byzantine art in post-byzantine southern italy

7/24/2019 Byzantine Art in Post-Byzantine Southern Italy

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BYZANTINE ART INPOST-BYZANTINE SOUTH ITALY?

Notes on A Fuzzy Concept

Linda Safran

Two decades ago I wrote a scholarly monograph on a church at the tip of the heelof the Italian boot, the region known as the Salento or the Terra dOtranto. SanPietro at Otranto: Byzantine Art in South Italytook for granted the applicability ofthe adjective Byzantine, which had been used in all previous publications aboutthe church.1It was built during the period of Byzantine hegemony in southern

Italy (c. 8801071), and I dated its first stratum of fresco decoration to c. 1000. Yetthe succeeding fresco layers, which are the best preserved in the church and whichrequired much longer explication in the monograph, were all post-Byzantine, ifstill mostly medieval in date. Should these later frescoes still be called Byzan-tine? If political affiliation is not necessary for cultural identification, does theanswer depend on how Byzantine they look, and if so, in what aspect(s) of thepaintings does Byzantine inhere? Is it a question of iconography, style, com-position, or technique, or does it have to do with Greek-language inscriptions orwith Orthodox liturgical usage? A consideration of a single monument heretofore

Common Knowledge18:3

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1630415

2012 by Duke University Press

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S ympo s i um : F u z z y S t u d i e s , P a r t 3

1. Published bilingually as San Pietro ad Otranto: Artebizantina in Italia meridionale/ San Pietro at Otranto: Byz-antine Art in South Italy(Rome: Edizioni Rari Nantes,1992). Earlier publications include Luigi Maroccia, La

edicola bizantina di S. Pietro in Otranto(Bari, 1925); GrazioGianfreda, Basilica bizantina di S. Pietro in Otranto: Storiae arte(Galatina: Ed. Salentina, 1973).


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labeled Byzantine leads to a review of the historiography of this designation inthe Salento and beyond, followed by an attempt to understand what is at stake inpotentially mislabeling not only historical monuments but also cultures, periods,

and geographies. Insights gleaned from fuzzy studies and theories of vaguenesshelp shed light on these questions and suggest possible new approaches.

Santa Maria di Cerrate

Instead of returning to San Pietro at Otranto, whose patrons and users areentirely undocumented, we will look instead at the nearby monastery church ofSanta Maria di Cerrate, located some 15kilometers northeast of Lecce. Cerratewas founded as an Orthodox monastery before 1096, probably by one of theregions Norman rulers,and it remained an Orthodox foundation throughout the

Middle Ages.2

Its original form is unknown, as the current church building mustdate to the twelfth century (fig. 1). It is a large, triple-apsed limestone basilicawith relief sculpture over the main entrance and a columned loggia added tothe north side. Inside, the altar was a reused Roman funerary stele, now movedelsewhere in the church. Its stone ciborium, still in situ, bears a Greek dodecasyl-labic inscription that dates the altar canopy to 1269(fig. 2). Paleographic analysissuggests that the texts engraver had only a rudimentary knowledge of Greek.3

European-style basilicas with monumental facade sculpture are unknownin twelfth-century Byzantium, although they are found in later Orthodox con-texts outside the Empire, notably in Serbia. Instead, the Greekness that schol-ars uniformly identify at Cerrate has to do with its wall paintings. There arestanding saints (plus one equestrian) on the side, back, and sanctuary walls; moresaints and busts of Old Testament figures in the arcade soffits; and a few narrativescenes: an Ascension of Christ in the apse conch (fig. 3), traces of an Annuncia-tion flanking the apse, a Koimesis (Dormition of the Virgin) on the west wall,and a second Koimesis superimposed on several of the north-wall saints and nowremoved to the adjacent Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari (figs. 45) along with

2. The founders name is uncertain; arguments havebeen made for Tancred, Accardus, and Bohemund, butonly the last fits the chronological parameters established

by the sites oldest dated funerary inscription, reinstalledon the church facade. See Andr Jacob, La fondationdu monastre de Cerrate la lumire dune inscriptionindite,Atti dellAccademia nazionale dei Lincei: Rendiconti,Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche9.7(1996):21123,esp. 223. Numerous papal letters attest to the presence ofOrthodox monks at Cerrate until at least the first quar-ter of the fifteenth century: Cosimo Damiano Poso, IlSalento Normanno: Territorio, istituzioni, societ(Galatina:Congedo, 1988), 1026.

3. Andr Jacob, Le ciborium du prtre Taphouros Sainte-Marie de Cerrate et sa ddicace, in Cavalieri allaconquista del Sud: Studi sullItalia normanna in memoria di

Lon-Robert Mnager, ed. Lon-Robert Mnager, ErricoCuozzo, and Jean-Marie Mart in (Rome: Laterza, 1998),11733.


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Figure 1. Sta. Maria di Cerrate. Exterior, view from the southwest. Photo: author

Figure 2. Sta. Maria di Cerrate. Interior, view toward the east. Photo: author


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Figure 3. Sta. Maria di Cerrate. Apse conch with Ascension above standing bishops

on apse wall. Photo: author

Figure 4. Sta. Maria di Cerrate, Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari. Second Koimesis

scene with Assumption of the Virgin above. Photo: author


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4. On the fifteenth-century scenes, see Valentino Pace,SantEustachio a Santa Maria di Cerrate, in Tempi e

forme: Miscell anea di Studi o fferti a Pina Bel li dE lia, ed.Luisa Derosa and Clara Gelao (Foggia: Claudio Grenzi,2011), 17784; Antonio Cassiano, Un presunto ritrattotardo medievale di Tancredi, in Tancredi conte di Lecce, redi Sicilia, ed. Hubert Houben and Benedetto Vetere (Gala-tina: Congedo, 2004), 36975.

5. Valentino Pace, La chiesa di Santa Maria delle Cerratee i suoi affreschi, in Obraz Vizantii: Sbornik statei v cest O.S. Popovoi(Limmagine di Bisanzio: Raccolta di studi in onoredi O. S. Popova), ed. Anna Vladimirova Zakharova (Mos-

cow: Severnyi Palomnik, 2008), 379; Marina Falla Castel-franchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina in Puglia(Milan:

Electa, 1991), 123.6. The puzzle wall has now been reconstructed, vir-tually: Francesco Gabellone, Virtual Cerrate: A DVR-based Knowledge Platform for an Archaeological Com-plex of the Byzantine Age (paper presented at CAA[Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods inArchaeology], Budapest, 2008). I thank Professor Gabel-lone for sending me an electronic copy of his paper.

some fifteenth-century figural scenes on the south wall.4The chronologicalrelationship among these saints and scenes is disputed. The earliest paintings,including the Ascension, likely date to the twelfth century. The second Koimesisobviously is later, probably from the first half of the fourteenth century.

Valentino Pace called Cerrate the key monument of the regions grecit,and Marina Falla Castelfranchi also singled it out: Among the most noted [picto-rial] cycles, [Cerrate] without a doubt occupies a prominent place in the contextof Byzantine painting in Apulia for the quality of its frescoes.5The deaconsin the sanctuary (fig. 6), the equestrian saint with his pointed shield, and thenow-dismembered military saints on the southern puzzle wall are thoroughlyByzantine in iconography, style, and technique (the green underpainting, orpro-plasmos, is especially evident).6Even the south-wall bishop wearing a Catholicpointed miter and carrying a curved pastoral staff is otherwise Byzantine in his

Figure 5. Sta. Maria di Cerrate, Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari. Second Koimesis

scene, detail. Photo: author


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7. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina, 123.

8. Pace, La chiesa di Santa Maria delle Cerrate, 38485,notes that the half figure of the Virgin is a necessaryadjustment for a scene not designed to fit into an apse

conch. However, in the roughly contemporary apseAscension at San Pietro Imperiale near Taranto, the Vir-gin is displaced to the side of the window so that her fullfigure can be included.

liturgical garments and in his pose and facial modeling (fig.7). Yet despite FallaCastelfranchis assertion, the Ascension (fig. 3) is not done according to the mostpure Byzantine iconographic canons.7The figure of Christ is too twisted andunbalanced, and the colors of his garments (red-orange over blue) are the oppo-site of the norm for the scene within the Byzantine world, strictly defined. Evenallowing for loss of color, the mandorla of light that encloses Christ is also anodd green hue. In addition, the half figure of the Virgin above the apse windowis unacceptably truncated for a Christological scene here she is an icon, not apresence. While a half-length Virgin is indeed represented in metropolitan Byz-antine monuments, this is never done in a narrative context.8An Ascension inthe apse conch is archaizing, although it occurs elsewhere in southern Italy, andsimilarly old-fashioned are the standing bishops (rather than inclined celebrants)on the apse wall.

Figure 6. Sta. Maria

di Cerrate. Deacon

flanking the apse,

detail. Photo: author


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The disposition of saints on the walls appears to be random, with militaryfigures, bishops, angels, and female saints all juxtaposed. In Byzantine churcheswithin the imperial borders, the saints tend to be grouped by t ype from thetwelfth century onward; in the Salento, this is rarely the case. In addition, thelarge number of standing saints and corresponding paucity of figural scenes isvery marked in the region.

The fourteenth-century Koimesis below a less well-preserved Assumptionof the Virgin seems, at first glance, to be Byzantine, because the sleep of theVirgin was an exclusively Orthodox feast day and an art istic subject since thetenth century (figs. 45). However, the image was soon imitated by Europeanartists, who used it in conjunction with the Virgins bodily Assumption to heaven,which was never part of Byzantine iconography.9Falla Castelfranchi called the

9. Elizabeth Walsh, Images of Hope: Representations ofthe Death of the Virgin, East and West,Religion and the

Arts11(2007): 29; Rainer Kahsnitz, Koimesis-dormitio-assumptio: Byzantinisches und Antikes in den Miniaturender Liuthargruppe, inFlorilegium in Honorem Carl Nor-denfalk Octogenarii Contextum, ed. Per Bjurstrm, Nils

Gran Hkby, and Florentine Mtherich (Stockholm:Nationalmuseum, 1987), 91122. See also Stephen J.Shoemaker, The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin MarysDormition and Assumption(New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2002). The Koimesis and Assumption were cele-brated in both churches on August 15.

Figure 7. Sta. Maria

di Cerrate. Bishop on

south wall. Photo:

author


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second Cerrate Koimesis one of the last attestations of Byzantine painting in theSalento, but the addition of a full-size, kneeling supplicant, even one distancedfrom the scene under his own aedicula, is extremely rare in Byzantine art.10So,

too, are the Gothic architectural background and St. Dionysius the Areopagitedisplaying an open book that contains a prayer of intercession to the Virginrather than one of his own texts.11These features, and especially the Assumptionabove the Koimesis, distance the image significantly from Byzantine norms.12It is worth noting that the Cerrate Assumption is rarely illustrated.13Its artificialexcision from the Koimesis, as in figure 5, certainly makes the truncated compo-sition look more Byzantine.

Salentine Art Historiography

For over a century, since the publication of Charles DiehlsLart byzantin danslItalie mridionale(1894), European art historians who have ventured this farsouth and east have considered the Salento an oriental or Byzantine artisticprovince.14Despite his title, Diehl did acknowledge the existence of an Italo-Latin school of painting, independent of the Greek school and local to Apulia,particularly the county of Lecce. His laterManuel dart byzantinfound that

regardless of whether they are tenth century or fourteenth century, onecan note in these frescoes some differences of technique and of style, butone cannot note any difference in inspiration. Even when Latin inscrip-tions accompany the figures, they remain purely Byzantine [elles demeur-

ent purement byzantines], executed in Greek land, for Greek populations,by artists profoundly impenetrated by traditions of Byzantine art.15

10. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina, 222.

11. Manuela De Giorgi, La Dormizione della Verginenella pittura medievale di Puglia e Basilicata, in Puglia tra

grotte e borghi: Insediamenti rupes tri e insediamenti urbani :persistenze e differenze, Atti del II Convegno internazionalesulla Civilt Rupestre, Savelletri di Fasano (BR), Novem-ber 2426, 2005, ed. Enrico Menest (Spoleto: Fondazi-one Centro italiano di studi sullalto Medioevo, 2007),19697.

12. The

of

(Mother of God) isvisible to the (viewer s) right of t he ascending figure inthe white mandorla; moreover, the figure wears the darkred maphorion of the Virgin and lacks a cross nimbus. Itcannot, therefore, be a figure of Christ, as seen hoveringamong the apostles above the Koimesis scene at Sopoani,c. 126370 (www.srpskoblago.org/Archives/Sopocani/exhibits/digital/western-pn,dormition-ww/index.html).

13. De Giorgi, La Dormizione della Vergine, showsonly part of it in fig. 1. She discusses the Assumption

briefly on 2012but concentrates on the miraculousarrival of the apostles on clouds and the textual sourcesfor that event. In the sole monograph on Cerrate, TeodoroPellegrinos Terra mia, Enciclopedia illust rata della TerradOtranto antica e moderna, vol. 1(Galatina: Ed. Salentina,1970), there are three details of the Koimesis (111, 114,115) but none shows the complete width of the scene or itsvertical extension to the Assumption. mile Bertaux,Lartdans lItalie mridionale, vol. 1, De la fin de lEmpire Romain la Conqute de Charles dAnjou(Paris: Albert Fontemoing,

1904), 148, illustrated part of the Koimesis with the cap-tion Fresque byzantine du XIVe sicle. Falla Castelfran-chi, Pittura monumentale bizantina, 220, does illustrate thecomplete double scene but does not explore who is ascend-ing to heaven (221: un Assunzione?).

14. Charles Diehl,Lart byzantin dans lItal ie mridionale(1894; Rome: LErma di Bretschneider, 1967), 1719.

15. Charles Diehl, Manuel dart byzantin (1910; Paris:Librairie Auguste Picard, 1925), 582.


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495The other great French scholar of South Italian art did not use the term Byzan-

tine but rather a perceived equivalent, basilien, referring to the (nonexistent)Order of St. Basil as an Orthodox equivalent of the Benedictine order.16Half a

century later, Adriano Prandis Il Salento provincia dellarte bizantina also leftno room for alternatives, finding a passive but unwavering Byzantine traditioneven in fifteenth-century monuments.17More recent interest in the region wasspurred by the glossy, seven-hundred-pageI Bizantini in Italia, which containedan essay by Valentino Pace titled Pittura bizantina in Italia meridionale (secoliXIXIV ),18although two years earlier, the same authors contribution to LaPuglia fra Bisanzio e lOccidentehad avoided the adjective Byzantine.19The latterbook title, which situated Apulia between Byzantium and the West (presumablyin cultural as well as spatial terms) was echoed by another,Ad Ovest di Bisanzio: IlSalento Medioevale, that located the Salento to the west of Byzantium. In the latter

case, however, both of the art historical contributions La pittura bizantina inSalento (secoli XXIV), by Marina Falla Castelfranchi, and Arte bizantina nelSalento. Architettura e scultura (secc. IXXIII), by Gioia Bertelli embracedByzantine as the descriptor for art produced well after the Byzantines depar-ture.20Falla Castelfranchis major book on wall painting in the region, Pitturamonumentale bizantina in Puglia, further solidified its Byzantine associations.21My own book, the first scholarly monograph on a Salentine church, also usedByzantine in the title. Finally, a new series of which only the first volume,on a late-fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century church, has appeared is titled TerradOtranto bizantina.22

Unlike the art historians, archaeologists have been less inclined to apply theadjective Byzantine to the time period after the end of Byzantine rule. HencePaul Arthur, at the University of the Salento, has editedApigliano: Un villaggiobizantino e medioevale in Terra dOtranto, distinguishing the sites phases chrono-

16. Book 2in Bertaux,Lart dans lItal ie mridionale, istitled Lart monastique: Basiliens et Bndictins. Lapeinture dans lItalie mridionale du Xe au XIIIe sicle.Basilian was an etic (Norman) label for the regions var-ied Orthodox monks, monasteries, and practices, but manyof the so-called monastic churches were actually family orvillage churches and their art was not monastic. In the

updating of Bertaux, theAggiornamento dellOpera di mileBertaux sotto la direzione di Adriano Prandi(Rome: colefranaise du Rome, 1978), bk. 4, 293, Moines basiliensis placed in quotation marks.

17. Adriano Prandi, Il Salento provincia dellarte bizan-tina, inAtti del Convegno internazionale sul tema LOrientecristiano nella storia della civilt(Rome: Accademia Nazio-nale dei Lincei, 1964), 681.

18. Valentino Pace, Pittura bizantina in Ital ia meridi-onale (secoli XIXIV), inI Bizantini in Italia , ed. Gug-lielmo Cavallo et al. (Milan: Scheiwil ler,1982), 317400.

19. Valentino Pace, La pittura dalle origin i in Puglia.Secoli IXXIV, in La Pugli a f ra Bisanzio e l Occ idente(Milan: Electa, 1980).

20. Benedetto Vetere, ed.,Ad Ovest di Bisanzio: Il SalentoMedioevale(Galatina: Congedo, 1990).

21. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina. Itcontains the subheadings La pittura bizantina in epocaromanica (XII secolo) and La pittura bizantina nelletsveva e angioina, the latter divided into the thirteenthand fourteenth centuries.

22. Michel Berger and Andr Jacob,La Chiesa di S. Stefanoa Soleto(Lecce: Argo, 2007).


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logically.23Similarly, historians generally limit their use of the term Byzantineto the strictly historical and chronological sense.24Among the important art his-torical contributions, only Hans Belting used Byzantine for the most part in a

chronologically restricted sense.25In the Salento, every church that contains Greek inscriptions or a row of

standing saints is identified as Byzantine. It seems that both the local popula-tion and the art historians accord the era of Byzantine rule a particular cachet.Why should this be so? Although almost no one outside of Italy can identifythe Salento, most people have heard of Byzantium. The empire still connotesantiquity, grandeur, power all desirable associations, especially in a region thathas known dire poverty in more recent centuries and is still the butt of northernItalian jokes, not to mention the object of some separatist desires.26Its Byzan-tine history distinguishes the Salento from most other regions of Italy in a way

that has strong positive associations. The result is a tendency both to retrodateimages and to associate them with Byzantine imperial figures. An example is theidentification of a well-dressed, kneeling supplicant at Sta. Marina (the medievalSan Nicola) at Miggiano as the Byzantine Empress Zoe on the grounds that Zoe,with her consort Constantine IX Monomachos (r. 104255), patronized a differ-ent church of St. Nicholas, the one at Myra where Nicholas had been bishop inthe fourth century. This identification was confirmed by dating the kneelingSalento Zoe to the eleventh century which cannot be the case, given therow of buttons on her tight sleeves and her low-cut bodice and by interpretingher elaborate coiffure as a Byzantine imperial crown, despite a manifest lack ofcomparisons for its form.27

If the Italians have resolutely considered the Salento to be a Byzantine artis-tic province, they have largely been ignored by other Byzantine art historians.Not a single Byzantine-art textbook of the past half century includes a mentionof the regions wall paintings, although Annabel Whartons study of art on theByzantine periphery did include a chapter on all of southern Italy.28There wereno references to the Salento in the 1993Dumbarton Oaks symposium Byzan-

23. Excavations since 1997revealed two phases of occu-pation at Apigliano: Early and Middle Byzantine (eighthto tenth centuries) and Angevin (thirteenth to fourteenth

centuries).24. E.g., Vera von Falkenhausen (her publications to2010are listed at www.studibizantini.it/docs/AISBCV_FALKENHAUSEN.pdf ).

25. Hans Belting, Byzantine Art Among Greeks andLatins in Southern Italy, Dumbarton Oaks Papers28(1974): 129.

26. See, e.g., the antiSouth Italian (but not specifi-cally Salentine) jokes collected at: www.bunnezone.com/

Barzellette/NordSud.htm; www.risatefacili.it/barzellette/elenco.asp?tag=nord%20e%20sud (accessed February 28,2012).

27. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina,1016; cf. Linda Safran, Scoperte salentine,Arte medi-evale8.2(2010): 7172, 75.

28. Annabel Jane Wharton,Art of Empire: Painting andArchitecture of the Byzantine Periphery: A Comparative Studyof Four Provinces (University Park: Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, 1988). Viktor Lazarevs dated Storiadella pittura bizantina(Turin: G. Einaudi, 1967) dismissedByzantine painting in South Italy in two pages and onefootnote.


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497tium and the Italians.29To assess whether Byzantine properly applies to the

post-Byzantine Salento, we need to define the term.

Defining Byzantine

If the term Byzantine is used as a chronological signifier on the order of medi-eval, it should be limited to works produced in the period when the Byzantineswere present in the region. This strict definition would produce a restricted listof paintings in churches decorated or redecorated between about 880and 1071.30But this is not the definition, or assumption, currently in use in Italy; on the con-trary, wall paintings are labeled Byzantine for centuries after the eviction of theByzantines by the Normans. If Byzantine is not a political and/or chronologicallabel, then what is it? Are its artistic components identifiable, or is it more like the

US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewarts famous 1964definition of pornogra-phy (I know it when I see it)?No one disputes that art made by craftspeople within the Byzantine empire

is Byzantine art; the definitional problem arises when dealing with products out-side the empires confines, whether or not that area was previously within theempire, like the Salento, or not (for instance, Serbia). A recent handbook of Byz-antine studies states that

The most popular definition of Byzantine art has been as the ar t ofConstantinople, but it is the narrowest and may distort our percep-tions, since it sets the notion of a norm against which variations may be

seen negatively as provincial or inferior. The current discourse sees thegenesis of Byzantine art as a progressive transformation of Graeco-Roman art rather than a rejection of it. But it avoids the question of

whether the category of Byzantine art represents a political state, a reli-gion, or a style.31

This nondefinition refuses to grapple with the questions it raises about the rela-tive roles of style and faith in defining Byzantine artistic borders. That someByzantine art is metropolitan and other art is provincial is obvious and not nec-

29. Byzantium and the Italians, Thirteenth through Fif-

teenth Centuries. Many of the contributions were pub-lished in Dumbarton Oaks Papers49(1995).

30. On these historically Byzantine images, see LindaSafran, Redating Some South Italian Frescoes: The FirstLayer at S. Pietro, Otranto, and the Earliest Paintings atS. Maria della Croce, Casaranello, Byzantion60(1990):30733; Safran, San Pietro at Otranto, chap. 2; Falla Castel-franchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina, 4599; and, mostrecently, several essays and entries in Gioia Bertelli, ed.,Puglia preromanica dal V secolo agli inizi dellXI(Milan: Jaca,

2004). For the history of Byzantines in the Salento see

Vera von Falkenhausen,La dominazione bizantina nellItaliameridionale dal IX allXI secolo(Bari: Ecumenica, 1978).

31. Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, and Robin Cormack,Byzantine Studies as an Academic Discipline, in Oxford

Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Jeffreys, Haldon, andCormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11.


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essarily a problem if provincial is understood as merely different rather thanas necessarily inferior.

Based on analysis of the introductory maps in the catalogs of two recent

Byzantine art exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,32Antony East-mond recently posed more detailed definitional questions that are worth repeat-ing in full:

Is Byzantine art coterminous with the frontiers of the empire (assum-ing we can work out where those are at any one time)? Is it art made byByzantine artists, whether at home or abroad? Or does Byzantine artrequire a very different definition? Given that the majority of the artthat survives is religious, should we define it in theological terms:art produced by those states that formed part of the theological com-munion of the Orthodox world (this then includes the states of the Bal-kans, Russia, and Georgia, but suggests a more awkward relationship

with the non-Chalcedonian churches of Armenia, Syria, and CopticEgypt)? Or is it vaguer still: a more embracing concept that includes allart produced under the general cultural sway of the empire and its reli-gious world view? Of course, as the definition becomes broader, we haveto wonder what is left of the term Byzantine art that is in any sensemeaningful. As we move away from the heartlands of the empire, and inparticular away from Constantinople, and look towards the frontiers ofthe empire, these questions become more pressing: at what point doesByzantine art stop being Byzantine and become Georgian or Rus-sian or Coptic instead? Does the use of a different script or languageon images with a common iconography mark a clear enough division

to exclude these works of art from Byzantium? Or do the various (andvarying) common iconographic, stylistic, or funct ional features of theart produced in all of these regions at different periods tie them in to acommon history with Byzantine art?

While Eastmond argues for as broad a definition of Byzantine art as possible,he acknowledges that this has a cost in the coherence and utility of the result-ing definition.33

Why do Byzantine art historians not limit their inquiry to what goes onwithin the imperial borders? The reason is the paucity of remaining works thatare inarguably Byzantine. The great Sicilian mosaics of the twelfth century and

32. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, eds., TheGlory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine

Era, A.D. 8431261(New York: Metropolitan Museumof Art, 1997); Helen C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: Faith andPower (12611557) (New York: Metropolitan Museum ofArt; New Haven, CT: Yale Universit y Press, 2004). NoSalento frescoes are mentioned in either work, althoughthe Sicilian mosaics and even wall paintings f rom Win-

chester are featured in Glory of Byzantium. An Apulianicon (cat. 320) and others from northern Italy are includedto raise questions about the movement of artists betweenItaly and the eastern Mediterranean.

33. Antony Eastmond, The Limits of Byzantine Art, inA Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Malden, MA:Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 31415.


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34. Eastmond, Limits of Byzantine Art, 31718.

35. See the perceptive comments of Sharon Gerstel, TheAesthetics of Orthodox Faith, review of the MetropolitanMuseum of Art exhibition Byzantium: Faith and Power(12611557),Art Bulletin87.2(2005): 33141.

36. Valentino Pace and Vera von Falkenhausen, review ofthe Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The Gloryof Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle ByzantineEra, A.D. 8431261, Gesta37.1(1998): 103.

37. Eastmond, Limits of Byzantine Art, 318.

38. The exceptions are the obviously Roman- ritechurches, often but not exclusively cathedrals, with Latininscriptions.

39. Cited in Jonathan Z. Smith, A Matter of Class: Tax-onomies of Religion,Harvard Theologi cal Review89.4(1996): 401.

Serbian wall paintings of the thirteenth have been appropriated to flesh outthe lacunose picture of Byzantine art. But even if Byzantine art ists born andtrained within the empire were pressed into service by Norman patrons in Sic-

ily and by members of the Serbian royal house, these monuments were responsesand challenges to Byzantium and its culture, not pieces of it. The large stonebasilicas that house these decorative ensembles have little in common with typi-cally small-scale Byzantine brick churches, and in the case of Sicily, the worshipinside the Byzantine-like or byzantinizing decorative envelope had nothingin common with the original Orthodox functions of the chosen dcor.34The eli-sion of differences results in a privileging of stylistic similarities over differencesin iconography, composition, function, and meaning. For many art historians,and for nonspecialists as well, style is what art history is about, so challengingthe definition of Byzantine is nothing less than an effort to reconceptualize the

very basis of the art historical discipline.35

Clearly, the definition of Byzantine is problematic, and different scholars(and amateurs, too) operate with divergent assumptions and contradictory agen-das. The Metropolitan Museums Glory of Byzantium exhibition focused ongeographical areas that were politically autonomous from Byzantium, outside theborders of the Byzantine empire, even if they exhibited varying degrees of cul-tural dependency.36Yet while most of these neighboring countries art historicalscholarship seeks to emphasize the differences between Byzantine and locallyproduced art,37in order to assert an independent and often a nationalist identity,the tendency in the scholarship on the Salento has been to stress the links withByzantium and, indeed, to accept the label of Byzantine for most of the regionsmedieval art.38

The Problem with Labels

Taxonomy (or, in archaeology, typology), classification, and labeling are all prod-ucts of the scientific method that has been privileged as a theoretical stancesince the eighteenth century. All real science rests on classification, the philolo-gist and historian of religion Max Mller said in 1873,39and even the nonscienceswere organized into neat pseudocategories. Byzantine studies was an offshoot of


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classical philology, which was particularly notable for its empirical and positivistemphasis.40But taxonomy, for all its alleged scientific rigor, is fraught with theo-retical and practical difficulties.41How does the scientist, or the art historian,

choose what things to compare? Often the decision is based on what has beenpublished, rather than on familiarity with all possible comparanda; coincidenceand subjectivity loom large. In addition, labels run the risk of essentializing,totalizing, and producing hegemonic discourse42 all things that desensitize usto the reality that classificatory labels and categories are historical products, notscientific facts.43

The problems are compounded by the tendency not just to label, but tolabel in pairs of ostensible opposites. This, too, is largely a product of the Enlight-enment, which enshrined all the old philosophical oppositions between mindand world, appearance and reality, subject and object.44The results are such

oft-repeated but seldom-interrogated binaries as Byzantine/Latin and East/West.In particular, the East/West (or Orient/Occident) binary has become a funda-mental component of postcolonial theory. Like many other contrasting pairs, thisone has become so familiar as to seem obvious and natural commonsensein linguistic terms. It is a kind of cultural code, a conceptual system organizedaround key oppositions in which one term is defined against its opposite and eachis aligned with multiple symbolic attributes.45These kinds of pseudoscientificantinomies have long structured thought and practice in many fields; they con-struct social reality . . . they hide as much as they reveal . . . these antinomies areat once descriptive and evaluative, one side being always considered as the goodone, because their use is ultimately rooted in the opposition between us andthem. 46And yet, as Rudyard Kipling wrote nearly a century ago, in We andThey, the validity of labels very much depends on who is doing the labeling andwhere she is standing when she does so.47

Jonathan Smith agrees that dualistic classifications are to be avoided, buthe argues that if we do not classify we are left with the inconclusive study of

40. Jeffreys, Haldon, and Cormack, Byzantine Studies asan Academic Discipline,14.

41. Smith, Matter of Class, 394; Rolf Sattler, Method-ological Problems in Taxonomy, Systematic Zoology13.1(1964): 1927.

42. Smith, Matter of Class,4012, citing Kimberly Pat-ton on the use of labels in comparing religious traditions.

43. Pierre Bourdieu, Vive la crise! Theory and Society17.5(1988): 779.

44. Richard Rorty, Science as Solidar ity, in Objectiv-ity, Relativism, and Truth, vol. 1, Philosophical Papers(Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 44. Aristotleanalyzed several enduring oppositions in the Metaphys-

icsand Physics. More recently, linguists have recognizedthe importance of oppositional pairs in language, wheredark is meaningless without l ight.

45. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics(New York:Oxford University Press, 1983), 36; Daniel Chandler,

Semiotics for Beginners, online at www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html (accessed Febru-ary 28, 2012).

46. Bourdieu, Vive la crise! 77778; Smith, Matter ofClass, 402.

47. All nice people, like Us, are We / And everyone else isThey: / But if you cross over the sea, / Instead of over theway, / You may end by (think of it!) / Looking on We / Asonly a sort of They!


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48. Smith, Matter of Class,402.

49. Lotfi Zadeh, cited in Jeffrey M. Perl with NatalieZemon Davis, Introduction: Abominable Clearness, Common Knowledge17.3(Fall 2011): 445.

50. Rorty, Science as Solidarity, 38.

51. Jeffrey Perl cites more fields of application in Perl with

Davis, Introduction, 444 . Articles I have found usefulinclude L. A. Zadeh, Fuzzy Logic and Approximate Rea-soning, Synthese30.34(1975): 40728; Petr Hjek, OnVagueness, Truth Values, and Fuzzy Logics, Studia logica91.3(2009): 36782; Christian G. Fermller, Theoriesof Vagueness versus Fuzzy Logic: Can Logicians LearnFrom Philosophers?Neural Network World13.5(2003):45566; Nike K. Pokorn, In Defence of Fuzziness, inThe Metalanguage of Translation, ed. Yves Gambier andLuc van Doorslaer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009),

13544; Judith Gelernter, Dong Ca, Raymond Lu, EugeneFink, and Jaime G. Carbonell, Creating and VisualizingFuzzy Document Classification, Carnegie Mellon Uni-versity, Computer Science Department, Paper 624(Octo-ber 1, 2009): repository.cmu.edu/compsci/624(accessedMarch 5, 2012).

52. Recent studies of vagueness include Richard Dietz

and Sebastiano Moruzzi, eds., Cuts and Clouds: Vagueness,Its Nature, and Its Logic(Oxford: Oxford University Press,2009); Delia Graff and Timothy Williamson, eds., Vague-ness(Aldershot, UK: A shgate, 2002); Rosanna Keefe,Theories of Vagueness(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress,2000); Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith, eds., Vague-ness: A Reader(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

53. Graff and Williamson, Introduction, in Vagueness,xvi.

individuals and individual phenomena. Taxonomy, he says, is a valuable tool inachieving that necessary distortion.48But perhaps we can destabilize the opposi-tional framework by exploring its ostensible margins. The Salento, which is per-

ceived in book and article titles as occupying a fuzzy space between Byzantiumand the West, provides a good point of entry.

Insights from Fuzzy Studies

What if the wall paintings at Santa Maria di Cerrate (and elsewhere) wereunderstood in terms of degree rather than assigned to, or excluded from, exist-ing categories of Byzantine and Western art? Fuzzy studies acknowledgesuncertainty, and despite many Italian scholars conviction that medieval Salen-tine painting looks or even is Byzantine, I hope to have shown that this is

hardly an incontrovertible fact. Indeed, high precision is incompatible with highcomplexity, and surely cultural contact and cultural production are situations ofhigh complexity.49Fuzzy logic is a more pragmatic approach, designed to allowfor imprecise criteria of set-membership.50It has been widely used in statistics,computing, logic, linguistics, and document classification, and it may have appli-cations in art history as well.51

The adjective Byzantine is a vague predicate not unlike tall or red.52The degree to which someone is tall or something is red is contingent on, in thefirst case, cultural norms of height, and, in the second, on lighting and context.Tall depends on whether someone is standing among Pygmies or Maasai. Redcan be orangey-red or maroon or burgundy or scarlet, and rarely will two view-ers describe it the same way. While small variations in redness do not change theessential color, accumulated changes the continuous addition of another color,for example will eventually make the color no longer red.53In other words,


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there is a point somewhere on the continuum of redness or tallness at which thatvague (or tolerant) predicate no longer obtains.54This is the classicsoritesparadox:how many grains does it take to make, or unmake, a heap (Greeksoros)?55Classi-

cal logic suggests that adding or subtracting individual tiny grains cannot makeor unmake the hypothetical heap, but at some point there is a recognizable heapor a nonheap, and somewhere along the art historical continuum there is a pointat which a wall painting is no longer Byzantine but something else. (The usualterminus is not, however, not Byzantine, but rather Western, an even vaguerterm.) Vague predicates mean that anyones answer to the question of Byzantine-ness will be neither true nor false.

There is general agreement that a term is vague if it has borderline cases,56which are those for which some competent speakers would judge that the predi-cate applies (is true) and some others not (they judge it to be false).57Such com-

petent scholars as Pace, Falla Castelfranchi, and Berger and Jacob have usedthe term Byzantine to describe wall paintings in the Salento that others adherents of a strict historical chronology, for instance, or those with differentstylistic criteria in mind might label differently. Byzantine art in the Salentois a borderline case; it lacks sharp boundaries and its definition eludes specialists.The reality is a question of degree, not fact of being more (or less) like a heapand more (or less) Byzantine, rather than being a not-heap, or not-Byzantine,at one moment and then a heap, or Byzantine, at the next. Epistemists wouldsay that while we do not know where the fuzzy border of Byzantine lies, thisis largely a matter of ignorance; furthermore, supervaluationists consider this alinguistic phenomenon, a case of semantic indecision. Degree theorists depen-dent on fuzzy logic would point out thatx = Byzantinebecomes more and less true(there are degrees of truth) at different points along the stylistic, iconographic,compositional, and technical spectrums.58From any theoretical or philosophicalstandpoint, it is impossible to specify precisely which component of Byzantine-ness is the sine qua non for identifying a painting as Byzantine.

Does the distinctly Gothic architectural background of Santa Maria diCerrates second Koimesis render the scene not-Byzantine (fig. 5)? Perhaps not:the distinction between foreground and background is maintained, and the fore-

54. Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith, Introduction:

Theories of Vagueness, in Keefe and Smith, Vagueness:A Reader, 4.

55. On thesoritesparadox, see Perl with Davis, Introduc-tion: Abominable Clearness, 44546; Dominic Hyde,Sorites Paradox, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/; Graff and Wil-liamson, Vagueness, essays in part 6.

56. Roy Sorensen, Vagueness, Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/; Adam

Sennet, Ambiguity, plato.stanford.edu/entries/ambigu-

ity/; Keefe and Smith, Introduction: Theories of Vague-ness, 23.

57. Petr Hjek, On Vagueness, Truth Values and FuzzyLogics, Studia logica91(2009), 367.

58. Keefe and Smith, Introduction: Theories of Vague-ness, 67, 49; Graff and Williamson, Introduction,xvixxii; Fermller, Theories of Vagueness versus FuzzyLogic.


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59. Kees van Deemter,Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

60. Andreas H. Jucker, Sara W. Smith, and Tanja Ldge,Interactive Aspects of Vagueness in Conversation,Jour-nal of Pragmatics35(2003): 173769.

61. Timothy Williamson, Vagueness, in The Encyclope-dia of Language and Linguistics, ed. Ron Asher and J. M. Y.Simpson, 10vols. (Oxford: Pergamon, 1994), 9:4869,cited in Jucker, Smith, and Ldge, Interactive Aspectsof Vagueness, 1738.

62. See my forthcomingArt and Identity in the MedievalSalento.

ground contains the familiar Byzantine cast of characters. One of them displaysa prayer instead of a psalm, probably on behalf of the supplicant kneeling at theright; but the book is small and does not distract the viewer, and the lay supplicant

is set apart in his architectural frame. The Byzantine iconographic contours havebeen retained. More troubling, for a Byzantine viewer, might be the duplicationof the scene and its unexpected accessibility, low down on the aisle wall of a siz-able basilica that could have imitated Byzantine (in the narrow sense: within theempires borders and for Orthodox use) church programs by placing such a scenehigh up on the walls of the nave. When I showed the Cerrate Koimesis to Byz-antine art historians unfamiliar with Salentine painting, one judged the figuralstyle not Byzantine and another said it was Byzantine, but with variations.The same occurred with the Ascension scene.

There is a way out of this puzzle if we admit that the traditional labels are

misleading and if we jettison the allegedly positive implication of precision inthis case, the category Byzantine and embrace the notion of vagueness. AsKees van Deemter argued in his engagingNot Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness, theworld is full of fuzziness and very few things are black or white.59The ubiquity ofvague expressions has engaged the attention of linguists, philosophers, and gametheorists in recent years. Even though it is commonly assumed that language ide-ally is precise and that vagueness is a defect to be avoided whenever possible,60thisturns out not to be the case: Used as a technical term, vague is not pejorative.Indeed, vagueness is a desirable feature of natural languages. Vague words oftensuffice for the purpose in hand, and too much precision can lead to time wastingand inflexibility.61Vagueness can be an interactional strategy, compelling thelistener or reader to draw implications rather than allowing her or him to passivelyreceive an alleged taxonomic fact that is, in reality, an oversimplification.

It is better to describe the Ascension at Cerrate as rather Byzantine-looking, with some unusual coloristic and iconographic features rather thanorotundly as Byzantine. Similarly, to say that the second Koimesis has manyByzantine iconographic and stylistic features but some notable differences in thedetails is both more accurate and more effective. Fuzziness is useful: in the caseof Byzantine art in the Salento, it can help us move beyond monolithic catego-rization and compel us to think about local and regional variety, taking paint-ings on their own terms rather than as inferior provincial products or artificially

inflated echoes of Constantinopolitan models.62


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We need fuzzy language and vague concepts in medieval art (and else-where). In my view, we do our colleagues, our students, and the public a disserviceby implying that our material is easily slotted into clear conceptual categories

when the reality is that it occupies a slippery slope. In the case of wall paintingin an erstwhile Byzantine province (Salento) or an Orthodox but nonimperialenvironment (Serbia) or when Byzantine craftsmen are pressed into service inan entirely different cultural context (Sicily), byzantinizing is a better choicethan Byzantine. It too is a fuzzy term, but at least it is obviously vague and doesnot try to convey false certainty. I used the term byzantinizing several timesin my Otranto monograph to refer to paintings that are Byzantine in style andiconography to some degree but probably not by true Byzantine artists. Val-entino Pace said that Byzantine is appropriate for what was done within thepolitical borders of the empire, Byzantinizing what was done outside those bor-

ders.63

Elsewhere, byzantinizing has been used as a synonym for Orthodox-looking.64I am not suggesting that byzantinizing should in every case replaceByzantine as a label; rather, I am urging that the terms we use be more open-ended, more versatile, more fuzzy. The way we talk about and label things affectsthe way we think about them. Rather than thinking of art history as a sciencethat permits definitive labeling and categorization, we should dispense with themonolithic terms and especially with the easy but inaccurate binary oppositions;we should demonstrate more humility about what we do not know; and we shoulddemand more complex thinking about our material. Byzantinists may be hungryfor more monuments, but Salentine art, like Sicilian and Serbian, is not simplyByzantine. While its frescoes may occupy points on the Byzantine-art contin-uum, Santa Maria di Cerrate is a complicated monument that is not illuminatedby labeling it Byzantine.

63. Pace and von Falkenhausen, review of The Glory ofByzantium, 103. See also the recent blog posting by Mat-thew Milliner on the Byzantinizing of America: www.millinerd.com/2010/10/byzantin izing-of-america.html.

64. Gerstel, Aesthetics of Orthodox Faith, 331: byzan-tinizing, that is, Orthodox.