religious portraits of Christ, angels and the saints; and imperial portraiture.3 The vessel, depicting a man who is neither an emperor nor a saint, corresponds to an emerging, third category of men depicted in middle Byzantine art – that of the manly, militarised man and the heroic hunter. Representations of men on medieval Byzantine tableware are ubiquitous, as a quick scan of ceramic collections will reveal. For example, the collections of medieval ceramics excavated in Corinth

1 H. Evans and W. Wixom (ed.), The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261 (New York, 1997), 401, cat. 268; M.J. Blackman and S. Redford, ‘Neutron activation analysis of medieval ceramics from Kinet, Turkey, especially Port Saint Symeon Ware’, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, 42 (2005), 83–186, 102, 136 140, fig. 23; P. Barnet and P. Dandridge (ed.), Lions, Dragons, & Other Beasts: Aquamanilia of the Middle Ages, Vessels for Church and Table (New York, 2006), 180, cat. 35; B.D. Boehm and M. Holcomb (ed.), Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven (New York, 2016), 41–2, fig. 19. 2 Blackman and Redford, ‘Neutron activation analysis’, 85. 3 For an introduction to the categories of holy man and emperor, see H. Maguire, ‘Style and ideology in Byzantine imperial art’, Gesta, 28.2 (1989), 217–31, 221–7. DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359-6

104  Manly Men, Heroic Hunters

Figure 5.1 Fragment of a bowl with a horse and rider, Port Saint Symeon, 1200–1268. 17.2 × 1.3 × 27 × 8.5  cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens since 1896 include around fifteen objects that depict men engaging in either non-identifiable or non-military activities – from ‘depressed gentlemen’, as the online catalogue labels them, to musicians. In addition to this, there are at least sixty objects and ceramic sherds that like the bowl from the Met show males riding a horse or power-posing, dressed to fight and, in many cases, confronting an animal foe.4 The imagery on the bowls and plates depicting militarised men engaged in a range of activities participate in the wider practice of depicting role models in a secular, domestic setting, well-established by the eleventh and twelfth centuries.5 Niketas Choniates documents the artistic and architectural patronage of Manuel I Komnenos in his Chronographia, indicating that the emperor ‘built the very long peristyle galleries at both palaces [the Blachernae and the Great Palace] which shimmered with gold mosaics that depicted (…) his feats against the barbarians’.6 The twelfth-century traveller Benjamin of Tudela observed during his visit to Constantinople that in Manuel’s palace ‘all the

4 The pattern of a high proportion of decorated vessels representing men is repeated in other ceramic assemblages such as those of the Louvre, catalogued in V. François, La vaisselle de terre à Byzance: Catalogue des collections du musée du Louvre (Paris, 2017). 5 A similar development has been observed in religious monumental art, particularly on the fringes of the empire. For an introduction, see C. Walter, The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition (Aldershot, 2003); R. Nelson, ‘“And so, with the help of God”: the Byzantine art of war in the tenth century’, DOP, 65/66 (2011–12), 169–92; M. White, Military Saints in Byzantium and Rus, 900–1200 (Cambridge, 2013) 6 Niketas Choniates, Chronographia, II.VII.206, ed. J.L. van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae Historia, CFHB, 11 (Berlin, 1975), 159, tr. H. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, BTT (Detroit, MI, 1984), 117.

Manly Men, Heroic Hunters  105 wars of the ancients as well as his own wars are represented in pictures’.7 Domestic décor of this type was not restricted to imperial residences, as is clear from John Kinnamos’s work Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus, written some time after the Fall of Constantinople in 1204. In this account, Kinnamos implies the conventional decoration of wealthy houses when he relates how the treacherous nature of the general Alexios Axouch, who was accused of conspiring with sultan Kılıç Arslan II (r. 1156–1192), was evident in the murals adorning his house, as he did not emblazon on them ancient Greek feats, nor did he set forth the emperor’s deeds, things which he has achieved in wars and beast hunts, such as is often customary for those who hold governmental offices. (…) Neglecting these [subjects], Alexius (…) commemorated the sultan’s martial deeds, foolishly making public in painting in his residence what should have been concealed in darkness.8 The dining chamber of Digenes Akrites is described as showing scenes ranging from Samson tearing apart a lion with his own hands to the triumph of Alexander the Great and the exploits of Joshua, in a blend of Old Testament history and classical myth and history.9 The decorated tableware showing men dressed in armour, proudly striding through the pictorial space to confront an opponent, makes it clear that depiction of these kinds of scenes were viewed not only in the houses of the wealthy, but also in those of the middling and even lower social spheres. There seems to have been a fashion for tableware depicting a certain type of man, at a specific moment in time – who are these men, what do they mean and why do people want to be looking at them? The imagery on eleventh- to thirteenth-century vessels visualises the increased valourisation of honour, glory and ‘manliness’ and the new ideal of the ‘knight’. The activities that these ‘manly’ men enjoyed and excelled at, the images suggest, were confrontations with other men and animals, pursued by the heroic hunter for pleasure and competition. Decorated tableware commonly represents men dressed in armour, dynamically moving through the picture space or power-posing at the centre of the image, engaged in the pursuit of an animal or a monster and heroic deeds. A fragmentary vessel in the champlevé technique from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century

7 J. Simon (ed. tr.), The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages (Malibu, CA, 1983), 71. 8 John Kinnamos, History, 266, ed. A. Meineke, Ioannis Cinnami epitome rerum ab Ioanne et Alexio Comnenis gestarum (Bonn, 1836), tr. C.M. Brand, Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies, 95 (New York, 1976), 199–201. Other twelfth-century residences with a similar decorative scheme included the house of Leo Sikoutênos at Thessalonike, which depicted the deeds of Old Testament heroes alongside Manuel, ‘slayer of alien peoples.’ Cod. Marc. Gr. 524, fol.22v; tr. C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (London, 1986), 225–6. 9 E. Jeffreys (ed. tr.), Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions, Cambridge Medieval Classics, 7 (Cambridge, 1998), G 7.60–101.

106  Manly Men, Heroic Hunters represents a male figure that occupies the central medallion of the bowl.10 The male, whose white body starkly contrasts with the surrounding brown surface area, is posed dynamically. On his left arm he holds a teardrop-shaped shield, in his right hand a sword. He is clad in scaled military garments and behind him flutters a cloak. A similar iconographic formula is used in a champlevé medallion from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century that shows the upper body of a young man.11 His facial features are articulated with finely drawn lines, his hair is short and neatly trimmed. The male’s shoulders are covered by a cloak tied below his neck. Below this he wears a tunic decorated with stencilled dots and incised lines, creating patterns in white and brown. Painterly brown dots placed across the medallion by the decorator’s brush further add to this effect. Behind each shoulder of the man sways a pointed tree, thus bringing together the emerging masculine ideal of the active and military man and the established Byzantine rhetoric of male beauty, which frequently compared physical appearance to trees, plants and flowers.12 On some objects, the hero is an armoured centaur holding a teardrop-shaped shield and wielding a sword.13 Around the same time, under the rule of the Komnenian dynasty (1081–1185), male (and, to an extent, female) ideals shifted. By the end of the eleventh century, a new social ideal was developing – that of the noble and courageous ‘knight’.14 Textual sources from the period suggest that the emperor seems to have been considered as the embodiment of this new ideal. The imperial image was militarised, which was reflected in state ritual. For example, the Roman custom of proclaiming the emperor by raising him on a shield was probably revived around the mid-eleventh century.15 Also around this time, a number of new virtues were introduced to the texts filled with advice addressed to rulers, with noble origins and military prowess emphasised in textual sources. Michael Attaleiates’ The History (c. 1079/1080), describes imperial virtue, singling out – besides the established ideals including philanthropy, righteousness and piety – nobility of birth and

10 Benaki Museum, Athens, inv. no. 13601. 11 Benaki Museum, Athens, inv. no. 13604. 12 On the militarised beauty ideals, see M. Hatzaki, Beauty and the Male Body in Byzantium: Perceptions and Representations in Art and Text (Basingstoke, 2009), 116–35; for example Timarion, VII.168–71 and VII.175, 177–8: ‘θαυμαστὴν ἐνεποίουν τὴν πρόοδον, πάντες ἀκμάζοντες, πάντες σφριγῶντες ἄνδρες Ἄρεος Ἐνυαλίοιο μύσται καὶ τρόφιμοι, σηρικοῖς καὶ καταστίκτοις ἀμφίοις τὴν περιβολὴν καλλυνόμενοι, οὖλοι τὰς κόμας, ξανθοὶ τὰς κόμας’ and ‘Ἵπποι δὲ τούτοις Ἀρραβικοὶ (...) ἐδόκουν συνιέναι καὶ τῆς περικειμένης λαμπρότητος, ὅση ἐν χρυσῷ καὶ ἀργύρῳ τοὺς χαλινοὺς περιέλαμπεν’ Τιμαρίων’ ed. tr. R. Romano, La Satira Bizantina dei Secoli XI–XV (Turin, 1999), 120. 13 Corinth C 1934 66, C 1934 1455. 14 A. Kazhdan, ‘The aristocracy and the imperial ideal’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Byzantine Aristocracy IX to XIII Centuries, BAR International Series, 221 (Oxford, 1984), 43–57, 50. 15 A. Kazhdan, ‘Certain traits of imperial propaganda in the Byzantine empire from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries’, in G. Makdisi, D. Sourdel and J. Sourdel-Thomine (ed.), Prédication et propagande au Moyen Âge: Islam, Byzance, Occident. Penn – Paris – Dumbarton Oaks Colloquia, Vol. III: Session des 20–25 Octobre 1980 (Paris, 1983), 13–28, 17.

Manly Men, Heroic Hunters  107 military prowess.16 Theophylact, the future archbishop of Ohrid, emphasised the power of inspiring leadership through military prowess.17 Constantine IX Monomachos was praised by Theophylact for his skill in riding a horse, throwing a javelin and as a mounted archer, and is said to have trained himself by running and hunting.18 And the twelfth-century court intellectual Theodore Prodromos composed several panegyrics for John II Komnenos and his son Manuel in which he defined the characteristics of the ideal emperor as including piety, military success and skill in hunting.19 In Eustathios of Thessalonike’s writings, Manuel I Komnenos is described as an ideal ‘knight’ who was not afraid of danger and took greater pride in his wounds than in the golden sparkle of his crown.20 The depictions of men fighting visible and invisible foes and male figures facing their viewer in their military glory on ceramic plates and bowls visualise cultural trends of the period and express the objects’ participation in these developments. One of the most popular militarised male iconographies of twelfth- and thirteenth-century ceramic tableware was that of an armoured male surrounded by the scaled body of a serpent-dragon (fig. 5.2). This is shown for example on a fragmentary ceramic vessel from the twelfth century in the Benaki Museum.21 On the fragment, a male mounted on a horse and clad in scaled armour, adorned with bands of pseudo-Kufic decoration, is represented next to a sinuous shape, all that remains of his snake or ‘dragon’ adversary. Divine and heroic figures killing monstrous beasts, symbolising the triumph of good over evil, can be traced as far back as to ancient near eastern and Graeco-Roman mythologies.22 The concept was absorbed into the stories and depictions of warrior saints during the late antique period, by way of equestrian imperial models such as Alexander the Great and the motif of the unidentified Holy Rider that appeared on amulets

16 For a discussion of the genre of ‘mirrors for princes’ and the question of its existence, see P. Odorico, ‘Les miroirs des princes à Byzance: une lecture horizontale’, in P. Odorico (ed.), «L’éducation au gouvernement et à la vie»: la tradition des «règles de vie» de l’Antiquité au Moyen-Âge. Colloque international – Pise 18 et 19 mars 2005, Autour de Byzance, I (Paris, 2009), 223–46; G. Prinzing, ‘Byzantine mirrors for princes: an overview’, in N.-L. Perret and S. Péquignot (ed.), A Critical Companion to the ‘Mirrors for Princes’ Literature, Reading Medieval Sources, 7 (Leiden and Boston, 2023), 108–35. See also M. Mullett, ‘The madness of genre’, DOP, 46 (1992), 233–43. 17 P. Gautier (ed. tr.), Théophylacte d’Achrida: Discours, traités, poésies, CFHB, 16.1 (Thessalonike, 1980), 193, 11.21–3. 18 Op. cit., 183, 11.4–8. 19 W. Hörandner (ed.), Theodoros Prodromos: Historische Gedichte, Text und Kommentar, WByzSt, 11 (Vienna, 1974), 89–108. 20 Eustathios of Thessalonike, Τοῦ ἀυτοῦ τὸ γραφὲν εἰς τὸν ἀοίδιμον ἐν ἁγίοις βασιλεῦσι κῦριν Μανουὴλ τὸν Κομνηνόν, 62.10–16, ed. tr. E.C. Bourbouhakis, Not Composed in a Chance Manner: The Epitaphios for Manuel I Komnenos by Eustathios of Thessalonike, Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, 18 (Uppsala, 2017), 69. 21 See also Benaki Museum, Athens, inv. no. ΓΕ 13641. 22 O. Pancaroğlu, ‘The itinerant dragon-slayer: forging paths of image and identity in medieval Anatolia’, Gesta, 43.2 (2004), 151–64, 152. See also S. Kuehn, The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art (Leiden, 2011).

108  Manly Men, Heroic Hunters

Figure 5.2 Plate with a dragon slayer, Corinth, 1150–1200.  American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Photo: Petros Dellatolas.

in Byzantine Syria, Palestine and Anatolia as early as the sixth century.23 In a Byzantine context, the imagery came to be associated especially with the military saints St George and St Theodore.24 While visually some of the images of heroic men on the ceramic tableware may resemble the iconographic formula of St George, the men depicted on the ceramic vessels are no saints. They have no halo, nor do inscriptions give us their names. Instead, the images of the male figures discussed here are visualisations of the new ideals of masculinity: of a life of action and heroism, of military valour and physical beauty. A twelfth-century plate from Greece now in the Menil Collection displays a version of the dragon-slayer scene that plays upon the tension between the heroic fighter’s power supplied by weapons on the one hand, and divine protection on the other (fig. 5.3). The plate is badly damaged, its glaze discoloured and washed off. Its appearance reveals that it is one of the many examples of Byzantine pottery to 23 Walter,  Warrior Saints, 33–8; C. Walter, ‘The intaglio of Solomon in the Benaki Museum and the origins of the iconography of warrior saints’, ΔΧΑΕ, 15 (1989–90), 35–42; C. Walter, ‘The Thracian horseman: ancestor of the warrior saints?’, ByzF, 14 (1989), 659–73; N. Thierry, ‘Aux limites du sacré et du magique: un programme d’entrée d’une église en Cappadoce’, Res Orientales, 12 (1999), 233–47. See Pancaroğlu, ‘Itinerant dragon-slayer’, 162, n. 6 for further bibliography. 24 See C. Jolivet-Lévy, ‘Saint Théodore et le dragon: nouvelles données’, in E. Cuozzo, V. Déroche, A. Peters-Custot and V. Prigent (ed.), Puer Apuliae. Mélanges offerts à J.-M. Martin (Paris, 2008), 357–82.

Manly Men, Heroic Hunters  109

Figure 5.3 Plate with fighter and dragon, 1100–1200. 5.1 × 25.7  cm. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Paul Hester.

come from a shipwreck. The plate shows a male figure moving to the right of the scene. His hair is long and curled, his body clad in armour. He wears a pointed hat or helmet. Despite wearing armour the male figure carries no weapons, unlike his counterparts on other plates. Instead, above both his right and his left hand, the shape of a four-armed cross has been incised with crudely drawn lines. Around him along the edge of the plate winds the body of his monstrous opponent. Here, the hero’s defence comes not from arms and violence but from faith and divine assistance. This builds upon the concepts of first the snake as an emissary of the devil and second the symbol of the cross as a protective weapon. The Life of St Luke of Steiris (d. 953) tells of how St Luke set off to climb a mountain, carrying a cross with him. The devil in his envy sought to deflect St Luke from his mission by ‘us[ing] a reptile as his instrument’, sending a snake that attached itself to the holy man’s toe.25 The saint, armed with the cross, successfully petitions the snake to let go of his foot. In this story as on the ceramic plate, the divine power invested in the symbol of the cross becomes the tool to control and neutralise the animal.26

25 ‘Καὶ ὁ μὲν πονηρὸς οὔτως ὡς ὀργάνῳ τῷ ἑρπετῷ χρησάμενος’, Vita S Lucae Junioris, PG 111:457B–460A. 26 H. Maguire, ‘The cage of crosses: ancient and medieval sculptures on the “Little Metropolis” in Athens’, in Θυμίαμα στη μνήμη της Λασκαρίνας Μπούρα, vol. 1 (Athens, 1994), 169–72, 171. Similar tropes are repeated in other vitae, such as the Life of St Nikon of Sparta from the mid-eleventh

110  Manly Men, Heroic Hunters The military figures fighting a dragon depicted on Byzantine pottery are usually identified by scholars as depictions of Digenes Akrites, who in one of the versions of the chivalric epic defends his wife against a three-headed snake.27 In the story, which summarises the new ideal of masculinity, Digenes’ heroic feat of killing the ‘dragon’ is part of his much larger collection of exploits. Digenes is described as an experienced and brave hunter by the age of twelve and is successful in fighting robbers as well as wild animals, asserting his ‘noble birth through noble actions’.28 The ultimate prey for his exploits is a female only known as ‘the girl’, whom Digenes steals and then marries. The second half of the story explores the couple’s often idyllic life together, describing the lush meadows and palaces where they live, expressing the ideal of aristocratic leisure. The story also relates Digenes’ heroic actions, which largely consist of winning in battle against increasingly powerful and seemingly invincible adversaries. He is given rewards for his military services appropriate for his aristocratic status: entitlements, hereditary land tenure and control over the frontiers. The story serves to reaffirm the medieval Byzantine code of honour formulated in texts such as the Strategikon of Kekaumenos, composed around the end of the eleventh or early twelfth century.29 In Digenes’ case, honour

century or later, see D. Sullivan (ed. tr.), The Life of Saint Nikon: Text, Translation and Commentary (Brookline, MA, 1987). For hagiographical topoi in Digenes Akrites, see E. Trapp, ‘Hagiographische Elemente im Digenes-Epos’, Analecta Bollandiana, 94 (1976), 275–87. 27 Jeffreys, Digenis Akritis, xlvii, 6.45–76, 155–6. This practice was established in A. Frantz, ‘Digenis Akritas: a Byzantine epic and its illustrators’, Byz, 15 (1940/41), 87–91; A. Frantz, ‘Akritas and the dragons’, Hesp, 10.1 (1941), 9–13; A. Cutler, ‘Akritic imagery’, in ODB I, 47–8; J. Notopoulos, ‘Akritan iconography on Byzantine pottery’, Hesp, 33 (1964), 108–33; D. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, Byzantine Glazed Ceramics: The Art of Sgraffito (Athens, 1999), cat. 130, cat. 134. For depictions of Digenes on tableware, see Glory of Byzantium, ed. Evans and Wixom, 270, fig. 192; for images of Digenes Akrites in other materials, see H. Evans, ‘Digenis Akritis and a middle Byzantine rosette casket in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’, in A. Cutler, G. Bühl and A. Effenberger (ed.), Spätantike und byzantinische Elfenbeinbildwerke im Diskurs (Wiesbaden, 2008), 97–112, 100. See also C. Livanos, ‘A case study in Byzantine dragon-slaying: Digenes and the serpent’, Oral Tradition, 26.1 (2011), 125–44. For an introduction to recent discussions of the literary aspects of Digenes, see A.J. Goldwyn and I. Nilsson (ed.), Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook (Cambridge, 2018); O. Cikán and M. Kulhánková, ‘Die Welt des Digenes Akrites: Zu den Eigennamen in der Grottaferrata-Version unter Berücksichtigung historischer Schichten und literarischer Assoziationsmöglichkeiten’, BSl, 78.1–2 (2020), 240–61; M. Kulhánková, ‘Narrative coherence in Digenes Akrites (G)’, BMGS, 45.2 (2021), 184–98. 28 T. Papadopoullos, ‘The Akritic hero: socio-cultural status in the light of comparative data’, in R. Beaton and D. Ricks (ed.), Digenes Akrites: New Approaches to Byzantine Heroic Poetry, Publications for the Centre for Hellenic Studies, KCL, 2 (Aldershot, 1993), 131–8; P. Magdalino, ‘Honour among the Romaioi: the framework of social values in the world of Digenes Akrites and Kekaumenos’, BMGS, 13 (1989), 183–218. 29 Kekaumenos, Στρατηγικὸν, ed. B. Wassiliewsky and V. Jernstedt, Cecaumeni Strategikon et incerti scriptoris de officiis regiis libellus (St Petersburg 1896, repr. Amsterdam 1965), ed. tr. C. Roueché, Kekaumenos, Consilia et Narrationes, SAWS (2013); see also P. Lemerle, Prolégomènes à une édition critique et commentaire des ‘Conseils et récits’ de Kékauménos, Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres, Mémoires, 54 (Brussels, 1960) and H.-G. Beck (ed. tr.), Vademecum des byzantinischen Aristokraten: das sogenannte Strategikon des Kekaumenos, Byzantinische Geschichtsschreiber, 5 (Graz, 1956).

Manly Men, Heroic Hunters  111 is acquired through glory and ‘manliness’ (ἀνδρεία).30 The identification of the hero confronting dragons depicted on ceramic tableware as Digenes Akrites is plausible given the popularity of the tale and the close parallels between Book VI of the epos and the imagery on the ceramic vessels. However, treating the images on ceramic and metal vessels as illustrations of popular stories is reductive of their complexity and fluidity and underplays the vessels’ role as active social and cultural agents. Although the popularity and wide circulation of Digenes’ epos may have meant that this would have been the primary character associated with the images of dragonslayers on pottery, the lack of identification allows for alternative conclusions to be made. The images act as more open-ended representations of honour, manliness and the triumph of strength and virtue over evil. The ‘manliness’ that defined this new type of heroic male ideal was intimately tied up in activities that allowed for the demonstration of bravery and honour. Prime among these were prowess in battle and pride in physical wounds, as described in the writings of Attaleiates, and the hunt of animals, foes and monsters, as suggested by Theophylact and Prodromos as well as Digenes Akrites. And while victory over a dragon or a foe was more glorious than that over a hare or a bear, the hunt served as an essential step in an individual’s preparation for greater glory. The hunt is depicted on a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century fragment of a large champlevé plate from Thebes.31 It shows a male figure; his hair is long and curly, his eyes large, his mouth a thin line. He wears a sleeved garment decorated with decorative strip around his upper arm. From his shoulder a hunting bird swoops downward towards the head of their prey, possibly a deer. Scenes of armoured and sometimes mounted men hunting prey including hares are found on other ceramic fragments dated to the twelfth century.32 The iconographic theme of the hunt is not restricted to ceramic vessels, nor to tableware. The metal vessels from Vilgort (fig. 3.2), Chernihiv and the Basilevsky collection (fig. 6.1) feature images of men mounted on horses and armed with spears and bows, galloping across the picture field. Two plates from a set of silver dated to the second half of the eleventh century display engraved medallions showing mounted hunters.33 Although the object of the pursuit is absent from the imagery on all but one of these precious metal vessels, the target of the hunt could have been supplemented by the viewer’s imagination or supplied by their knowledge of contemporary literature or their familiarity with the empire’s visual culture. The royal or aristocratic hunt was a prominent theme in the art of Greece and Rome.34 It also played an important role in the image and ideology of rulership in the ancient and medieval near east, from the Achaemenid era to the 30 Magdalino, ‘Honour among the Romaioi’, esp. 189–94. 31 Inv. no. 8086; Byzantine Glazed Ceramics, ed. Papanikola-Bakirtzi, 40, cat. 24. 32 Corinth C 1933 588, C 1934 74, C 1934 1462, C 1936 508. 33 A. Ballian and A. Drandaki, ‘A middle Byzantine silver treasure’, ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟ ΜΒΕΝΑΚΙ, 3 (2003), 47–80, pl. 1 and 3; M. Mundell Mango, ‘From “glittering sideboard” to table: silver in the wellappointed triclinium’, in L. Brubaker and K. Linardou (ed.), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, SPBS, 13 (Aldershot, 2007), 127–61, 139–40. 34 See H. Malcolm, ‘Hunters, heroes, kings: the frieze of Tomb II at Vergina’ (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2008); J. Barringer, The Hunt in Ancient Greece (Baltimore, MA, 2001); P. Peirce, ‘The Arch of Constantine: propaganda and ideology in late Roman art’, AH, 12.4 (1989), 387–418.

112  Manly Men, Heroic Hunters Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties. In the Byzantine empire, images of hunting were produced and consumed throughout late antiquity and beyond; for example, scenes of hunting feature on a silver plate of the fourth- or fifth-century Sevso treasure, in a mosaic floor from the fourth-century Roman house at Piazza Armerina and in the sixth-century mosaics from the Great Palace in Constantinople.35 The familiarity with such images would mean that, even when the prey was suspended from the iconography of an object – as is the case with the metal tableware – its audience would have been able to recognise it as a hunting scene. The presence of such images on objects viewed at the table highlights the popularity of the theme of the hunt, appreciated beyond the social circles that could actually afford to go hunting for leisure rather than for necessity. The hunt, in addition to appearing frequently in art, was a prominent theme in Byzantine literature. In the twelfth century, Constantine Manasses wrote an ekphrasis of bird hunting and the metropolitan Constantine Pantechnes an extensive ekphrasis of a hunt.36 The aristocratic and wealthy classes, both in the Byzantine empire and beyond, hunted not for necessity but as a pleasure. The hunt as a leisure activity was restricted to those able to afford a hunting park as well as its cultivation and the animals kept within it, from animals trained for the hunt including horses, cheetahs and falcons, to the animals that were hunted in the parks.37 The importance of hunting as a social and status symbol is clear from the boasting popular with those hunting for leisure. In 968, Nikephoros II Phokas sought to impress the Italian ambassador Liudprand by inviting him to come and see the onagers kept in one of his hunting parks, implying that the visitor from Italy had seen nothing like it before. But when Liudprand accompanied the emperor on the hunt, he drily remarked that the onagers looked just like the donkeys back home, effectively killing off the emperor’s attempts at impressing the ambassador.38 This episode reveals the prestige associated with privately owned hunting parks, but also Liudprand’s general displeasure with his second trip to Constantinople. Hunting as a leisure activity was not limited to the Byzantine elite, as parallels for Byzantine game preserves have been found in Islamic and Sicilian hunting parks, in particular those of the Norman Kings of Sicily in the environs of Palermo. According to Romuald of Salerno, some of the hilly terrain beyond the city was enclosed with a stone wall by Roger II (r. 1130–1154) to contain deer and wild boar; special trees were planted inside

35 For examples only known through texts, see A. Walker, The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Middle Byzantine Imperial Power, Ninth to Thirteenth Centuries C.E. (Cambridge, 2012), 22. 36 L. Sternbach, ‘Analecta Manassea’, Eos, 7 (1901), 180–94; E. Miller, ‘Description d’une chasse à l’once par un écrivain byzantin du XIIe siècle de notre ère’, Annuaire de l’Association pour l’encouragement des études grecques, 6 (1872), 47–52 and 7 (1873), 133–4. 37 On hunting parks, see N.P. Ševčenko, ‘Wild animals in the Byzantine park’, in A. Littlewood, H. Maguire and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Byzantine Garden Culture, Papers Presented at a Colloquium in November 1996 at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC, 2002), 69–86. 38 Liudprand of Cremona, Embassy, 37–8, ed. tr. P. Squatriti, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Washington, DC, 2007), 260–2.

Manly Men, Heroic Hunters  113 the preserve, water channelled into it and a palace erected.39 These game parks attest to the interest of medieval rulers in hunting in controlled environments that guaranteed a successful hunt and that were carefully laid out, landscaped, managed and harvested.40 The men depicted in the hunt of wild game on the ceramic and metal vessels bear notable similarities to the fighting men on other vessels, from their dress to their physical features. The hunter on the fragment from Thebes shares his long curly hair, his determined facial expression and his tunic top with a decorative band around the upper arm with the dragon-hunters on a number of plates. This signals that while the prey of the former is an animal rather than a monster he nevertheless represents the same ideal of masculinity. In the middle Byzantine period, the hunt was seen as a crucial part of the training and preparation for military action. The advice given in hunting manuals such as the Kynegetika provides an overview of different kinds of adversaries and advice on how to overcome these foes, an approach also taken by military manuals. The successful confrontation with the animal or human foe depends on a knowledge of weapons and their use, of the surroundings and of the adversary, highlighting the intersection of the hunt and of war.41 The hunting treatise written by Constantine Manasses explicitly addresses the close conceptual link that existed between hunt and war in the middle Byzantine period, stating that the hunt is ‘excellent for preparing men for warfare, since [it teaches] them to ride, to pursue, to hold a pattern (…)’.42 For the Byzantine aristocracy, hunting and warfare were all but interchangeable – though the hunt took the second rank since it was an activity of leisure.43 Because of the close connection between the hunt and military action, hunting was considered an important component of the education of young aristocratic males. In his epitaph for John I Komnenos, Theodore Prodromos states that it was John’s ‘lust for victory’ that drove him to learn how to ride a horse and how to shoot with a bow and arrow, and how to use his sword during the hunt to kill bears and leopards.44 The prominence

39 Romuald of Salerno, Chronicon, 232.14–21, tr. H. Maguire, ‘A description of the Aretai palace and its garden’, The Journal of Garden History, 10.4 (1990), 209–13, 210. See also A. Littlewood, ‘Gardens of the palaces’, in H. Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204 (Washington, DC, 1997), 13–38. 40 On the management of nature through gardens and its gendering, see C. Barber, ‘Reading the garden in Byzantium: nature and sexuality’, BMGS, 16.1 (1992), 1–20. 41 N.P. Ševčenko, ‘Eaten alive: animal attacks in the Venice Cynegetica’, in I. Anagnostakis, T.G. ­Kolias and E. Papadopoulou (ed.), Ζώα και περιβάλλον στο Βυζάντιο (7ος–12ος αι.) (Athens, 2011), 115–35, 133–4. 42 Constantine Manasses, Encomium of Emperor Manuel Komnenos, ed. E. Kurtz, ‘Eshje dva neizdannyh proizvedenija Konstantina Manassii’, VizVrem, 12 (1906) 69–98, 79.1–15, tr. in A. Kazhdan and A. Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (London, 1985), 244; C. Messis and I. Nilsson, ‘The description of a crane hunt by Constantine Manasses: introduction, text and translation’, Scandinavian Journal for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 5 (2019), 9–90. 43 E. Patlagean, ‘De la chasse et du souverain‘, DOP, 46 (1992), 257–63, 260. 44 ἔρως δὲ νίκης 25.15; Theodore Prodromos, Poem 25.12–20, ed. Hörandner, 336.

114  Manly Men, Heroic Hunters of hunting and its connection with warfare was consistent with the ideal life pattern for the twelfth-century man, set out by Prodromos in the birthday speech for the son of the sebastokratorissa Eirene: a young boy will begin by learning how to successfully partake in games, then in the hunt and finally in battle.45 While preparing a male individual for war, the hunt could also function as an act of valour that demonstrated power, particularly imperial power. Myths of successful hunts were used to justify imperial rule, as in the case of Basil I, and to underline the emperor’s virility and fitness to rule.46 Liudprand attributed Romanos I Lekapenos’s (r. 919–944) rise to power to his single-handed slaying of a lion, and John Kinnamos claimed that Manuel I ‘had fought more wild beasts than any man of whom I have ever heard’.47 The emperor was seen as a symbolic hunter, in particular during the Komnenian period, which witnessed a revived concern with blood sport and a militarisation of the public image along with the ideal male character of the noble warrior.48 Not only were descriptions of the chase composed by various writers, hunting motifs were also included in imperial symbolism. Prodromos regarded the emperor not only as an ideal warrior but also as an ideal hunter.49 In his account of the decoration of the palace erected by Andronikos I at the church of the Forty Martyrs in Constantinople, Choniates relates that mosaics were put up that depicted scenes of the hunt together with the ‘common feasting on [the hunted] game, with Andronikos cutting up deer meat or pieces of wild boar with his own hands and carefully roasting them over the fire’.50 The prominence of the theme of the heroic hunter on ceramic tableware raises the questions of reality, realism and the ideal. The ceramic tableware proudly proclaims a new ideal of masculinity that rested on military and hunting prowess. How did this speak to their audiences on the one hand, and to Byzantine society more widely on the other? The images of ‘manly men’ on ceramic tableware allude to role models popularised through oral and written versions of epic tales but also imitate textual strategies employed to encourage audiences to imitate these role models. In the twelfth century, Nikephoros Bryennios (c.1081–1136), the husband of Anna Komnene, composed the Material for History, which re-tells the story of the empire in the 1070s but heavily relies on Roman ideals of honour and masculinity and emphasises the increasingly militaristic and aristocratic culture of the period. The performance of history through the oral and written presentation of historical works not only contributed to creating and enacting the cultural memory of an audience and contemporary cultural developments, but also was an attempt 45 B. Hill, Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025–1204: Power, Patronage and Ideology (New York, 1999), 78–9. 46 Patlagean, ‘De la chasse’, 258–9. 47 Liudprand, Retribution, III.25, ed. Squatriti, 120–2; John Kinnamos, History, ed. Brand, 266; Littlewood, ‘Gardens of the palaces’, 36. 48 Kazhdan and Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture, 110. 49 Theodore Prodromos, Poem 25.15–20, 30.276–86, 44.63–81, ed. Hörandner, 336, 356–7, 407–8; A. Kazhdan and G. Constable, People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington, DC, 1982), 67. 50 Choniates, Chronographia, IV.II.45–60, ed. van Dieten, 333, tr. Magoulias, 184.

Manly Men, Heroic Hunters  115 to change and correct the behaviour of the audience through the presentation of models, often moralised, for imitation.51 The ceramic vessels decorated with hunters and heroes take part in this practice, highlighting the permeability between text and image in the middle Byzantine period. The images on the bowls and plates are more than illustrations to popular stories that their audience would have been familiar with. They encourage their viewers to explore, visually and orally, the models of behaviour displayed and invite them to imitate the models that the vessels presented. Viewers could bring their pre-existing knowledge and understanding of different stories of heroism both real and fictional and use these to discuss and debate the meaning of an image. Textual sources from the middle Byzantine empire document this emerging ideal almost exclusively for the realm of the wealthy and powerful, in texts written for and about emperors and by their wider social and familial circles. The imagery of hunting on ceramic tableware specifically and the material’s appearance and iconography more generally has been attributed by scholars to the objects illustrating or imitating the fashions of nobility.52 This interpretation reduces objects of ceramic tableware to passive reflections of the trends being shaped by the upper classes, from where – this interpretative framework implies – artistic, cultural and intellectual developments trickled down to those less wealthy. This denies both the objects and their consumers of their agency and loses sight of the artistic skill and technological know-how involved in ceramic production and the active role of this type of material culture in shaping society. Depictions of dragon-slayers, the hunt and animal conflicts feature prominently on ceramic tableware, corresponding to the themes most frequently depicted on middle Byzantine clay bowls and plates. The prominence of this type of imagery on ceramic tableware that presents notable affinities with ideals and themes central to the articulation and display of the identity of nobility, from the hunt as a preparation for war and the defeat of formidable enemies to symbolisms of triumph and superiority. The developments that objects of tableware took part in spread widely in geographical as well as socio-economic terms and were consumed through material culture. The popularity of such themes on items of metalware such as the set of plates associated with the proedros Constantine the Alan makes sense: if the individual looking at a precious metal vessel was wealthy and powerful, as the relative expense of a metal vessel displaying such imagery suggests, maybe even a member of the military elite, then they would see

51 L. Neville, Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios (Cambridge, 2012), 34, 89. 52 J. Vroom, ‘Piecing together the past. Survey pottery and deserted settlements in medieval Boeotia (Greece)’, in K. Belke, F. Hild, J. Koder and P. Soustal (ed.), Byzanz als Raum. Zu Methoden und Inhalten der historischen Geographie des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für die TIB, 7 (2000), 245–60, 257; K. Dark, Byzantine Pottery (Gloucestershire, Charleston, Joué-lès-Tours and Erfurt, 2001), 72, 77, 101; Blackman and Redford, ‘Neutron activation analysis’, 85, 92, 105; S. Redford, ‘On sāqīs and ceramics: systems of representation in the northeast Mediterranean’, in D. Weiss and L. Mahoney (ed.), France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades (Baltimore, MA, 2004), 282–312; François, Vaisselle de terre, 156.

116  Manly Men, Heroic Hunters their own ideals reiterated in the images on the vessels. But in addition to being highly appreciated and expensive, and by extension seen in upper-class environments, the same images of military and heroic men seem to have had significant and enduring popularity across the breadth of ceramic tableware and social strata. The individuals owning ceramic tableware depicting imagery of hunter and hunted not only participated in the trends of the upper classes but played an active role in shaping and spreading them. The pervasive imagery of dragon-slayers, hunters and hunting game on ceramic vessels raises questions of the socio-economic relevance of such imagery and the role of ceramic tableware in reversing previously held assumptions about Byzantine society. Far from only passively copying ideas and developments that stemmed from other areas of Byzantine life or from the upper tiers of Byzantine society, ceramic plates and bowls actively participate in the former. Often, metal tableware is assumed to inform imitation through ceramics, but the date, quality and quantity of surviving material puts this into question. Precious metal objects such as the silver and silver-gilt plates depicting hunters were owned by wealthier individuals, though even that group in itself represents a spectrum of cost and quality. A champlevé ceramic plate from Corinth represents a very sophisticated version of the theme of the hero and the dragon-snake; the plate from the Menil Collection made in mainland Greece in contrast is very rudimentary in its depiction of a similar scene. Ceramic and metal tableware of the eleventh and twelfth centuries studied in this chapter represents different centres of production and different standards of production, but the same interests. The values that they formulate in their imagery were held widely across Byzantine society, though their fulfilment for many may have been aspirational rather than attainable. As such, the vessels play an important part in the construction of identity both real and desired. Ceramic tableware as a result of the cost spectrum that it represents would have been viewed in the houses of lower-class individuals, who may not have been able to afford to eat meat most if not all of the time.53 Why are these individuals interested in looking at pictures of heroes and hunters and the animal hunt? And what does this tell us about the ceramics? Perhaps there was a divergence in what the imagery on the tableware claimed about the host and the food served, and the unique reality in which each vessel was viewed. While bowls represented hares, deer and other game, the food served may have been purely vegetarian, harvested in the host’s gardens rather

53 C. Bourbou and S. Garvie-Lok, ‘Bread, oil, wine, and milk: feeding infants and adults in Byzantine Greece’, Archaeodiet in the Greek World: Dietary Reconstruction from Stable Isotope Analysis Hesperia Supplements, 49 (2015), 171–94, 174; J. Koder, ‘Stew and salted meat – opulent normality in the diet of everyday?’, in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, 59–72, 71; J. Koder, ‘Fresh vegetables for the capital’, in C. Mango and G. Dagron (ed.), Constantinople and its Hinterland: Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, April 1993, SPBS, 3 (Aldershot, 1995), 49–56, 49; M. Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle: propriété et exploitation du sol (Paris, 1992), 39; see also A. Laiou (ed.), The Economic History of Byzantium: from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, DOS, 39 (Washington, DC, 2002).

Manly Men, Heroic Hunters  117 than heroically hunted in the wilds.54 While a plate showed a hero and a hunter, the host may have been a fat old man. The tension between the imagery on items of tableware and the context in which they were viewed may have been explored self-consciously by their owners and viewers, to different effects – from comedy and satire to embarrassment and self-edification.55 Examining Byzantine ceramics from the eleventh and twelfth centuries reveals the changing structure and norms of Byzantine society at the time. Although ­ideals of physical beauty remained largely constant throughout the Byzantine middle ages, the notion of the perfect man or perfect manly behaviour underwent a significant transformation. Until the tenth century, it was subdued, orderly, restrained and moderate behaviour that was valorised in both holy and secular men. From the eleventh century, possibly prompted by the rise of a military aristocracy in the Byzantine provinces, an active life was increasingly stressed as a virtue and ideal, with the hunt and military exploits presented as particularly heroic. This is explored in official literature, including histories of the Byzantine empire and texts written for the emperor; in the newly emerging vernacular genre of stories such as that of Digenes Akrites; and in the art of the period. The art of the period played an important role in fostering this new ideal, which is expressed on ivories and in enamels for example. But in addition to occurring on these luxury forms of art, images of hunters and military men, shown slaying dragons, snakes, lions and other beasts, appear in the imagery of a significant proportion of surviving ceramic tableware. Partly as a result of the volume in which ceramics survive, this is actually the largest group of material depicting such scenes. The frequent appearance of these kinds of images on ceramics reveal, on the one hand, that the new ideal of masculinity was not limited to one social class, but instead was immensely popular across the empire, both in terms of geographical and socio-economic spread. On the other hand, it further highlights the close connection in Byzantium between text and image, with developments in one medium being presented in the other, using similar strategies and pursuing similar aims.

54 On vegetable consumption and cultivation, see J. Koder, Gemüse in Byzanz: Die Versorgung Konstantinopels mit Frischgemüse im Lichte der Geoponika, Byzantinische Geschichtsschreiber. Ergänzungsband, 3 (Vienna, 1993); Koder, ‘Fresh vegetables’; Koder, ‘Stew and salted meat’, 67–9; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre. 55 On Byzantine satire, see P. Marciniak and I. Nilsson (ed.), Satire in the Middle Byzantine Period: The Golden Age of Laughter? (Leiden and Boston, 2021).

6

The Display of Triumph or: How a Plate Can Make You Powerful

Byzantine households across the social spectrum enjoyed looking at images of heroic men while seated at the dining table. Objects of ceramic and metal tableware are prolific in depicting the new male ideal of the powerful fighter and successful hunter, highlighting its wideheld appeal. And yet, as the works by contemporary rhetors that represent the emperor as the embodiment of the new ideal highlight, the latter spoke to the imperial and wealthier circles in particular.1 It was these images that played an integral role in displays of power and triumph, so crucial to the identity of the upper classes, that took place in banqueting contexts. While the unnamed representations of male warriors may have been a blunt tool in this process, more nuanced and subtly encoded messages were constructed through more pointed iconographies that depicted specific historic and fictional events. Subjects represented on the art of dining included the victorious campaigns of emperors, with the decorated tableware tactically deployed to further the humiliation of those they had vanquished. The practice of tableware representing imperial triumphs reaches back to late antiquity, where Justin II (r. 565–578) served food to the guests at his coronation banquet on golden plates depicting Justinian’s military victory over the Vandals.2 The material properties of the art of dining including the weight and colour of precious metal were used to further communicate the might of an object’s owner in combination with the way in which the artwork was presented to its viewers and users. Liudprand of Cremona’s description of a banquet held at the court of Constantine VII in 949 or 950 reveals the use of large silver and gold vessels for the serving of food in the Byzantine imperial palace.3 These showpieces, he

1 For a discussion of the Byzantine aristocracy, including its definition, (self-)representation and activities, see M. Grünbart, Inszenierung und Repräsentation der byzantinischen Aristokratie vom 10. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften, 82 (Paderborn, 2015). 2 S. Malmberg, ‘Dazzling dining: banquets as an expression of imperial legitimacy’, in L. Brubaker and K. Linardou (ed.), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, SPBS, 13 (Aldershot, 2007), 75–92, 77. 3 Liudprand of Cremona, Antapodosis VI.8.148: ‘[Q]uibus in diebus non argenteis, sed aureis tantum vasis ministratur. Post cibum autem aureis vasis tribus sunt poma delata, quae ob immensum pondus non hominum manibus, sed purpura textis vehiculis sunt allata. Apponuntur autem duo hoc in mensa modo. Per foramina laquearis tres sunt funes pellibus deauratis tecti cum anulis depositi aureis, qui DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359-7

The Display of Triumph  119 reports, were so large and heavy that they need to be lifted by several men at once.4 Silver and gold tableware was used if not regularly then certainly on occasions where it mattered to impress visitors. For example, silver tableware with relief decoration was used during the reception of ambassadors from Tarsus in the Triklinos of Justinian as The Book of Ceremonies records.5 Chronicles by Byzantine historians and visitors to the empire and texts inventorying the household contents and the wills of Byzantine individuals show that the use of gold, silver and copper tableware was not limited to the imperial household but also popular in the houses of the rich and powerful.6 The relative frequency with which precious metal tableware is mentioned in historical sources is not reflected by material remains – probably because the bullion value of metal tableware meant that vessels were melted down when they had outlasted their usefulness and then re-shaped into something else. While reports such as Liudprand’s stress the scale and weight of precious metal vessels, they rarely comment in detail if at all on the vessels’ appearance or their iconography. While this suggests that gold and silver tableware was appreciated mainly for its costly material as a way to display wealth and status, material and textual evidence demonstrates that the imagery on tableware played a central role in articulating messages of triumph and power, equally as if not more important than the material splendour of the object itself. A popular subject that connoted triumph, and specifically imperial power, was that of Alexander the Great, a triumphal ruler associated through visual and textual culture with the figure of the emperor. Episodes from the life of Alexander are shown on a silver-gilt bowl now in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, formerly in the collections of the Russian émigré A.P. Basilevsky. The depictions of and allusions to Alexander the

ansis, quae in scutulis prominent, positi, adiuvantibus inferius quattuor aut eo amplius hominus per vertibile, quod supra laquea est, ergalium in mensam subvehuntur eodemque modo deponuntur’; ed. tr. P. Squatriti, The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Washington, DC, 2007), 199. 4 Late antique plates and bowls made of silver were on display in the imperial palace during the middle Byzantine period, the use of precious metal vessels for eating and drinking is also recorded. Constantine Porphyrogennetos, De thematibus, I.15–16, ed. A. Pertusi, Constantino Porfirogenito De thematibus: introduzione, testo critic, commento, Studi e testi, 160 (Vatican City, 1952), 61–2; Constantine Porphyrogennetos, De cerimoniis, II.13, ed. J.J. Reiske, Constantini Porphyrogeniti imperatoris de cerimoniis aulae byzantinae libri duo, CSHB (Bonn 1829–1830, repr. Berlin, 2021), 587, ed. tr. A. Moffatt and M. Tall, Constantine Porphyrogennetos: The Book of Ceremonies, ByzAus, 18 (Canberra, 2012), vol. 2, 560; N. Oikonomides, Les listes de préséance byzantines des IXe et Xe siècles (Paris, 1972), 274–5 and n. 43; C. Mango, ‘The palace of Marina, the poet Palladas and the Bath of Leo VI’, in E. Kypraiou (ed.), Ευφρόσυνον: αφιέρομα στον Μανόλη Χατζάδακη, Δημοσιεύματα του Αρχαιολογικού Δελτίου, 46, I (Athens, 1991), 321–30, 330. 5 Constantine Porphyrogennetos, De cerimoniis, II.15, ed Reiske, 592, ed. tr. Moffatt and Tall, vol. 2, 582. Heavy bowls made of gold and adorned with gemstones were used for the washing of hands in the palace, see Oikonomides, Listes, 277; J. Ebersolt, Les arts somptuaires de Byzance (Paris, 1923), 68–9. 6 N. Oikonomides, ‘The contents of the Byzantine house from the eleventh to the fifteenth century’, DOP, 44 (1990), 205–14; J. Lefort, N. Oikonomides and D. Papachryssantou, Actes d’Iviron II: du milieu du XIe siècle à 1204, Archives de l’Athos, 16 (Paris, 1990), 170–5, n. 47; M. Mundell Mango, ‘From “glittering sideboard” to table: silver in the well-appointed triclinium’, in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, 127–61; E. Malamut, ‘Chypre au XIIe siècle’, Επετηρίδα, 36, 2011–12 (2013), 9–50, 20, 22.

120  The Display of Triumph Great on the vessel are accompanied by scenes of armed conflict and images that could be interpreted as representations of leisure and pleasure. Re-contextualising these depictions of pleasure through contemporary discourse and art reveals that they held an alternative meaning that encoded nuances of power and triumph. Four epigraphic poems preserved in a manuscript dating to Manuel I Komnenos’s reign (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venice, MS Marcianus Graecus 524, c.1165) were composed for inscription on golden and silver vessels that depicted the emperor’s successful military campaigns against Hungary and Iconium.7 Two, commissioned by the sebastos Constantine Kalamanos and presented to Manuel, perhaps during a triumphal procession marking the emperor’s return from the expeditions depicted, showed ‘various victories (…) against the barbarians in Hungary’.8 A golden vessel depicted Manuel’s defeat of the sultan and a golden lid the successful expedition against Iconium, with the Persian Chief ‘avoiding the gates of Ikonion and escaping to the ravines, to the foothills of the mountains’ and his army as ‘having thrown [themselves] on the ground’.9 The sultan depicted on the golden vessel is not named but may have been Kılıç Arslan II, the Seljuk sultan of Rum, or his father Masud I (r. 1116–1156).10 The epigram on the golden vessel explicitly parallels Manuel’s victory against the sultan to the hunt: σκεύους δὲ τούτου κυκλόθεν διεγράφη ὁ πορφυραυγὴς οὗτος αὐσονοκράτωρ, φοβῶν, διώκων καὶ κατὰ κράτος τρἐπων   7 Venice Marciana MS gr. 524, nos. 315 and 333.   8 MS Marc gr. 524, nos. 115, 130; F. Spingou, ‘Words and artworks in the twelfth century and beyond: the thirteenth-century manuscript Marcianus gr. 524 and the twelfth-century dedicatory epigrams on works of art’ (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2012), v, 79. Ἐπὶ πατελίῳ χρυςῷ γεγονότι παρά τοῦ σεβαστοῦ τοῦ Καλαμάνου καὶ δοθέντι τῷ ἁγίῳ ἡμῶν βασιλεῖ ὅπερ εἶχεν εἰκονισμένα διάφορα κατὰ τὴν Οὐγγρίαν τρόπαια Φωνὴν μὲν Ἴστρος ἐκ Δαυὶδ προσλαμβάνων κρἀζει Μανουὴλ αὐτάνακτος τὸ κράτος. Ἴστρου δὲ τύπον ἐν κρατῆρι χρυσέῳ Γράψας σεβαστός δουκόπαις Καλαμάνος, έκ παιονικῶν ῥηγικῶν ῥιζωμάτων, καὶ τας ἐπ` αὐτῷ μυριανδραγαθίας φωνὴν ἀνυψοῦν χρυσέαν τοῦτον θέλει καὶ τῷ βασιλεῖ δουλικὸν δῶρον φέρει. The expedition referred to is probably that of 1151–2, described in John Kinnamos, History, 117–8, ed. A. Meineke, Ioannis Cinnami epitome rerum ab Ioanne et Alexio Comnenis gestarum (Bonn, 1836), tr. C.M. Brand, Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies, 95 (New York 1976), 93–4. See also F. Chalandon, Les Comnènes: études sur l’empire byzantin aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 2 (Paris, 1912), 406–7; P. Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge, 1997), 55–6, 240.   9 Cod. Marc. Gr. 254, nos. 354, 372.5–8; Spingou, ‘Words and artworks’, 183. See also P. Magdalino and R. Nelson, ‘The emperor in Byzantine art of the twelfth century’, ByzF, 8 (1982), 123–84, 132–5; Kinnamos, Deeds, Ch. 3, 206–7, tr. Brand, 156–7. 10 Foteini Spingou thinks it was Kılıç Arslan, Paul Magdalino and Cyril Mango that it was Masud. See Spingou, ‘Words and artworks’; Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I, 473, 475; C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (London, 1986), 227–8.

The Display of Triumph  121 τὸν ἀρχιπέρσην πρὸς μάχην ὡπλισμένον σὺν μυρίαις φάλαγξιν Ἰκονιέων καὶ πῶς, άμέτροις ἐντυχὼν χιλιἀσι βουνῶν φαράγγων ἀφανῶς ἀνηγμέναις, μονώτατος διεῖλε τὴν ὁμαιχμίαν ἐκεῖ μὲν ἔνθεν ἀνδρικῶς δόρυ στρέφων, τὸν χρυςὸν οὕτω ταῦτα χρυσοῦσι πλέον. depicted on the circumference of this vessel was this purple-gleaming Emperor of the Ausonians, threatening, chasing, and routing by all his force the chief of the Persians, who was armed in order to fight, along with his innumerable columns of men from Ikonion. How when he met the uncountable men, which had been led up from the ravines of mountains, he, alone, destroyed their troops, just by rolling the spear in a manly way in all directions; in this way, these [depictions] make even gold more golden.11 While preparing a male individual for war, the hunt was an act of valour that demonstrated power, particularly imperial power. Myths of successful hunts were used to justify imperial rule, as in the case of Basil I, and to underline the emperor’s virility and fitness to rule.12 Liudprand attributed Romanos I Lekapenos’s rise to power to his single-handed slaying of a lion, and John Kinnamos claimed that Manuel I ‘had fought more wild beasts than any man of whom I have ever heard’.13 The emperor was seen as a symbolic hunter, in particular during the Komnenian period, which witnessed a revived concern with blood sport and a militarisation of the public image along with the ideal male character of the noble warrior.14 Not only were descriptions of the chase composed by various writers, hunting motifs were also included in imperial symbolism. Prodromos regarded the emperor not only as an ideal warrior but also as an ideal hunter.15 In his account of the decoration of the palace erected by Andronikos I at the church of the Forty Martyrs in Constantinople, Choniates relates, mosaics were put up that depicted scenes of the hunt together with the ‘common feasting on [the hunted] game, with Andronikos cutting up deer meat or pieces of wild boar with his own hands and carefully

11 MS Marc gr. 254, fol. 180r, no. 353, v.7–16, tr. Spingou, ‘Words and artworks’, 244; Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 228. 12 E. Patlagean, ‘De la chasse et du souverain‘, DOP, 46 (1992), 257–63, 258–9. 13 Liudprand, Retribution, III.25, ed. Squatriti, 120–22; Kinnamos, History, tr. Brand, 266; A. Littlewood, ‘Gardens of the palaces’, in H. Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204 (Washington, DC, 1997), 13–38, 36. 14 A. Kazhdan and A. Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (London, 1985), 110. 15 Theodore Prodromos, Poems 4.81–90, 11.99–100, 25.15–25, 30.276–86, 44.63–81, ed. W. Hörandner, Theodoros Prodromos: Historische Gedichte, Text und Kommentar, WByzSt, 11 (Vienna, 1974), 203, 256, 336, 356, 407–8; A. Kazhdan and G. Constable, People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington, DC, 1982), 67.

122  The Display of Triumph roasting them over the fire’.16 The invocation of this trope of imperial power on the vessel representing Manuel’s triumph against a sultan indicates that one of the object’s purposes was to reaffirm the glory of the emperor at banquets held in the imperial palace.17 Tableware depicting the military victories of the ruling emperor was presented to foreign visitors to articulate the emperor’s power and the hierarchical ­relationship between host and guest.18 In the early twelfth century Kaykhusraw I (r. 1195–1199 and 1205–1211), the youngest son of Kılıç Arslan II, visited the court of Alexios III Angelos (r. 1195–1203). His stay is recorded by the contemporary historiographer Ibn Bībī, who among anecdotes of Kaykhusraw’s quarrels at the court and the list of precious presents lavished on the sultan reports on a banquet held by the emperor: That night until daybreak they occupied themselves with pleasures and delights and enjoyed lute and wine until the dawn […]. When the sultan left for his dwelling and rested, the emperor ordered the treasurer to bring to the banquet chamber of the sultan’s palace the collection of various banquet items which his ancestors had preserved and decorated with gold and jewelry: the gold and silver drinking vessels and goblets, filled with excellent wines, and fruits, and sweetmeats, as numerous as [the stars in] the Pleiades. And that day they remained there, neither living nor dead because of the pleasantries of the table, so that they were spilling wine from their cups.19 The splendour of the food and drink served is enhanced and even outdone by the serving vessels, with the palace making a concerted effort to use the contents of its treasury to display the imperial court’s ancestry and wealth. Reports by Liudprand and other visitors to the court show that this practice was in use throughout the middle Byzantine period. Around forty years prior to Kaykhusraw’s stay in Constantinople, his father the sultan Kılıç Arslan II arrived in the capital in 1161 to plead for Manuel’s assistance in defending his territory. On this occasion, the emperor seized his chance of ‘charming the money-loving barbarian with gratifying entertainment’ and to attempt a strengthening of the relationship between Byzantium and the Sultanate of Rum.20 The reception of the sultan was a vivid demonstration of Manuel’s power and employed symbolic language that expressed the sultan’s 16 Niketas Choniates, Chronographia, IV.II.45–60, ed. J.L. van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae Historia, CFHB, 11 (Berlin, 1975), 333, tr. H. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, Byzantine Texts in Translation (Detroit, MI, 1984), 184. 17 For an overview of those invited to imperial banquets, see Oikonomides, Listes. 18 On the ‘family of kings’ and the use of material culture in constructing and displaying relationships between rulers, see C. Hilsdale, ‘The social life of the Byzantine gift: the Royal Crown of Hungary re-invented’, AH, 31.5 (2008), 602–31. 19 Ibn-i Bîbî, El-Evâmirü’l-` Alâ’iyye fî’l-umûri’l-` Alâ’iyye, ed. N. Lugal and A.S. Erzi (Ankara, 1957), 82, tr. D. Korobeinikov, ‘A sultan in Constantinople: the feasts of Ghiyāt al-Dīn Kay-Khusraw I’, in Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, ed. Brubaker and Linardou, 93–108, 97. 20 Kinnamos, History, 204–7; Choniates, Chronographia, III.3.118, tr. Magoulias, 67; see also Korobeinikov, ‘A sultan in Constantinople’; Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I, 77.

The Display of Triumph  123 position as an inferior petitioner. After receiving the sultan with a ceremony during which he was forced to sit on a low chair next to the emperor’s throne – a clear visual message about their respective places within the hierarchy of power, despite their spatial proximity – the emperor ‘absolutely gorged the man in spectacles in the hippodrome’ and entertained Kılıç Arslan II with ‘magnificent banquets’.21 Kılıç Arslan’s stay in Constantinople lasted eighty days and twice a day he was sent his food on gold and silver plates, Michael the Syrian reports. On the last day of his stay, the emperor and the sultan dined together and the meal concluded with the emperor presenting the sultan with all of the golden plates off which he had eaten during his stay.22 These plates were probably similar to the one showing the victories of Manuel over the sultan of Iconium, that is Kılıç Arslan or his father Masud.23 If this was the case, Kılıç Arslan was forced to contemplate during every meal taken at the imperial palace a different humiliation of his family or his people, the Seljuk Turks, by the Byzantines and be reminded of the superior military power of his hosts. As such, the images representing the triumphs of the Byzantine ruler were used to drive home the humiliation of those he defeated.24 This messaging extended from the plates to the walls, with visitors at imperial banquets surrounded by images of the military glory of the ruler. For example, Manuel constructed a triklinos in the Great Palace and decorated it with mosaics depicting his victories. The banqueting hall decorated with Manuel’s victories was certainly complete by 1166; if it was already built by the early 1160s, it could have served as the scene for the lavish feasts with which Manuel attempted to impress the visiting sultan.25 The triumphal imagery decorating the banqueting hall would have reiterated visually the relationship between the two rulers, with the petitioner Kılıç Arslan II in the inferior position and Manuel as the generous host whose wrath one would not wish to attract in order to avoid the same fate as the defeated figures depicted.26

21 Choniates, Chronographia, II.III.119, tr. Magoulias, 67. 22 Magdalino and Nelson, ‘Emperor in Byzantine art’, 132–5; Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 76–7, 118, 242. 23 Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I, 473, 475. 24 H. Maguire and E. Dauterman Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 57. On depictions of imperial triumphs in private residences, churches, monasteries and towns, see R.P. Schmitz (ed. tr.), Benjamin von Tudela: Buch der Reisen (Sefär ha-Massa’ot), Judentum und Umwelt, 22 (Bern, 1988), 11; Cod. Marc. Gr. 524, fol. 108r, tr. Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 227; Euthymios Malakes, ‘Oration to the emperor Manuel Komnenos, delivered when the sultan came to Constantinople’, ed. A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Noctes Petropolitanae, Subsidia Byzantina, 21 (St Petersburg, 1913, repr. Leipzig, 1976), 173.7–16; tr. Magdalino and Nelson, ‘Emperor in Byzantine art’, 132. 25 Magdalino and Nelson, ‘Emperor in Byzantine art’, 134. 26 Another banqueting or reception hall that some scholars think might have been built specifically for or around the time of the visit of Kılıç Arslan II is the Mouchroutas Hall, described by Nicholas Mesarites. This hall was an Islamicising building decorated with ‘Persian’ images and possibly with princely cycle imagery, typically depicting courtly figures merrymaking. This would have reflected the nature of the entertainment experienced inside the Hall, and offered an alternative and contrasting display of power, particularly to an Islamic ruler, to the other banqueting halls of the palace; A. Heisenberg (ed.), Nikolaos Mesarites: Die Palastrevolution des Johannes Komnenos (Würzburg,

124  The Display of Triumph Another visitor to the emperor’s court forced to contemplate military losses to the Byzantine ruler was the župan of Serbia Stefan Nemanja (r. 1166–1196). In a speech written around 1174 and addressed to Manuel, Eustathios of Thessalonike recalls Nemanja’s visit to Constantinople following his defeat by Manuel in 1172, describing Nemanja’s confrontation with images of imperial victory: Περιέρχεται τῇ θέᾳ καὶ ποικίλματα ἐκεῖνα, ὅσα ζωγράφων χεῖρες εἰς μνήμην δαιδάλλουσι, τά τε ἄλλα, καὶ τὰ καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸν, ὁτὲ μὲν ἐρεθίζοντα τὸ περὶ αὐτὸν ἔθνος εἰς ἐπανάστασιν, ἄλλοθι δὲ ὁλίτην, ἱππότην, ἑτέρωθι δὲ τὴν χεῖρα ξίφους ἄψασθαι πλησιάζοντα, πολλαχοῦ δὲ καὶ στρατὸν ἐξ ἐμφανοῦς τάττοντα, καὶ λόχους καθιζοντα, καὶ τέλεσει νικώμενον, καὶ φυγῆς ἐμπιπλῶντα τήν τε πεδιάδα, καὶ ὅση ἀπόκροτος, καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσι δουλούμενον. He surveys with his eyes those decorations that represent your feats, cunningly wrought for the sake of remembrance by the hands of painters – those that concerned himself as well as the other [paintings]. Here [he was represented] arousing his people to rebellion, elsewhere a man-at-arms or a horseman, elsewhere placing his hand upon his sword, repeatedly ranging his army in the open, planting ambuscades, being defeated by your forces, (…) and finally being enslaved.27 To round off the ritual degradation that he is suffering, Nemanja is forced to admit that he ‘agrees with everything and approves of the visual feast’; the only criticism that he has to offer is that the painter has not labelled him as a ‘slave’ in the scenes of triumph. Together with the depiction of the emperors’ victories on the decorated dishes off which visitors at the palace may have consumed their food, guests dining in the imperial palaces would have been surrounded by images of the triumph of the emperor wherever they looked – on the walls, in the presentation of the emperor and even on their tables. In the middle Byzantine empire, feasting and the art involved in and surrounding banquets took on an ideological dimension by conveying messages of triumph. Ritual humiliation including that of diplomatic visitors, vanquished enemies and even Byzantine individuals was not unusual at the imperial court. The presentation of gifts that depicted the recipient’s ignominy, whether in

1907), Ch. 27–8; Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 228–9; A. Walker, The Emperor and the World: Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Middle Byzantine Imperial Power, Ninth to Thirteenth Centuries C.E. (Cambridge, 2012), 146–9; P. Magdalino, ‘Manuel Komnenos and the Great Palace’, BMGS, 4 (1978), 101–15; L.-A. Hunt ‘Comnenian aristocratic palace decoration, description and Islamic connexions’, in M. Angold (ed.), The Byzantine Aristocracy IX to XIII Centuries, BAR International Series, 221 (Oxford, 1984), 138–56, 141–2; N. Asutay-Effenberger, ‘“Muchrutas.” Der selschukische Schaupavillon im Großen Palast von Konstantinopel’, Byz, 74.2 (2004), 313–29. 27 Eustathios of Thessalonike, Speech addressed to the Emperor Manuel, T.L.F. Tafel (ed.), Eustathii metropolitae Thessalonicensis opuscula (Frankfurt am Main, 1832), 419; tr. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 225.

The Display of Triumph  125 literal or analogical terms, fed into this practice.28 Precious metal t­ ableware played an important role in this process of visualising imperial military victory, with gold considered a particularly suitable metal to depict imperial feats; perhaps in an act of analogy since, as epigrams suggest, the emperor ‘seems as if he is made of gold’.29 The precious metal tableware from the imperial court, described in epigrams and historical accounts, has been lost. Surviving artworks made of precious and semi-precious metal however reveal that, despite the close association between the emperor and the material of gold, the depiction of triumphal and military imagery was not restricted to the imperial sphere.30 The display of power and even violence was shared by plates, cups and bowls owned by the well-to-do (as indicated by the vessels’ material, rather than by any clues in their appearance about who owned them).31 A silver-gilt bulbous vessel from the Basilevsky collection shows individual relief figures placed under colonnaded arches, running around the body of the bowl (fig. 6.1). From the left to the right, beginning with a badly damaged panel, the frieze continues with a partially missing depiction of a frontally posed man in imperial dress, followed by a man wrestling with a lion, a man playing a string instrument, an armed and mounted figure, another rider, pointing his bow towards the rider behind him, a female dancer, a second man wrestling with a lion, a male musician and two medallions that each represent a male individual armed with a sword. The lower half of the vessel is badly damaged, but probably once showed a second frieze of images. The inside of the silver-gilt bowl is decorated with an engraved image of two griffins. The vignettes on the outside of the object do not derive from a single narrative, but instead combine almost generic images connoting wealth and leisure with episodes from well-known literary works and depictions of battle. Some of the iconographic elements pertaining to the visual vocabulary of fight and flight present on this vessel are not unique to it. They are also featured on other middle Byzantine metal vessels: the mounted riders both looking forwards and turning back can be found in the engraved decoration on the outside of the dishes from Vilgort and Chernihiv for example.32 While the figures on the vessel from the Basilevsky collection are not identified by inscriptions and their identities are therefore inconclusive, there are two picture fields whose main character can be recognised as a result of the images’ iconographic components. A fragmented panel shows a male figure from the waist upwards, posing frontally and holding up two staff-like objects. The figure is wearing a crown and a loros adorned with large

28 Spingou, ‘Words and artworks’, 293. Spingou suggested that what the epigram describes is not necessarily what is depicted on the object. 29 Cod Marc Gr 254 no. 325, 1–2; no. 344, 3; no. 354, 5; no. 116/340, 3 and 7; Spingou, ‘Words and artworks’, 225. 30 Cod. Marc. Gr. 254, fol. 180r; tr. Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 228. 31 On a cup from the Chungul Kurgan, see W. Woodfin, ‘Within a budding grove: dancers, gardens, and the enamel cup from the Chungul Kurgan’, ArtB, 98.2 (2016), 151–80. 32 The ‘Parthian shot’ is a pre-Sasanian motif, frequently employed by Sasanians in royal imagery, particularly in metalwork depicting the royal hunt; a Byzantine silk fragment of c.800–50 shows hunters in this pose. Walker, The Emperor and the World, 28.

126  The Display of Triumph

Figure 6.1 Bowl from the Basilevsky Collection, 1100–1200. The State Hermitage ­Museum, St Petersburg.

gems, as well as a collar worn on top of the imperial gem-encrusted garment. The representations of male figures in imperial dress have been identified as representations of the Flight or Ascension of Alexander the Great.33 Representations of and allusions to Alexander the Great and his flight to the heavens are multiplied on the vessel: one of the panels shows a male figure clothed in imperial dress and holding a staff, seated on a griffin – probably another way of depicting the same subject matter, the Ascension of Alexander. Griffins, the creatures essential to Alexander’s success in ascending to the heavens, are depicted on the body of the bowl and a pair of prancing griffins is represented inside of the vessel, incised at its heart.34

33 V.P. Darkevich, Светское искусство Византии: Произведения византийского художественного ремесла в Восточной Европе X–XIII века (Moscow, 1975), 63; on the depiction of Alexander the Great in medieval art, mainly western, see V. Schmidt, A Legend and Its Image: The Aerial Flight of Alexander the Great in Medieval Art (Groningen, 1995). For parallels, see the stone relief on the façade of San Marco in Venice, c. 1080; the Innsbruck dish; and the ivory casket in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt. See H. Belting, ‘Eine Gruppe Konstantinopler Reliefs aus dem 11. Jahrhundert’, Pantheon, 30 (1972), 263–71, 267; T. Steppan, ‘The Artukid Bowl: courtly art in the middle Byzantine period and its relation to the Islamic East’, in O.Z. Pevny (ed.), Perceptions of Byzantium and Its Neighbors (843–1261), The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia (New York, 2000), 84–101, 97; S. Redford, ‘How Islamic is it? The Innsbruck Plate and its setting’, Muqarnas, 7 (1990), 119–35. 34 Darkevich, Светское искусство, 62, fig. 85.

The Display of Triumph  127 The flight of Alexander the Great represents the culminating moment of the Alexander Romance, a late antique text attributed to Pseudo-Callisthenes that enjoyed enduring popularity in Byzantium.35 It was probably composed in its earliest form in the second or third century BC and rewritten and expanded several times in antiquity. The oldest Byzantine recension of the Greek text is preserved in an eleventh-century manuscript, Par. Gr. 1711 siglum A, and many later Byzantine copies survive.36 The Romance tells the story of the exploits of Alexander the Great – some real and historical, others fictional and fantastical. It begins with the conception and childhood of Alexander, then covers his military exploits. The Romance tells of how, after defeating Darius, Alexander travelled to strange regions and encountered mysterious beasts, trees and stones. After Alexander went further than any human being before him, he began to wonder whether he had truly reached the end of the world or whether there was more to see. Keen to ‘discover the truth’, Alexander ordered his companions to capture two of the large, strong but tame birds – griffins – that lived where he and his retinue had set up camp. According to the text, ‘[s]ome of the soldiers climbed on to their backs, hung on tightly, and flew off’. The bowl’s depiction of a male figure on the back of a griffin could be a representation of this passage of the Romance, showing the prelude to the tamed griffins being chained to Alexander’s chariot, or an ‘abbreviated’ version of the Flight of Alexander. In the passage from the novel, the Macedonian ruler goes on to describe how he achieved the beasts’ submission to his will: he left the griffins without food for three days, after which he tied them to a yoke attached to his chariot. Then, he climbed into the vehicle and taunted the two creatures with ‘two spears, each about ten feet long and with a horse’s liver fixed to the point. At once the birds soared up to seize the livers, and I rose up with them into the air, until I thought I must be close to the sky’.37 However, once Alexander has alighted he is ‘admonished by Providence’ and scolded for attempting the impossible, exploring both earth and the heavens. Having to recognise the limitations of his powers and mortality, Alexander returns to earth. The popularity of the Alexander Romance in Byzantium is reflected by the numerous depictions of episodes from the tale, and scenes from the novel found their way into later manuscripts. The eleventh-century Venice Kynegetika includes representations of three episodes from the Romance: Alexander bringing the horse Bucephalus to Philip, Bucephalus imprisoned and Alexander chasing Darius.38 But the scene most frequently depicted in middle Byzantine art is that of the Ascension

35 There are eighteen Byzantine manuscripts preserving five separate recensions of the Romance, see N. Trahoulia, The Greek Alexander Romance: Venice Hellenic Institute Codex Gr. 5 (Athens, 1997), 42. 36 Pseudo-Callisthenes, Historia Alexandri Magni, ed. L. Bergson, Der griechische Alexanderroman (Stockholm, 1965); S. Gero, ‘The Alexander Legend: some literary gleanings’, DOP, 46 (1992), 83–97, 83; G. Galavaris, ‘Alexander the Great conqueror and captive of death: his various images in Byzantine art’, Revue d’art canadienne, 16.1 (1989), 12–18, 14. 37 Pseudo-Callisthenes, Historia Alexandri Magni, Ch. 41, ed. tr. R. Stoneman, The Greek Alexander Romance (New York, 1991), 123. 38 Galavaris, ‘Alexander the Great’, 14.

128  The Display of Triumph of Alexander – it occurs on tableware, including as a central motif on a twelfthcentury silver-gilt dish in the Hermitage collections, ivory boxes and enamelled plaques, among others. During the medieval Byzantine period, this scene was imbued with two main interpretations: an eschatological and an imperial one. The ‘sanctification’ of Alexander in eschatological literature paralleled the Ascension of Alexander to Biblical episodes such as that of the prophet Elijah and attributed a symbolical meaning to the exploration of the heavens by the king wishing to obtain immortality. By exploring the heavens, the now-Christian hero realises the limitations of his glory before the glory of God, and the Ascension of Alexander serves to remind the king of his humanity.39 The second important association of the image of the Ascension of Alexander is a triumphal, imperial one. Alexander the Great emerged as an imperial archetype during the tenth century. The use of griffins in imperial display is described in the Book of Ceremonies for the reception of ambassadors from the emirate of Tarsus, where each apse of the Chrysotriklinos was hung with imperial insignia and silks including one ornamented with liongriffins.40 A biography of the emperor Basil I claims the emperor as a descendant of Alexander, with this mythological genealogy deployed to bolster the rule of the usurper.41 Basil I himself named his third son Alexander, highlighting the perceived link between the Byzantine emperors and the great Macedonian ruler.42 In the eleventh century, the court historian Michael Psellos in his Chronographia described both Herakles and Alexander as forerunners or prototypes to the emperor, and in her biography of her father Alexios I, Anna Komnene referenced Herakles and Alexander as imperial analogues.43 Also in the twelfth century, the court poet Theodore Prodromos compared the imperial heir, Isaac, to Alexander the Great since, like Alexander, Isaac was said to combine military skill with learning.44 And an anonymous thirteenth-century ekphrasis of a joust held for Manuel I in Antioch in 1159 (MS Vat. Gr. 1409) describes the emperor as adorned with griffins, indicating ‘that the emperor is on high, and elevated; and thundering, as it were, from heaven he performs great and wonderful deeds’, evoking the Ascension of Alexander the

39 Galavaris, ‘Alexander the Great’, 17. 40 Constantine Porphyrogennetos, De cerimoniis, II.15, ed. tr. Moffatt and Tall, 581. 41 Theophanes Contiuatus, Chronographia, V.35, ed. I. Bekker, Theophanes Continuatus, Ioannes Cameniata, Symeon Magister, Georgius Monachus, CSHB, 33 (Bonn, 1838), 216.2–4, ed. tr. I. Ševčenko, Chronographiae quae Theophanes Continuati nomine fertur quo Vita Basilii imperatoris amplectitur, Series Berolinensis, 42 (Berlin and Boston, 2011), 131; Trahoulia, Greek Alexander Romance, 21–2; Patlagean‚ ‘De la chasse’, 258. 42 Walker, Emperor and the World, 125. 43 Psellos, Χρονογραφία, ed. tr. E. Renauld, Psellos: Chronographie ou Histoire d’un siècle de Byzance (976–1077), 2, Livres VI et VII (Paris, 1928), 51–2; Anna Komnene, Ἀλεξιάς, prol. 4,1 (12), I 9,6 (1), I 6 (2), VII 5,3 (39), IX 5,1 (17), XV 7,8 (4), ed. D.R. Reinsch and A. Kambylis, Anna Comnenae Alexias, CFHB, Series Berolinensis, 40, I (Berlin, 2001), 9, 34, 217, 267, 484, tr. E.R.A. Sewter, The Alexiad of the Princess Anna Comnena (Harmondsworth, 1969), 37, 52, 130, 277, 321, 414, 495. 44 Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I, 194; P. Magdalino, ‘Isaac Sebastokrator (III), John Axouch, and a case of mistaken identity’, BMGS, 11 (1987), 207–14, 210–12.

The Display of Triumph  129 Great, the most common Byzantine visual expression of the symbolic ascension of an emperor.45 The imperial clothing worn by Alexander the Great on the Basilevsky vessel and other works of middle Byzantine art reiterated the conceptual link between the emperor and the Macedonian ruler. The iconography of the Ascension of Alexander further visually equated the scene to imperial triumphs and their mise-en-scène. Theodore Prodromos provides an account of the elaborate ceremony of the imperial triumph celebrated by John II in 1133 to mark his recent capture of Kastamon. During the procession the soldiers and the spoils taken during the campaign passed through Constantinople, displaying the victorious outcome of the military excursion.46 A highlight of the procession was the imperial chariot, which featured silvergilt reliefs of lions on its side and two griffins on its front.47 Here, to celebrate his triumph, John not only made use of a chariot but also of the image of two griffins worked into its front, turning the vehicle into the chariot of Alexander pulled by the two beasts. The parallelism between the symbolic language of imperial triumphs and the iconography of the Ascent of Alexander is also present in twelfth-century interpretations of artworks, as in one of the poems in the Marcianus gr. 524 manuscript, describing the decorative scheme of the newly built Kouboukleion at the Blachernae palace: + Τί τὸν μέγαν ἄνακτα τυπῶν ζωγράφε μέσον δ᾽ ἐπ᾽ αὐτῆς τῆς στοᾶς διαγράφεις τὸ πορφυραυγὲς κοσμικοῦ κέντρον κύκλου μακρὰν διïστὰς ἀρετῶν τὰς εἰκόνας ἃς ἐντὸς αὐτὸς ἀδιαστάτας ἔχει; (...) ὑψοῦσιν αὐτὸν μέχρις ἀντύγων στόλου ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς ὥσπερ εἰσδεδεγμέναι, ὑφ᾽ ὧν τροποῦται Δαλμάτας, Πέρσας, Δάκας, καὶ βάρβαρον πᾶν καὶ παράσπονδον γένος Why, O artist, in portraying the great king [Manuel I Komnenos], do you depict him in the middle of a stoa, the purple-rayed centre of the world’s orbit, and set at a distance the images of the virtues which he has inseparable within him?48 (…) For they are the guardians of his state; they raise him to 45 H. Maguire and L. Jones, ‘A description of the jousts of Manuel I Komnenos’, BMGS, 26 (2002), 104–48, 104–5, 108, 116–17; English translation of the Greek text by Maguire and Jones, 105–9. Paul Magdalino suggests that it is for the same reason – the griffin’s proclamation of the emperor’s divine elevation above other mortals – that the beasts were depicted in the palace baths built by emperor Leo VI (886–912); P. Magdalino, ‘The baths of Leo the Wise and the “Macedonian Renaissance” revisited: topography, iconography, ceremonial, ideology’, DOP, 42 (1988), 97–118, 109. 46 Theodore Prodromos, Ἔκφρασις διὰ στίχων ἡρωϊκῶν τῆς ἐπι τῇ ἁλώσει τῆς Κασταμόνος προελεύσεως τοῦ αὐτοκράτορος κυροῦ Ἰωάννου τοῦ Κομνηνοῦ, ed. Hörandner, 220–4. 47 Theodore Prodromos, Poem 6.58ff., ed. Hörandner, 222. 48 The representation of the emperor as the incarnation of virtues corresponds to a standard topos of panegyrical literature; Magdalino and Nelson, ‘The emperor in Byzantine art’, 143.

130  The Display of Triumph the railings of the chariot, as if acclaiming him above their heads. Through them he triumphs over Dalmatians, and every barbarian and faithless race.49 This explicitly states the connection between imperial triumph, in this case over ‘barbarian’ enemies, and the victorious procession in a chariot, a practice adopted from late antique triumphal celebrations.50 During the twelfth century, the visual and ideological analogy between the triumph of the Byzantine emperor and the Ascension of Alexander the Great was promoted both in rhetoric and in art. The back-to-back griffins on the shoulders of the emperor, on the front of John’s chariot and even on the inside of the Basilevsky vessel function as a visual abbreviation of the iconographic scheme of the Ascension of Alexander, referencing the wellknown image by its most basic components. By depicting griffins on objects as well as regalia, the visual similarity between the Byzantine emperor and Alexander the Great extended not only to the hieratic way in which their triumph was depicted and enacted, but also to the body of the emperor itself – the emperor becomes Alexander in his chariot, propelled by the griffins depicted on and around him. As a consequence of the markedly triumphal connotations of the imagery of Alexander the Great, the iconography on the Basilevsky vessel undergoes a significant shift from the domain of luxury and leisure, so pronounced on other contemporary metal tableware, to the domain of war and power. At first sight, the imagery of the dish appears to be disjointed and divided into two different themes: the depictions of aristocratic entertainments on one hand, and images of war, fight and triumph on the other. The major themes of the vessel that could be perceived as overarching and present in both the images of entertainers and the ‘military’ scenes are triumph and victory, and nobility and wealth. The musicians and dancers could be performing for an affluent client, and the clothes of some of the figures themselves – namely the gem-adorned imperial garments and crowns worn by some of the males depicted – imply power, money and status. By re-contextualising the seemingly innocuous depictions of dancers and musicians in the ideological framework of power and triumph, they transform from party accessories to participants in the celebration of a powerful ruler. The seemingly disparate iconographic scheme of the Basilevsky vessel is not as unusual as it appears: in the epic poem Digenes Akrites, the hero’s dining chambers are described as depicting scenes in a blend of Old Testament history and that of the classical world.51 This combination of literary, mythological and Biblical heroes and model rulers could also be found on the walls of the imperial palace

49 Cod. Marc. gr. Z 524, fol. 112v, no. 271; tr. Magdalino and Nelson, ‘The emperor in Byzantine art’, 142–3, Greek original 142; Spingou, ‘Words and artworks’, 194. 50 M. McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986), 174. 51 E. Jeffreys (ed. tr.), Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions, Cambridge Medieval Classics, 7 (Cambridge, 1998), G 7.60ff.; H. Evans, ‘Digenis Akritis and a middle Byzantine rosette casket in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’, in A. Cutler, G. Bühl and A. Effenberger (ed.), Spätantike und byzantinische Elfenbeinbildwerke im Diskurs (Wiesbaden, 2008), 97–112, 99.

The Display of Triumph  131 of Constantinople. So, although the images on the vessel are seemingly unrelated, they would have formed an iconographic scheme not unfamiliar to the Byzantine viewer. The Basilevsky vessel includes two images of a man fighting a lion. The male figure in each of these two vignettes is clothed in a short tunic with long sleeves, with a billowing piece of drapery flowing behind him, animating the scene. His face is beardless and his hair short, indicating youth or lack of seniority. With both hands, the young man is grappling with a lion, of which he has grasped the mouth to force it shut. As is the case for one of the figures depicted on Digenes’ banqueting room ceilings, this scene on the vessel might be identified as Samson battling a lion.52 Other identities proposed for the figures are Alexander the Great, which seems plausible given the recurrence of the king within the iconographic scheme of the dish, and Herakles, another prototype frequently quoted in reference to the emperor and in combination with Alexander. Although either of these three – Samson, Alexander or Herakles – could be considered a likely candidate for the identity of the two lion-fighters on the vessel, a precise identification of these two figures is not necessary to comprehend the general connotations of the vessel, nor may it have been desired. What is more important about the vessel’s iconography is that it connotes ‘courtly pastimes and heroic adventures’, two often interconnected genres, as tales such as Digenes Akrites attest.53 By invoking characters that were model warriors and heroes, as well as rulers, the object was in keeping with cultural developments of the Komnenian period, during which the ‘noble warrior’ and military courage became increasingly valued, both in young men across the empire and in its ruler especially. The visual and conceptual linking between triumph and dining is a documented occurrence in the middle Byzantine period. Objects of tableware, such as the vessel from the Basilevsky collection but also the vessels from Vilgort and Chernihiv, carried images of rulers and imperial prototypes, a practice documented as early as the beginning of the tenth century. Hārūn Ibn Yahyā in his description of the serving vessels used at the imperial banquet for Muslim captives in the early tenth century relates that the vessels are claimed to have belonged to Solomon, David, Alexander and Constantine. In this case, the tableware does not depict the prototypical rulers, but claims a connection with them by supposedly once having been in their ownership. By using tableware in a variety of ways, emperors and members of the aristocracy could lay claim to the power that they saw themselves entitled to, either through conspicuous display or visual analogies, and insert themselves in a long line of ideal and idealising images. When re-considering the imagery of the precious metal dishes alluding to entertainment, particularly those on the Basilevsky vessel, in connection with the ideology of power embedded in the dish their meaning takes on a new and additional dimension, transitioning from the domain of upper-crust enjoyments to that of triumphal connotations. In Byzantine culture, dancers had an ambiguous status. The

52 Walker, Emperor and the World, 114 A. Bank, Byzantine Art in the Collections of Soviet Museums (Leningrad, 1985), 310–11. 53 Walker, Emperor and the World, 114.

132  The Display of Triumph association between music, dancers and prostitution, as well as bad rulership, is evident in Choniates’ description of Andronikos I Komnenos, who ‘could be seen on fixed days only, as though through a curtain and by very few of the courtiers who were particularly close to them, but any time he was accessible to flute-girls and harlots (…)’.54 Despite the questionable morality of female dancers and of their performances, representations of women dancers in middle and Late Byzantine art can be found accompanying the texts of the Old and New Testaments.55 Given this wide range in the perception of female dancers, how should these performers be interpreted on middle Byzantine courtly and secular art in general? In what ways does their presence on the Basilevsky vessel in particular add another layer to the fluid and shifting meaning of its imagery? As a result of the connection between illustrated Psalter passages relating to Moses and King David and the images of female dancers placed alongside them, there existed by extension a direct link between these depictions and the Byzantine ideology of rulers, which championed David as an important predecessor to the emperor. Hence, secular images of emperors accompanied by dancers, which occur with considerable frequency during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, referred to the depictions of David accompanied by female dancers.56 One of the examples of secular luxury artworks that has been suggested to employ this analogy in depicting the emperor is the Crown of Constantine IX Monomachos. Next to the plaque of each empress on the Crown is an enamelled image of a haloed young woman wearing a heart-patterned garment and dancing with a scarf. Like the dancing figure on the Basilevsky vessel, the performers on the Monomachos Crown are wearing long dresses that reach down beyond their ankles and are kicking one of their legs into the air in a dance movement. Two small panels that depict female personifications of the Virtues Truth and Humility, framed by cypresses and birds, flank the two plaques with the dancers.57 The dancers on the Crown, being depicted in the presence of an imperial trio, act as visual references to the dance of David, stressing the perceived analogy between the Biblical king and the Byzantine ruler.58 Based on Restle’s proposition that the dancers on the Monomachos Crown derive from representations of the imperial adventus, one of the basic ideological

54 Choniates, Chronographia, IV.II.321–2, tr. Magoulias, 176–8. 55 A. Liveri, ‘Der Tanz in der mittel- und spätbyzantinischen Kunst’, in W. Hörandner, J. Koder and M.A. Stassinopoulou (ed.), Wiener Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik. Beiträge zum Symposium Vierzig Jahre Institut für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik der Universität Wien in Gedenken an Herbert Hunger (Wien, 4.–7. Dezember 2002) (Vienna, 2004), 287–98, 287. 56 T. Steppan, ‘Tanzdarstellungen in der mittel- und spätbyzantinischen Kunst: Ursache, Entwicklung und Aussage eines Bildmotivs’, CahArch, 45 (1997), 141–68, 154. 57 On the varying interpretations of the dancers, see R. Cormack, ‘But is it art?’, in J. Shepard and S. Franklin (ed.), Byzantine Diplomacy: Papers from the Twenty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, March 1990, SPBS, 1 (London, 1992), 219–36; P.A. Drossoyianni, ‘A pair of Byzantine crowns’, JÖB, 32.3 (1982), 529–36; A. Grabar, ‘Le succès des arts orientaux à la cour byzantine sous les Macédoniens’, MünchJb, 3.2 (1951), 32–60, 42–7 58 H. Maguire, ‘Davidic virtue: the Crown of Constantine Monomachos and its images’, Jewish Art, 28.4 (1997), 117–23, 119, 121.

The Display of Triumph  133 concepts of Roman imperial propaganda from late antique times until the fall of Constantinople, Kiss argued that the female dancers on the crown constitute metaphors for victory, namely that of King David, by referring to the Life of David or the Dance of Miriam.59 The dancers allude to the power of the Byzantine ruler and his ability to insert himself in a long line of successful, triumphant predecessors all the way back to the beginnings of the empire. Depending on the context, images of female dancers could be more than a ‘basic component of the courtly iconography of Byzantine art’, ceasing to be a decorative backdrop and quasi-meaningless iconographic element and instead becoming active contributors to messages of vice, virtue and triumph.60 The Monomachos Crown is not unique in depicting female dancers that refer to the topoi of luxury and leisure and beyond this also take on a connotation of victory, underlining a message of triumph. The Innsbruck Dish comprises an extensive decorative programme that displays many of the iconographic elements suited to secular luxury artworks – notably acrobats performing elaborate tricks, musicians and heraldic elements. Two inscriptions in Arabic script indicate that this vessel was made for an Islamic ruler, confirming the courtly context in which this artwork would have been viewed originally.61 On the dish, roundels depicting heraldic eagles alternating with scenes of animal battle surround the central image of Alexander the Great. Between two of the roundels framing the central medallion is the image of a female dancer kicking a leg in the air and waving a scarf above her head, a pose similar to that assumed by the dancers on the Monomachos Crown and Basilevsky vessel. The Innsbruck Dish too, establishes a visual connection between triumph and dance, visually and conceptually, by physically approximating the image of the performer and that of the victorious ruler and by referencing the triumph of King David through its iconography. Similar iconographic elements also recur in the ceiling of the Cappella Palatina: the muqarnas decoration includes depictions of dancers and musicians, mentioned above, but also scenes of fighting animals and wrestlers as well as an image of the Ascent of Alexander.62 The recurrence of dancers in the presence of powerful royal prototypes across twelfthcentury art suggests that the figures of female dancers, when depicted surrounded by images carrying connotations of power, were understood by their viewers as allusions to the imagery of the triumph of David and triumphal rulership more generally. Consequently, images of dancers – in particular female dancers – could function as recognisable symbols of power and victory and are to be understood instead as the virtuous performers celebrating a triumphal event. The musicians on

59 E. Kiss, ‘The state of research on the Monomachos Crown and some further thoughts’, in O.Z. Pevny (ed.), Perceptions of Byzantium and Its Neighbors (843–1261), The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia (New York, 2000), 60–83, 73; M. Restle, ‘Höfische Kunst in Konstantinopel in der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit’, in R. Lauer and H.G. Majer (ed.), Höfische Kultur in Südosteuropa, Berichte der Kolloquien der Südosteuropa-Kommission 1989 bis 1991 (Göttingen, 1994), 26–31. 60 Steppan, ‘The Artukid Bowl’, 89. 61 Redford, ‘How Islamic is it?’, 119. 62 See B. Brenk (ed.), La Capella Palatina a Palermo (Modena, 2010).

134  The Display of Triumph the Basilevsky vessel express this function of music within a dining context as a tool of expressing consent with and the triumphal nature of the emperor through sound.63 This would complement the vessel’s use of iconographic elements with strong links to imperial imagery and models of rulership. Thus, in keeping with the contemporary practice of double-tonguedness, the meaning of the vessels discussed here undergoes subtle changes depending on the context in which the artworks are viewed. While the viewing context of the banquet would have prompted an association with leisure and aristocratic entertainments, embodied by the dancers, acrobats, and musicians present on many of these dishes, these figures also alluded to the undertones of power and triumph associated with the food present at the banquet, the ritual of dining, some of the imagery on the dishes, and even the art surrounding the feasters. Dining was instrumental in the display of status and power in medieval Byzantium. In addition to demonstrating an individual’s sophistication and wealth, the art of dining conveyed nuanced messages about alliances, hierarchy and favouritism; about the physical and military strength of the person providing the food; about the reaches of the host’s power and influence; about the host’s and guests’ respective stations within Byzantine culture (or lack thereof); and about the character of individuals. The tableware viewed at banquets depicted models of power and triumph, and could even take on a role in the enactment of military victories. Tableware was also an important component of the ritual humiliation of guests that was practised by the Byzantine emperor. It was used to display his wealth as well as his power by depicting rulers to which the emperor claimed an alliance, and even by representing the military exploits and triumphs of the Byzantine ruler. The images and use of the tableware was complimented by the setting in which it was viewed, as similar imagery could also be found on the walls of Byzantine churches, houses and palaces, including in dining halls, reinforcing the messages of triumph and power. Additionally, the ritual of dining, in particular in an imperial context, was designed to visualise and reinforce hierarchy by means of where and when guests were seated, and when and what they were served. Consequently, dining and tableware were argued to be not simply depictions and promoters of pleasure and leisure, but to also be important factors in the visual rendering and the articulation of power, hierarchy and triumph. By depicting ideal rulers popular in Byzantine culture and that in some cases were part of the visualisation and display of imperial power, the vessels reveal a preoccupation with not only the world of leisure but also with that of power, triumph and military exploits. In light of these triumphal connotations of some of the vessels’ imagery, other elements of the artworks’ decoration can be read as displays of power. The dancers on the metalware, in addition

63 M.E. Torres, ‘Echoes of Constantinople: rewriting the Byzantine soundscape in travel accounts’, in B. Stojkovski (ed.), Voyages and Travel Accounts in Historiography and Literature, I: Voyages and Travelogues from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages (Budapest, 2020), 193–214, 202–10, esp. 209–10. See also the sounds made by automata described by Liudprand in G. Brett, ‘The automata in the Byzantine “Throne of Solomon”’, Speculum, 29.3 (1954), 477–87.

