Byzantine Art PDF
Preview Byzantine Art
UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape '1 own Dar es Salaam Delhi . ^Hf^ Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi JUL SB BR Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press N6250 .C656 2000 © Robin Cormack 2000 First published 2000 by Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the proper permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available 0-19-284211-0 10 987654321 Typeset by Paul Manning Printed in Hong Kong on acid-free paper by C6cC Offset Printing Co., Ltd Preface This part of the Oxford History of Art must expect to engage with a variety of viewpoints which may be mutually incompatible. Byzantine art for some will be seen as a direct continuation of Greco- Roman art. In this case, it is the next stage in a story in which the art and aesthetic ideas of antiquity move on and are developed in the different circumstances of a society that described itself as Roman, at least until it had doubts in the thirteenth century, but that thought and wrote predominantly in Greek rather than Latin. From such a perspective, Byzantine art emerges as western art and will be seen at its most effective in its continuation and adaptations of classicism. Byzantine intellectuals encouraged this viewpoint when they praised their own art for its 'lifelike' appearance, and when they even invoked the famous artists of anti-quity in comparison. The ninth-century intellectual Photios, who became patriarch and head of the Byzantine church, actually described one church pavement in Constantinople, decorated with inlaid representations of various animals, as a work of art that surpassed that of Phidias, Parrhasios, Praxiteles, and Zeuxis. No one now will take his claim at face value, and most will regard it as eccentric, probably demonstrating book learning rather than an appreciation of ancient art. Yet it is the shock of Byzantine remarks like this that injects a tension into a viewing of Byzantine art as a continuation of antiquity. How true and how false is our perception of Byzantine art and the Byzantines' perception of their own art? The opposite standpoint is to put the greatest emphasis on discontinuity with antiquity. The question is then how radically Christian art rejected classical learning and culture because they were unacceptably tinged with paganism, and how far the innovation of Byzantine art lay in the exploration of non-naturalistic imagery. Was there a deliberate and positive move against and away from classical 'illusionism' and towards an art that might better convey and symbolize the eternal values of the Christian religion and the superiority of another world beyond the earthly world? This view lias sometimes stimulated the idea of Byzantine art as an abstract form of art more in line with the orient than with the west, and has encouraged the viewing of Byzantine art as a non-western art. These two views of Byzantine art are perhaps the extremes and exist with many variations in between. This book aims to deconstruct the extremes by arguing that Byzantium and Byzantine art are products of the Roman world, and that any stark east-west polarity in culture had ahead}' vi PREFACE been broken down by the internationalism of the Roman empire when Christian art developed. The method of this book is to accept that these general questions have always dominated the literature on the subject, and that they can only be broken down and tested through analysis of all the specific images and materials that make up the totality of Byzantine art. At the same time, there is no such thing as an innocent eye, and everyone will come to Byzantine art with the baggage of these and other equally broad assumptions as they face the objects. It follows tha't the quality of any particular Byzantine work will for some lie in its classical echoes, and for others in its bold decorative features, and this may lead to profound disagreement over the nature of the period itself and the materials that hold the best clues to its understanding. Any resolution of these questions must in the end involve treating particular moments of time in depth and with a full awareness of how the Byzantines themselves structured their thought processes. A full art history of Byzantium is also a cultural history of Byzantium. This probably means that studying Byzantium chronologically can demonstrate the extent and nature of change over the centuries, yet it may involve too restricted a selection of materials; whereas studying it synchronically through chosen themes may allow greater consistency of choice of materials, but distort the period by underestimating the amount of change. The solution here has been to work chronologically, and to impose 'periods' on the full range of Byzantine art history, while admitting that the boundaries are artificial and may overlap. Over a long period of time it emerges that
The list of books you might like
