Envisioning Worlds in Late Antique Art
ISBN 978-3-11-054374-2
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-054684-2
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-054650-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958063
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Acknowledgements
This volume springs from a research project on architectural representation and symbolism in Late-Roman and Early-Byzantine visual culture which I conducted at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul between 2010 and 2014 as part of a senior research fellowship sponsored by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. I am greatly indebted to these institutions, and to the following foundations for their generous support of my project in its earlier stages and of my work with preparing this volume for publication: Fondazione Famiglia Rausing, Rome; Enboms Donationsfond, Stockholm; Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-Samhllet i Gteborg; Torsten och Ingrid Gihls Fond, Stockholm; and Stiftelsen Lars Hiertas Minne, Stockholm. A very special thanks is owed to the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation who also sponsored the conference which inaugurated this book project: without them that fruitful meeting and the collaboration that developed from it would not have been possible.
My gratitude naturally also goes to the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, in whose inspiring environment I have conducted my research over the last eight years. Special thanks go to Prof. Elisabeth zdalga, who has taken such stimulating interest in my research throughout, and to Helin Topal and Birgitta Kurultay who have assisted me in so many valuable ways.
Last but not least I want to express my warm-hearted thanks to my co-authors in this book project it has been a privilege to collaborate with you all! and to my husband, Ulf R. Hansson, my most precious reader.
Cecilia Olovsdotter
Introduction
Note on the abbreviation system: The abbreviations used through the volume follow those recommended by the The American Journal of Archaeology, supplemented by those of LAnne Philologique and The Oxford Classical Dictionary.
The beginnings of this book were a conference on abstraction and symbolism in Late Roman and Early Byzantine art organised at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul in May 2013. The aim was to present some new and critical perspectives on what is universally considered to be the most defining, yet arguably also the most multifaceted, aspect of late antique and early medieval art: its abstracted and symbolic nature. The specific ambition was to draw a more nuanced picture than is generally conveyed in the literature of the ideals, principles and means by which symbolic (intrinsic, metaphorical, allegorical) meaning was communicated in various contexts of late-antique visual culture, to discuss the methods and theories by which modern scholars have sought to understand the abstraction and symbolisation of art in late antiquity, and to suggest fresh subjects and angles through which we might seek to re-examine and extend our comprehension of them.
The problem of how to analyse and explain the abstracted and un-classical visual language that developed in Roman art towards the end of the 3rd century is one that has engaged many archaeologists, art historians, philologists and theologians over the last century. Since the decades around 1900, when scholarship began to shift from a predominantly negative and form-oriented to a more positive and meaning-oriented analysis of late antique art in general and abstracted art in particular, the attention has principally rested on conceptions of the human form and spatio-temporal aspects of composition and narration, and how and why these diverge from the representational modes and interests that characterised the Greco-Roman art from which they grew. Interpretational models that still today underpin much of what is written on late-antique visual culture were those advanced by among others Alois Riegl (18581905), Wilhelm Worrringer (18811965) and Hans Peter LOrange (19031983), who in their different ways held that the abstracted modes of representation that evolved from the last decades of the 3rd century resulted not from a general decline of the arts and artistic competency as crisis-wrecked antiquity faltered to its end, but from a positive and creative response to the challenges of the times; a communal impulse, more or less concerted and controlled, to develop a new visual aesthetic through which the concerns and ideals of a new era might be conveyed. As reasoned by LOrange in e.g. Apotheosis in ancient portraiture (1947) and Fra principat til dominat (1958) (English edition: Art forms and civic life in the Late Roman Empire (1965)), and variously affirmed in works such as to name but a few Ranuccio Bianchi-Bandinellis Organicit e astrazione (1956) and Roma. La fine dellarte antica (1970), James D. Breckenridges Likeness: a conceptual history of ancient portraiture (1968), Rudolf Arnheims Art and visual perception (2nd edition 1974), the two Age of spirituality volumes edited by Kurt Weitzmann (1979, 1980), Ernst Kitzingers Byzantine art in the making (1980), Js Elsners Art and the Roman viewer (1995), Giselle de Nies et al. (eds) Seeing the invisible in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (2005), and Anastasia Lazaridous (ed.) Transition to Christianity (2011), the major upheavals experienced in the late antique period political and religious strife, incursions, disintegration of the Roman empire and state, economic decline caused a collective insecurity that drove people to seek certainty and meaning in the inner and eternal truths of philosophy and religion. In the terms of visual representation this inner-directed search, first and most influentially channelled through imperial art and reaching its full expression in Christian art, was translated as a renouncement of the physical and material in favour of the a-physical and immaterial. It is thought (often by drawing on philosophical and Christian writings of the period and beyond) that an abstract approach to visual conception, of the human form in particular, enabled artists to reach beyond the living individual to capture the superindividual, essential or true man and the moral and spiritual qualities by which he hoped or claimed to transcend the human state; by relinquishing the aesthetic principles of naturalism, the makers of abstracted art could rise above the transience of this world and give shape to the eternal order of the divine. The artists are inferentially credited with the insight and imagination (whether spontaneous or acquired through training is mostly unclear) needed to identify and express such intangible essences through artistic media expression, imagination and vision are variously used to designate the creative impulse and process as well as the resulting work and the viewers reception of it. Whether one agrees or not with this comprehensive spiritual explication of late antique art, and independently of the fact that the naturalistic conventions of Greco-Roman art were not abandoned wholesale but evolved and interacted with the new abstracted forms of artistic expression throughout late antiquity, the phenomena of abstraction and symbolism in late antique art have since the mid 20th century almost unanimously been construed as expressions of eschatological meaning, and as motivated by a collective and period-specific desire to give visual form to the hyperphysical and eternal essence of reality.
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