The Display of Triumph  135 to representing a form of entertainment, can also be interpreted as underlining the victorious nature of the vessels’ imagery by establishing visual links with images such as that of the triumphal return of King David. The musicians on the vessels in turn are not only the performers that provided the auditory background in which the artworks would have been viewed, but also represent ritual and ceremonial acts of acclamation.

Conclusion

What is food? It is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour. How does one study the alimentary reality, expanded to the image and the sign?1

In medieval Byzantium, this ‘system of communication’ established at the dining table was formed by the objects, even more so than the food, present. The art of dining – tableware, its decoration, its contents – and its viewing context were central to constructing and communicating ideas and ideals, behaviour and messages ranging from flattery to threats. It reveals the lives of their audiences, from what they ate to what they would like to have eaten; their ambitions, from dazzling hosting to military glory; and their fears, from shame to eternal punishment; their desires, from aesthetic to social. The ceramic and metal vessels are dazzling in their visual splendour, which was precisely part of their visual and commercial appeal and of their function at table. During the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, new decorative techniques were introduced and employed to keep up with the everevolving taste for novelty and visual complexity in tablewares. Glazes became shinier, colours more varied and textures were articulated through dots, stencils and raised and recessed surfaces. The art of dining was visually stunning and fun but also scary and impressive where it needed to be – but never boring. Over a relatively constrained time period, from the eleventh to the first half of the thirteenth century, the objects of tableware – the art of dining – display images that are shared across materials, geographies and socio-economic spheres. The shared themes are important. They show that cultural developments predominantly associated with the imperial sphere and the capital of Constantinople in fact took place much more widely and across the social spectrum.2 The imagery on ceramic 1 R. Barthes, ‘Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption’, in C. Counihan and P. van Esterik (ed.), Food and Culutre: A Reader (London, 1997), 28–35, 31. 2 On the this (outdated) binary of centre and periphery see A. Eastmond, ‘Art and the periphery’, in R. Cormack, J. Haldon and E. Jeffreys (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford, 2008), 770–6; R. Cormack, ‘Away from the centre: “provincial” art in the ninth century’, in L. Brubaker DOI: 10.4324/9781003016359-8

Conclusion  137 tableware in particular highlights the central role played by the middling and lower classes in the formation and dispersion of cultural trends. Themes such as that of the military male emerge around the same time on works in both clay and metal, highlighting that artistic and technological innovation in medieval Byzantium was not a top-to-bottom process but instead simultaneous and multi-pronged. Cultural, visual and artistic trends in the Byzantine empire were a lot more ‘democratic’ than has previously been assumed, with the art of dining the key to unlocking a unique and redefining perspective on Byzantine life and culture. Visual and culinary developments in the culture of dining during the eleventh and twelfth centuries reveal a taste for novelty. The period saw the increased popularity of glazed, decorated ceramic tableware that was desired for its visual splendour. Its size, its sheen and its incised, stamped and raised figural imagery reveal a new emphasis on the display of the tableware itself and the food contained in it. The images of animals on the ceramic vessels act as a visual commentary on the food served to and the food desired by diners. They show popular foodstuffs – fish, birds and game – though the desirability of the dishes, indicated by the frequency with which the animals are depicted on tableware, may not have been matched by their actual consumption. Even better than seafood and game were elaborate and composite dishes, as indicated by the representations of creatures such as ostriches and even sirens on plates and bowls. Culinary novelty in medieval Byzantium favoured rarity, luxury and hybridity, with the unusual and unnatural combination of ingredients the peak of novelty in fine dining. Eating and banqueting were important preoccupations during the middle Byzantine period: feasts were held for important visitors and guests; at the imperial court, banquets structured the ritual and ceremonial surrounding the emperor; and in the houses of those viewing the art of dining, their communal meals provided occasions for discussion, competition and the forging of new relationships. Sources from the period attest to the taste for culinary and aesthetic novelty and the increased interest in food and eating. Intellectuals such as Eustathios of Thessalonike composed riddles describing the elaborate meals they had consumed, highlighting the connection between dining and rhetoric; they boasted about procuring certain foodstuffs that not only satisfied their cravings but also displayed their social relationships and designated them as part of the intellectual and social elite; and they wrote lengthy pieces dedicated to the description of what they had eaten or what they would like to eat, indulging not only in their descriptive skills but also their culinary fantasies. The art of dining in medieval Byzantium worked together with the discourses surrounding food and eating, the performances surrounding the feast, the ceremonial of the banquet and the rhetoric enveloping both the artworks and the act of eating. This resulted in a rich overall effect that carried nuanced messages about taste and quality, power and wealth, sophistication and virtue. The spectacle of the middle Byzantine banquet incorporated the guests and their food, the objects on

(ed.), Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? Papers from the Thirtieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham, March 1996, SPBS, 5 (Aldershot, 1998), 151–63.

138 Conclusion the table, their presentation and the performances that accompanied the banquet. Its dramatic impact was achieved through the material splendour of dining, in particular the highly skilled application of glaze and decoration to ceramic vessels, and the performance of both the presentation of tableware and of the entertainers present in dining spaces. Bowls and plates needed to be handled, moved and turned to be fully appreciated, with the adding and taking away of food obscuring and exposing different parts of an image. The way that the artworks were brought to the table was carefully designed to heighten the sensation of awe produced through the objects’ visual richness. Many ceramic and metal vessels depict entertainers and activities that featured prominently in Byzantine dining spaces, with their imagery revealing the close link between dining and the entertainments of music, dance and acrobatics. Sound and movement punctuated the ceremony of the banquet by creating moments of suspense, delight and laughter. The images on tableware highlight that, like a good piece of theatre, the performances surrounding the middle Byzantine dinner table could produce both comedic effects and morally elevating results. This duality highlights the ambivalent and fluctuating perception of entertainers. Together, the decorated tableware, the artworks surrounding it, the displays of dancers, acrobats and musicians and the performance of pieces of rhetoric created an enveloping spectacle. But the art of dining was not only a spectacle that inundated the senses. Beyond its aesthetic and sensorial role, it structured the relationships of its audience, marked social status and exclusion and visualised the power and aspirations of the host. Not all of the objects might have had a utilitarian purpose, such as that of a cup or a chafing dish; their practical use is only one aspect of their function. The complex symbolism of the artworks was activated through being viewed and contemplated both visually and orally. Being looked at was a central component of the vessels’ function. They visualised the lavish lifestyle lived or desired by their owners through the depiction of entertainment and leisure, including dancers, musicians, acrobats and the hunt. They also visualised, enacted and constructed social hierarchy, relationships and the ideal individual. The artworks respond to ideas and ideals expressed in rhetoric produced and consumed during the time of their making, highlighting the intricate link between oral, textual and artistic genres between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Cultural processes such as rhetorical strategies and works of literature allowed to interpret the artworks but also motivated their imagery; the artworks in turn prompted further rhetorical exploration. The decorated tableware reveals the circular relationship between art and text in Byzantium, where the themes and processes of one art form influenced the other. The images on ceramic and precious metal tableware presented their audiences with polyvalent, if not paradoxical, imagery that covered both the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’; leisure and fight; and the real and the fantastical. Rather than attempting to impose a singular and unambiguous interpretation on many if not all of these artworks, it is important to recognise that their ambiguity was an intrinsic part of their appeal and function. By participating in the contemporary trend of amphoteroglossia or double-tonguedness, the images on bowls, cups and plates communicated a range of meanings to their viewers, enhanced by their deliberately complex and opaque imagery, intended to stimulate contemplation and

Conclusion  139 conversation. They prompted their audiences to exercise their skill in constructing an argument, persuasion, ekphrasis and synkrisis, to recite works they had heard, read or written themselves, and to thus display their knowledge, rhetorical virtuosity and sophistication. Within the public or semi-public setting of the banquet, the art of dining offered occasions for the display of the status, wealth and power of the host. Decorated vessels made of precious metal and ceramics were consciously worked into the spectacle of the banquet by being introduced in a spectacular and dramatic fashion; by impressing guests through their material cost, visual splendour and lavishness; and by passing from one guest to another in a ritualised way expressive of hierarchy. The display of military prowess, an established part of the ceremonial of dining, fed into the demonstrations of power and triumph. Scenes of confrontation and victory were represented on the tableware that was viewed and used during the banquet, as well as frequently being depicted in the houses of the wealthy and powerful. In light of the complex symbolism embedded in foodstuffs and eating, conveying messages of triumph as well as threat, it is likely that the scenes of fight and flight on the plates (and walls) seen during the banquet were more than decorative elements. They expressed messages of hierarchy, power and victory that their viewers would have been able to decode. They glorified the host and acted as a warning to the guests. While many of the objects were made to be viewed in the communal, public setting of the banquet, they also incorporate the private aspects of their owners’ lives in their viewing and significance. Some visualise models of behaviour that invited their viewers to reassess their own behaviour and to adopt a certain set of characteristics and behaviours, both at the dinner table and in everyday life. The ideals depicted on the vessels are those also promoted in contemporary rhetoric. They include the noble and virtuous knight; the courageous yet flawed ruler; and the sensible and moderate dinner guest. The ideals depicted in the art of dining and their moralising dimension not only advised diners to remain virtuous while at the dinner table, where – as contemporary literature suggests – excessive consumption of food and alcohol could lead to dancing, tumbling, lasciviousness, vomiting and farting. The images encouraged their audiences to adopt virtuous and decorous behaviour in their everyday, with one eye firmly set on the trends and fashion of their own time, and with the other on their afterlife. Objects of tableware voice their owners’ concerns for intercession and protection not only in this life but also the next. They depict allusions to the Last Judgement and the punishments that await sinners in hell, encouraging the viewer to contemplate the Last Things and to both check and repent for their behaviour. While those living in the medieval Byzantine empire enjoyed food and luxuriated in the experience of eating it, the sensory dimension of dining was inherently fraught with danger. The Byzantine art of dining explored the dark side of taste, where the pleasure and desire produced by sensory (over)indulgence could lead to greed, excessive eating and drinking and poor manners. Even worse, food consumption could in itself constitute a sin and lead to the vice of gluttony, associated with the expulsion from paradise and characters like Hades. Much like contemporary texts,

140 Conclusion the imagery on the vessels was instructed by fear. Decorated tableware vividly reminded its viewers of the consequences of their sins, depicting shorthand versions of the Last Judgement to stress the bodily nature of the punishments undergone by those who had depraved manners or morals, at table and beyond. The contemplation of death and the fate of the soul was an important cultural practice during the middle Byzantine period. It extended to the dinner table, where individuals had to be mindful of the consequences of eating on not only their body but also their soul. While the imagery on medieval Byzantine tableware does not specify any sins committed, with viewers prompted to recall their personal and individual transgressions, there were specific acts and behaviours associated with the dining table that were inappropriate and even impermissible. In a monastic context, these were defined in texts that included monastic typika and the lives of saints, with transgressions resulting in the public punishment of the offender. In the monastery refectory, tableware played a central role in the committing and the display of certain transgressions. In a secular context, images on tableware and textual sources reveal the reprehensibility of the excessive consumption of food and drink, along with other behaviours that were considered as undesirable at table. The visual and intellectual culture of dining encouraged banqueters to follow positive role models to encourage social cohesion and stability. To excessive consumption of food and drink, middle Byzantine literature attached moral connotations that revealed an individual’s character. The apocalyptic tales in circulation during the period reflect the dietary restrictions imposed on individuals living in medieval Byzantium, highlighting that the act of eating in itself could constitute a sin that would go punished in the afterlife. The sense of taste was not only a vehicle for sensory pleasure and even divine cognition but also for gluttony. The perceived link between the sense of taste and the sin of gluttony ultimately goes back to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, with both text and image laying the blame for the expulsion from paradise firmly at the feet of Eve. This is indicative of the gendered perception of taste and the susceptibility to moral corruption and sensory excess but also of the dangers inherent in sensory perception more generally. To counteract the dangers of falling into the sin of gluttony, Byzantine diners had recourse to a range of norms and tools to stay on the path of moral fortitude. One of these was the imagery presented to diners on tableware. In addition to acting as a visual aid to righteousness, vessels of tableware were used as a rhetorical topos to metaphorically represent good character. The depictions of fragmentation and resurrection warned their viewers against sins and vices associated with the dining table, the context in which the objects were viewed. The images on tableware, from model diners to the otherworldly punishment of those who transgressed against behavioural and moral codes, reminded their viewers of the rules that governed the banquet and warning them of the consequences of misbehaviour. They prompted their audiences to contemplate death and the state of their soul, acting a framework that encouraged diners to stay on path of good taste and virtuousness, ensuring their arrival at the banqueting table of heaven. Examining Byzantine ceramics from the eleventh and twelfth centuries reveals the changing structure and norms of Byzantine society at the time. Although ideals

Conclusion  141 of physical beauty remained largely constant throughout the Byzantine Middle Ages, the notion of the perfect man or perfect manly behaviour underwent a significant transformation. Until the tenth century, it was subdued, orderly, restrained and moderate behaviour that was valorised in both holy and secular men. From the eleventh century, possibly prompted by the rise of a military aristocracy in the Byzantine provinces, an active life was increasingly stressed as a virtue and ideal, with the hunt and military exploits presented as particularly heroic. This is explored in official literature, including histories of the Byzantine empire and texts written for the emperor; in the newly emerging vernacular genre of stories such as that of Digenes Akrites; and in the art of the period. The art of the period played an important role in fostering this new ideal, which is expressed on ivories and in enamels for example. But in addition to occurring on these luxury forms of art, images of hunters and military men, shown slaying dragons, snakes, lions and other beasts, appear in the imagery of a significant proportion of surviving ceramic tableware. Partly as a result of the amount in which ceramics survive, this is actually the largest group of material depicting such scenes. The frequent appearance of these kinds of images on ceramics reveals, on one hand, that the new ideal of masculinity was not limited to one social class but instead was immensely popular across the empire, both in terms of geographical and socio-economic spread. On the other hand, it further highlights the close connection in Byzantium between text and image, with developments in one medium being presented in the other, using similar strategies and pursuing similar aims. Re-contextualising the ceramic and metal bowls and plates at the banqueting table, as part of the art of dining, allowed to treat them as works with agency and an active role and thereby to uncover their significance more fully. One of the central and unifying characteristics of the decorated vessels studied here is that they are open to interpretation, forever remaining in flux. Reframing the vessels not only in the context of the middle Byzantine banquet but also in that of contemporary rhetoric, specifically amphoteroglossia, presents a possible avenue for interpreting the complex and often paradox imagery of the artworks: that of rhetorical exploration, multiple meanings and exchange of ideas. One of the central questions was how the images, which seem disparate and incongruent in both their specific meaning and their relation to one another, construct meaning and operate together. The answer to this question is, in short: it is all in the eye of the beholder. Every viewer would have brought his or her own set of expectations, experiences and knowledge to the viewing of the artworks, revealing new meanings at each turn. This study presented a range of interpretations for the images on the vessels, which as a consequence of the conscious polyvalence of the imagery are not mutually exclusive but exist alongside one another, without prioritising one meaning over another. The ambiguous and seemingly incoherent imagery of some vessels should not be a hindrance to exploration but instead a starting point.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to footnotes. acclamations 42 acrobats 1, 11, 47, 50–5, 85 Adam 12, 97–9, 102, 140; see also Eve Alexander the Great 60, 119–20, 131, 133; ascension of 126–8, 133; depiction in Digenes Akrites’ dining chamber 105; gold dish of 38; as imperial archetype 128–30 Alexander Romance 127 Alexios III Angelos, emperor (r. 1195– 1203) 122 Alexios Axouch, general 105 Alexios I Komnenos, emperor (r. 1081– 1118) 49, 128 Alexios Komnenos Porphyrogennetos, coemperor (r. 1119–1142) 86 allegory 70–1, 75 ambiguity 59, 63, 69, 71, 138 American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Athens (Greece) 104 amphoteroglossia see double-tonguedness Anastasis 92, 100 andreia see manliness Andronikos I Komnenos, emperor (r. 1183– 1185) 49, 72, 114, 121, 132 angel 45, 46, 58, 103 animal park see hunting park animals see individual entries Anna Komnene 114, 128 Apocalypse of Anastasia 23, 88, 102 Apocalypse of John, attributed to John Chrysostom 88 Apocalypse of the Theotokos 88 apocalyptic tale 23, 88, 91, 102, 140 Aristides Quintilianus, author 44–5 artifice 4, 76, 77 asteiotes 64n28

Athanasios, patriarch of Constantinople 23 Benaki Museum, Athens (Greece) 16, 37n14, 106n10–11, 107 Benjamin of Tudela, traveller 104 Berezov (Russia) vessel 1–2, 59, 73; banqueter 83–5; function 87; performers 34, 40–1, 47, 53 Bernard of Clairvaux, abbot 94–5 birds 10, 16–17, 37, 57–8, 89; consumption 15, 19; culinary preparation 30–1; hunting 111–12; of prey 17, 20 Blachernae Palace, Constantinople: mosaics 104; Kouboukleion 129 Bodrum (Turkey) 20, 22 Boeotia (Greece) 36 Book of Ceremonies 16, 48, 119, 128 Boukoleon Palace, Constantinople 21 Brumalia 95 Cappella Palatina, Palermo (Italy) 50, 133 centaur 28, 40, 42–6, 106 ceramics 3–12, 114–17, 140–1; breaking of 83; decoration 18; glaze 15, 37; production 34–6 chafing dish 7, 34–5, 37, 40, 50, 78–9 champlevé 9, 16, 36, 46, 105–6, 116 chariot 38; of Alexander the Great 127, 129; imperial 129–30 cheetah 19–20, 112 Chernihiv (Ukraine) vessel 60, 63, 111, 125, 131 Choumnos see Nea Mone of the Mother of God, Thessalonike (Greece) Christ 39, 92, 94–5, 103 Christodoulos see Monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos (Greece)

170 Index Christopher Mitylenaios, poet 95 Chrysostomic Apocalypse see Apocalypse of John, attributed to John Chrysostom Church of the Forty Martyrs, Constantinople 72, 114, 121 Clephane Horn 20 comedy 9, 11, 53, 68, 117 conspicuous consumption 40 Constantine the Alan, proedros 38n17, 115 Constantine Kalamanos, sebastos 120 Constantine Manasses, author 112–13 Constantine IX Monomachos, emperor (r. 1042–1055) 107; Crown of 50, 73, 132–3 Constantine Pantechnes, metropolitan 112 Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, emperor (r. 913–959) 21, 39, 53, 118 Constantinople 8, 36, 87, 131, 136; ambassadorial visits 29, 53, 112; military processions 129; visits by foreign potentates 122–4; waterworks 21; see also individual entries Convent of Lips, Constantinople 45 Corinth (Greece): assemblages 36, 103–4; bowl with head of feline and human hand 90–1; bowl with ostrich, siren and fish 24–5, 27, 30, 58, 69; chafing dish with entertainers 34–5; chafing dish with musicians and monsters 78–9, 98, 101; fragment with Adam after the Fall 98–9; fragment with musician 40; plate with a dragon slayer 107–8; plate with rider and angel 57–8, 116 Council of Trullo 48–9 dancers 1, 11, 34, 43, 53, 138; performance 46–50, 55; triumphal connotations 131–4 De Cerimoniis see Book of Ceremonies Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus see John Kinnamos Demetrios Chomadetos, metropolitan 23 Didaskalia of our Lord Jesus Christ 88 diet 10, 15, 19, 25, 27, 81; see also foodstuff dietary regulations 19, 25, 80, 102, 140; medical 82; religious 23–4, 88–9 dietary restrictions see dietary regulations

Digenes Akrites 62–3, 66, 73, 117, 131, 141; dining chamber 105, 130–1; as ideal of manliness 110–11 discursivity 8, 13, 57, 64, 75 disorder 43–5, 47, 55, 85, 87 double-tonguedness 11, 68–9, 71, 76–7, 138 dragon-serpent 7, 107–11, 113, 115–16 Dreambooks see Oneirokritika Drosilla and Charikles 47, 51–3; see also Niketas Eugenianos drums 1, 40, 78 ekphrasis 67, 72, 76, 139; of a hunt 112; of a joust 128; of a tent 43 emperor 12–13, 101, 119, 137; at banquets 38–9, 42, 122–3; demonstrations of power 53–5; entertainments 44, 49; as a hunter 114, 121; imperial ideals 84–5, 128–30, 132; imperial virtues 106–7, 112; military campaigns 120–1, 124; see also individual entries Ephrem the Syrian, theologian 94 epigram 71, 120, 125 epistolography 26, 32 Eumathios Makrembolites, writer 29; see also Hysmine and Hysminias Eustathios of Thessalonike 107, 124; riddles 30, 137; wedding oration 26, 67, 86–7 Evagrios of Pontos, monk 99 Eve 12, 96–8, 102, 140; see also Adam Fall, the see Adam and Eve fast 23, 88 fasting 22–4, 32, 80, 88, 94 felines 1, 10, 15, 20, 59, 90–1 fish 7, 10, 15–18, 20–5, 30, 97 fishpond 21 fish sauce 22, 29 flute 40, 49, 132 food morality 5 foodstuffs 5, 10, 15, 30, 137; availability 26; medicinal properties 81; restrictions 24; status 27, 31–2 four humours 80–2 Galen, medical writer 60, 81–2, 94 Geoponika 28 gluttony 12, 85, 93, 96–100, 102, 139–40 gold 9–10, 38–9, 67, 104, 118–19, 121–5

Index  171 Great Palace, Constantinople 123; Chrysotriklinos 128; Magnaura 39; mosaics 104, 112; Triklinos of Justinian 119 Gregory of Nyssa, bishop 38 griffins 27–8, 31, 125–30 Hades 80–1, 92, 93, 99–100, 139 hagiography 101 hare 7, 16, 57, 61, 116 harp 48, 61 Hārūn Ibn Yahyā, Syrian traveler 38, 40, 42, 131 Heavenly Ladder, The 92–3 Hell 93, 99, 139 Herakles 60, 128, 131 Hippodrome, Constantinople 20, 51, 123 horse 20, 57–8, 103–4, 107, 111, 113 humour 11, 43n31, 53, 71 hunt 12, 20, 57, 63, 107, 141; in art 111–12; for leisure 112–13; as preparation warfare 113–14, 120–1 hunter 103, 105, 110, 121; see also hunt hunting parks 20, 112 hybrid(s) 27–8, 31, 43, 73; see also individual entries hybridity 25, 32, 137; agricultural 28; culinary 28–31 Hysmine and Hysminias 76; banquets 29– 30; fresco of the virtues 70–1; see also Eumathios Makrembolites Ibn Bībī, historiographer 122 Iconomachy 14 imperial court 14, 15, 24, 40, 65, 124–5 innovation see novelty Innsbruck dish 50–1, 133 inscription 37, 73, 101; Cod. MS Marcianus Graecus 524 120; Crucifixion ivory 100; function 73–4; Innsbruck dish 51, 133; lack of 60, 62, 74–5, 108, 125; Palazzo Venezia ivory box 101 instruments see musicians and individual entries Isaac II Angelos, emperor (r. 1185–1195 and 1203–1204) 49, 53, 85 Istanbul (Turkey) see Constantinople and individual entries ivory: boxes 43, 44, 57, 98, 128; Clephane Horn 20; Crucifixion ivory 100; Palazzo Venezia box 101; Veroli

Casket 43; Walters Art Museum box 96–7 Jerome, exegete 97–8 jester 11, 49, 53, 54, 75 John Geometres, poet 70 John Kinnamos, historian 105, 114, 121 John Klimakos see Heavenly Ladder, The John of Poutze, courtier 85 John Sikeliotes, rhetorician 69 John Tzetzes, poet 68–9 John Zonaras, author 49, 51 joke 20, 49, 53, 71 Justin II, emperor (r. 565–578) 118 Justinian, emperor (r. 527–565) 48, 118 Kastamon (Turkey) 129 Kaykhusraw I (r. 1195–1199 and 1205– 1211) 122 Kekaumenos 110 Kılıç Arslan II, sultan (r. 1156–1192) 105, 120, 122–3 King David 38, 50, 61–2, 73–4, 131–3 Kletorologion 16 Kynegetika 113, 127 Last Judgement, depictions 12, 92; on tableware 79–80, 89–91, 101, 139–40 Last Things, meditation on 6, 89, 91, 93, 139 laughter 9, 11, 45, 49, 51, 138 Lazarus 99 Leo VI (r. 886–912), baths of 21 Letter of our Lord that Fell from the Sky 88 lion 15, 141; slaying of 114, 121; depiction 60, 105, 125, 131 Liudprand of Cremona, historian 114, 121, 122; imperial banquet 29, 39, 53–4, 118; imperial hunting park 112–13 logos 66, 95 Louis VII, king of France (r. 1137–1180) 86 lyre 30, 40, 54, 74, 85 Manganeios Prodromos, poet 43 manliness 4, 12, 105, 111 Manuel Bryennios, author 45 Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143–1180) 44, 85, 104, 107, 114, 128–30; military campaigns 67, 101, 104–5, 120–5; wedding banquet 26, 66

172 Index Masud I, sultan (r. 1116–1156) 68, 120–1, 123 meat 19, 20, 27, 114, 116; abstinence from 23, 88–9 Melodia 61–2, 73, 74 Menil Collection, Houston (United States) 108–9, 116 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (United States) 16–17, 103–4 Michael Attaleiates, historian 106–7, 111 Michael Choniates, writer 81 Michael Italikos, writer 30–1, 81 Michael Psellos, writer 32, 69, 70, 128 military action 113; see also warfare mixanthropos 42–3, 45 monasteries 24, 45, 83, 102, 140; see also separate entries Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai (Egypt) 24 Monastery of St Demetrios of the Palaiologoi-Kellibara, Constantinople: typikon 82 Monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos (Greece): typikon 45 monkey 78–9 mosaic 21, 24, 64; church of the Forty Martyrs 114, 121; Great Palace 104, 112, 123 Moscow (Russia) vessel 40, 42, 44 Mount Galesios monasteries 46 Mt Athos monasteries 23 Musée du Louvre, Paris (France) 37 music 11, 40–6, 48–9, 55, 132–4 musicians 1, 11, 51, 53, 133; at the banquet 40–3; on tableware 34–5, 40, 59, 78–9, 130, 134–5 Nea Mone of the Mother of God, Thessalonike (Greece): typikon 45 Nicholas Grammatikos, patriarch 23 Nikephoros Bryennios, historian and general 114 Niketas Choniates, historian 85, 101, 104, 132; description of banquet 49, 53; description of portrait of Andronikos I Komnenos 72, 114, 121 Niketas Eugenianos, writer 51; see also Drosilla and Charikles obscurity 70–1, 72 Oneirokritika 91 On the Properties of Foodstuffs see Galen opacity see obscurity

Orpheus 30, 62, 63 ostrich 24–5, 27, 58 paideia 64, 70, 77 panegyrics 47, 62, 107 Pantokrator monastery, Constantinople 23–4 Paradise 93, 94, 97–8, 102, 139–40 parody 72 plain pottery see unglazed pottery Poenae monasteriales see Theodore of Stoudios polyvalence 61, 69, 72, 75, 76 Port Saint Symeon, Antioch (Turkey) 103 Port Saint Symeon Ware 103 Procopius, historian 48 pseudo-Kufic 37, 107 Ptochoprodromic Poems 21–2, 24, 26, 71 refectory 12, 83, 93, 102, 140 repair 9, 35–6 rhetoric 11, 57, 63–5, 68–9, 75, 137–8; and sweet taste 94–5 Rhodanthe and Dosikles 31, 46–7, 54–5, 76; see also Theodore Prodromos riddle 11, 30, 70–2, 137 Roger II, king of Norman Sicily (r. 1130– 1154) 112 Romanos I Lekapenos, emperor (r. 919– 944) 114, 121 Romanos the Melodist, hymnographer 94, 96–7, 100 Romuald of Salerno, historian 112–13 Sagalassos (Turkey) 9 Samson 60, 105, 131 San Marco, Venice (Italy) 28 seafood 22, 137; see also shellfish Second Coming 79, 92; see also Last Judgement senses 10–11, 32, 33n1; auditory 11; sight 30; taste 11–12, 78–80, 93–5, 102, 140 sensory 29–30, 46, 139–40; pleasure 22, 27; overindulgence 47, 93, 98, 102 serpent see dragon-serpent sgraffito 9, 16, 20, 37, 103 shellfish 22, 24 shipwreck 3, 109 silver: dining table 39; tableware at the imperial palace 38–40, 118–123; vessels 1, 3–4, 6, 64, 111–12; visual characteristics 9–10, 38–40

Index  173 sin 12, 78, 139–40; food consumption 88, 91–3; gluttony 96–100 siren 24–5, 27–8, 32, 58–9, 137 snake 89, 96, 107, 109–10 sound 37, 40–8, 134, 138 spectacle 36–8, 46, 65, 75, 137–8 sphinx 71 spiritually beneficial tales 85, 91 State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (Russia) 1, 40, 61, 119, 128 Stefan Nemanja, župan of Serbia (r. 1166– 1196) 124 St Demetrios 80 St George 1, 59, 73, 108 St John of Damascus 94 St Luke of Steiris, Life of 109 St Neilos of Rossano, Life of 83 Strategikon see Kekaumenos string instruments 1, 40, 42, 44, 48, 125 St Sophia, Kyiv (Ukraine) 51 St Theodore 89, 108 subversion 43, 72 Suetonius, historian 85 Symeon Seth, medical writer 81, 86 tambourine 1, 40 taste 9–12, 31–2, 88, 137; sense of 78–80, 93–9; sweet 94–6 taxis 45, 47, 84–5; see also disorder tent 43 theatron 57, 65, 66 Thebes (Greece) 40, 111, 113 Theodora Porphyrogenita, empress (r. 1042–1056) 73 Theodore Prodromos, writer 107, 113, 114, 121, 128, 129; artifice 76–7; Rhodanthe and Dosikles 31; riddles 70; see also Ptochoprodromic Poems and Rhodanthe and Dosikles Theodore of Smyrna, official and scholar 81

Theodore of Stoudios, monastic penitential of 83 Theodore Tourkeles, vessel of 89–91, 98–9 Theophanes Continuatus 39 Theophylact, archbishop of Ohrid 107, 111 Thessalonike (Greece) 16, 37, 48, 80, 82 Timarion 80–3 trapeza see refectory Treatise on the Properties of Foodstuffs see Symeon Seth triklinos 123; of Justinian 119; Magnaura 39 triumphal procession 120, 130 tumbler see acrobat typikon 23, 45, 46, 82, 102, 140 unglazed pottery 5, 15, 34–6 Vandals 118 Veroli Casket 43 vice 46, 79–80, 99, 101, 133 Vilgort (Russia) vessel 60–3, 73–5, 111, 125 Virgin, the 100 vitae: Elias Spelaiotes, Life of 101; Ioannikios, Life of 101; St Luke of Steiris, Life of 109; St Neilos of Rossano, Life of 83; see also hagiography Vitellius, emperor (r. 69) 85 Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (United States) 96–7 war 113–14, 115, 121, 130; see also military action wild game 12, 20, 30, 113–14, 121, 137 William of Tyre, chronicler 44 wine 23, 30, 32, 42, 86–8, 112 Zoe Porphyrogenita, empress (r. 1028– 1050) 73