Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sculpted eloquence and Nicetas Choniates's De Signis

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666286.2011.587260

1943-2178

Paroma Chatterjee,

Historical and Religious Studies of Rome

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank Ross Barrett, Lyneise Williams, the anonymous reviewer of Word & Image, and the organizers and participants of the international conference ‘Images at Work: Image and Efficacy from Antiquity to the Rise of Modernity’ held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, in September–October 2010, where a portion of this paper was presented. Notes 1 – Nicetas Choniates De Signis, ed. J.A. Van Dieten, Nicetae Choniatae Historia (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975); trans. Harry J. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas Choniates (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), p. 2. All subsequent passages are drawn from Magoulias's translated text and referenced as Historia followed by the appropriate number marking the passage. These numbers correspond to van Dieten's edition of the Historia. 2 – For an analysis of the manuscripts of the Historia, see Alicia J. Simpson, ‘Before and after 1204: The versions of Niketas Choniates's Historia,’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006), pp. 189–221. For the most recent scholarship on the text, see Niketas Choniates. A Historian and a Writer, ed. Alicia Simpson and Stephanos Efthymiadis (Geneva: La Pomme d'Or, 2009). 3 – See Jonathan Harris, ‘Distortion, divine providence and genre in Nicetas Choniates's account of the collapse of Byzantium 1180–1204,’ Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000), pp. 19–31; idem, ‘Looking back on 1204: Niketas Choniates in Nicaea,’ Mesologeios 12 (2001), pp. 117–24. 4 – Other sources on sculpture in Constantinople are the Patria, ed. T. Preger, Scriptores originum Constantinopolitanarum, vols I–II (Leipzig. B. G. Teubner, 1901–1907). For a translation and discussion of the Parastaseis, see Constantinople in the Early Eighth Century. The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai. Introduction, Translation and Commentary, ed. A. Cameron and J. Herrin (Leiden: Brill, 1984). For a comprehensive discussion of sculpture in general, see Sarah Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 5 – For a brief but informative discussion on the De Signis, see Anthony Cutler, ‘The De Signis of Nicetas Choniates. A reappraisal,’ American Journal of Archaeology 72/2 (April 1968), pp. 113–18. 6 – Historia, p. 654. 7 – Titos Papamastorakis, ‘Interpreting the De Signis of Niketas Choniates,’ in Simpson and Efthymiadis, Niketas Choniates, pp. 209–24. 8 – Magdalino points out that despite his occasional scepticism regarding portents and divination, Choniates still takes them seriously enough to devote considerable portions of his chronicle to them. See ‘Prophecy and Divination in the History,’ in Simposon and Efthymiadis, Niketas Choniates, pp. 59–74. 9 – Anthony Kaldellis, ‘Paradox, Reversal and the Meaning of History,’ in ibid., pp. 75–99. 10 – For sources on the Fourth Crusade see Michael J. Angold, The Byzantine Empire, 1025–1204: A Political History, 2nd ed. (London: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1997); The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. Angeliki Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001); The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange between East and West during the Period of the Crusades, ed. Vladimir P. Goss (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986). 11 – Kaldellis, ‘Paradox, reversal and the meaning of history,’ pp. 85–87. 12 – Papamastorakis, ‘Interpreting the De Signis of Niketas Choniates,’ pp. 211–12. 13 – The literature on ekphrasis is vast. For studies on Byzantine ekphrasis, see Leslie Brubaker, ‘Perception and Conception: Art, Theory, and Culture in Ninth-Century Byzantium,’ Word & Image 5 (1989), pp. 19–32; Liz James and Ruth Webb, ‘“To Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places”: Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium,’ Art History 14 (1991), pp. 1–17; Robert S. Nelson, ‘To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium,’ in Seeing as Others Saw. Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 143–68; Ruth Webb, ‘Accomplishing the Picture: Ekphrasis, Mimesis, and Martyrdom in Asterios of Amaseia,’ in Art and Text in Byzantine Culture, ed. Liz James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 13–32; and Ingela Nilsson, Erotic Pathos, Rhetorical Pleasures: Narrative Technique and Mimesis in Eumathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 2001). 14 – Historia, pp. 647, 648. 15 – Henry Maguire, ‘Images of the Court,’ in The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era A.D. 843–1261, ed. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), pp. 184–85. 16 – The famous description by Ammianus Marcellinus of Costantius's procession into Rome in 357, when the Emperor sat in his chariot ‘as if his neck were firmly clamped…,’ appearing to onlookers ‘as though he were the statue of a man’ is important here. For a general account of this passage, see Christopher Kelly, ‘Empire Building,’ in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, ed. G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 170–95, here p. 174. 17 – Gregory of Nazianz, Eulogy on Basil of Caesarea 52.2 PG xxxvi. 569 A. For a brief discussion, see Peter Brown, ‘A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy,’ English Historical Review 88/346 (January, 1973), pp. 1–34, here p. 13. 18 – Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, trans. E.R.A Sewter (London: Penguin Books, repr. 2003), p. 451. 19 – Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 437. 20 – Historia, pp. 649, 650. 21 – Ibid. p. 649. 22 – John of Damascus, On the Divine Images. Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, trans. D. Anderson (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1980), p. 36. 23 – For literature on the Blachernai miracle, see Charles Barber, ‘Living Painting or the Limits of Painting?: Glancing at Icons with Michael Psellos,’ in Reading Michael Psellos, ed. Charles Barber and David Jenkins (Leiden: Brill, 2006); and Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 24 – For an extensive discussion of mimesis, see Karl F. Morrison, “I am you.” The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 7. 25 – Historia, p. 650. 26 – Patriarch Nicephoros, Antirrheticus I adversus Constantinum Copronymum, in Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Graeca vol. 100, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris: parisiis, apud tratres Garner editores, 1865), col. 277. 27 – For an excellent discussion, see Charles Barber, ‘From Image into Art: Art after Byzantine Iconoclasm,’ Gesta 34 (1995), pp. 5–10. 28 – Charles Barber, ‘Leo of Chalcedon, Euthymios Zigabenos and the Return to the Past,’ in Contesting the Logic of Painting. Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 131–57. 29 – Historia, p. 649. 30 – Marc Shell, Art and Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 9. 31 – Ibid., p. 12. 32 – See the formulation of Basil the Great, De Spiritu Sanctu, in Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Graeca, vol. 32, col. 1249. 33 – Alan M. Stahl, ‘Coinage and Money in the Latin Empire of Constantinople,’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001), pp. 197–206. 34 – Ibid., p. 206. 35 – Historia, p. 647. 36 – For an account of the perceived atrocities committed by the Latins at the altar, and their ‘erroneous’ sense of attire, see Tia M. Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists. Errors of the Latins (Urbana–Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 56–64. 37 – Historia, p. 651. 38. Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 44–51. 39 – Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 40 – Ibid., pp. 164–65. 41 – Herbert Hunger, ‘On the Imitation (ΜΙΜHΣΙΣ) of Antiquity in Byzantine Literature,’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23/24 (1969/1970), pp. 15–38, here p. 29. 42 – Ibid., p. 29. 43 – Ibid., p. 29. 44 – Historia, p. 348. 45 – Ibid., p. 349. 46 – Ibid., p. 349. 47 – For an excellent discussion of sculpture and sound, see Anthony Kaldellis, ‘Christodoros on the Statues of the Zeuxippos Baths: A New Reading of the Ekphrasis,’ Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007), pp. 361–83. 48 – Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1969), pp. 46, 61. 49 – For a discussion of Adorno and Horkheimer's reading of the disempowerment of art, see Albrecht Wellmer, ‘The Death of the Sirens and the Origin of the Work of Art,’ New German Critique 81 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 5–19. 50 – Morrison, “I am you,” p. 88. 51 – Henry Maguire, ‘Profane Icons: The Significance of Animal Violence in Byzantine art,’ RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 38 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 24 – 30. Significant here is the mosaic in the Great Palace depicting an eagle clutching a snake with its talons. For a discussion of the motif and its recurrence in other architectural spaces, see Robert Ousterhout, ‘Architecture, Art, and Komnenian Ideology at the Pantokrator Monastery,’ in Byzantine Constantinople, ed. Nevra Necipoğlu (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 52 – Historia, p. 651. 53 – Stratis Papaioannou, ‘Animate Statues: Aesthetics and Movement,’ in Reading Michael Psellos, pp. 95–116. 54 – Henry Maguire, ‘Epigrams, Art, and the “Macedonian Renaissance”’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994), pp. 105–15, here p. 111. 55 – James and Webb, ‘“To Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places,’” pp. 1–17. 56 – Historia, p. 652. 57 – Ibid., p. 652. 58 – Ibid., p. 652i. 59 – For a comprehensive study of such spells, see Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 60 – Ibid., pp. 43–50. 61 – Homer, The Odyssey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), Book 4, pp. 1–305. 62 – See S. Douglas Olson, ