Graphic Signs of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 300-900

404 Pages·2018·34.13 MB·English

by  Ildar Garipzanov

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
OXFORD STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL
EUROPEAN HISTORY
General Editors
john h. arnold patrick j. geary
and
john watts
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
Graphic Signs of
Authority in Late
Antiquity and the Early
Middle Ages, 300–900
ILDAR GARIPZANOV
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
1
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First Edition published in 2018
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
To Annika, Elvira, and Lenar
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/02/18, SPi
Acknowledgements
During my childhood, the first thing I saw waking up every day was a Central Asian
carpet hanging on the wall beside my bed. It was replete with various geometric
shapes and aniconic forms that were very distinct from the natural world and
saturated with colours absent in my immediate surroundings. Every morning, my
eyes browsed through this visual labyrinth and occasionally discovered new patterns
and discerned silhouettes of unfamiliar things. This wall carpet with its interlacing
lines and curves captivated my awakened imagination, and seemed infinite in the
number of shapes and figures it revealed to my contemplative gaze. These early
experiences of visual thinking no doubt contributed to my fascination with late
antique and early medieval aniconic graphic devices, which constitute the main
subject of this study.
The vast amount of surviving visual graphic evidence, most of which remains
unknown outside highly specialized disciplines and some of which has not been
studied at all, meant that it took much effort and external support to complete this
book. The generous funding of the Research Council of Norway (grant no. 217925
for 2012–17) financially supported my research and writing throughout, whilst
the highly supportive academic environment at the Department of Archaeology,
Conservation, and History at the University of Oslo, which I joined in 2012, made
my work on this project a highly productive process. My special thanks to my
departmental fellow historians Klaus Nathaus and Veronique Pouillard for helping
me to see my book project within a much broader perspective, and to Knut
Ødegård and Alf Storrud for their genial assistance during my research trips to
Rome and Istanbul. I also truly enjoyed the cordial atmosphere at the Norwegian
Institute in Rome, my research base during various Italian trips, and I am grateful
to Siri Sande, Anne Nicolaysen, and Manuela Michelloni for their unwavering
support on those occasions.
Visiting fellowships at Balliol College, Oxford and at Clare Hall, Cambridge as
well as a visiting membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
have greatly contributed to the successful completion of this book, by allowing me
to write its various parts in vibrant and highly stimulating scholarly settings. I am
filled with sincere gratitude to Lesley Abrams, Jonathan Shepard, Rosamond
McKitterick, Anna Muthesius, Patrick Geary, Nicola di Cosmo, and Alan Stahl for
their generous support and hospitality during those academic stays. I am also
appreciative of companionship with other visiting historians and medievalists at
the Institute for Advanced Study in the autumn of 2016; social interactions and
conversations with most of them made my research stay there quite a unique
experience. The latter membership provided me with access to visual resources at
the Index of Christian Arts at Princeton University, and I am thankful to Catherine
Fernandez for her expert guidance through its card database, which has yet to be
fully digitized.
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viii Acknowledgements
Writing a book navigating through the worlds of late antiquity, early Byzantium,
and the early Middle Ages is a challenging task for a single author, and I have learnt
many positive lessons from scholarly collaboration and the productive exchange
of ideas within the Early Graphicacy network and during its conferences in Oslo,
Rome, and Istanbul. I would like to express special thanks to Caroline Goodson,
Henry Maguire, Patrick Geary, David Ganz, Larry Hurtado, Leslie Brubaker,
Michelle Brown, Ben Tilghman, Michael Squire, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Beatrice
Kitzinger, Richard Abdy, Jim Crow, and Chris Entwistle. I have also benefited
from presenting preliminary thoughts and some sections of this book at the Earlier
Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London, at the
Oliver Smithies Lecture Series at Oxford University, the Materialität und Medialität
des Geschriebenen Seminar at Heidelberg University, the Late Antique and Medieval
Seminars at Cambridge University, the Making a Mark Conference at Brown
University, and the Medieval Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton. I am further greatly indebted to John Arnold for his valuable feedback
on the book’s original design and to Henry Maguire, Michelle Brown, Celia Chazelle,
Jinty Nelson, Rosamond McKitterick, Christoph Eger, Caroline Goodson, and
anonymous readers at Oxford University Press for casting an expert eye on its
earlier drafts or selected chapters and providing me with encouraging comments
and constructive criticism.
This book relies on a substantial number of images to make its narrative accessible
to readers, which necessitated the demanding task of acquiring relevant image
permissions from different institutions in Europe and North America, and I am
appreciative of the friendly efforts that Manuela Michelloni, Romy Wyche, and Alf
Storrud invested in communicating on my behalf with relevant collections and
authorities in Italy, France, and Turkey. I am also grateful to Svein Gullbekk and
Alan Stahl for their cordial support and assistance in providing this book with the
photos of relevant coins from their numismatic collections at the University of
Oslo and Princeton University. Furthermore, I am beholden to those museums
and libraries, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York, the Walters
Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel—to
name just a few—that facilitate current visual and material turns in humanities by
sharing images of their artefacts and manuscripts with researchers and the general
public under unlimited Creative Commons licenses. I hope that more museums
and libraries will choose this path of public service in the future.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Alice Hicklin and Albert Fenton for
their assistance in styling my text in British English and checking its various
technical aspects, as well as the editorial staff at Oxford University Press for their
sterling work in bringing my manuscript to its final form.
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Contents
List of Figures xiii
List of Charts xxi
List of Diagrams xxiii
List of Abbreviations xxv
Introduction 1
0.1 Graphic Signs, Graphic Visualization, and Early Graphicacy 3
0.2 Graphic Signs of Authority and Political Culture 8
0.3 Graphic Signs of Authority: Historiographic Trends 13
0.4 Cultural History of Graphic Signs of Authority 19
I. GRAPHIC SIGNS OF DIVINE AUTHORITY
IN LATE ANTIQUITY
1. The Origins of Early Christian Graphic Signs 27
1.1 The nomina sacra, Staurogram, and Chi-Rho 27
1.2 Early Christian Authors on Symbolic Meanings of Letters and
Christian Graphic Signs 31
1.3 Protective Seals and the Bruce Codex 35
1.4 ‘Magical’ Characters and their Early Christian Critics 41
1.5 Apotropaic Graphic Devices as a Symptomatic Feature of
Late Antique Culture 47
2. Christograms as Signs of Authority in the Late Roman Empire 50
2.1 Lactantius and Constantine I’s Victorious Sign in 312 50
2.2 Eusebius and the Appropriation of the Chi-Rho as an Imperial
Triumphant Symbol in the 320–40s 54
2.3 The Hierarchy of Christian Signs in the Visual Communication
of Imperial Authority in the Second Half of the Fourth and
Early Fifth Centuries 65
2.4 Christograms as Paradigmatic Christian Symbols at the Turn
of the Fifth Century 77
3. The Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 81
3.1 The Early Symbolism of the Cross and the Origins of the Cult
of the Holy Cross 81
3.2 The Sign of the Cross as a Late Antique Symbol of Authority 89
3.3 The Apotropaic Power of the Sign of the Cross in Late Antiquity 99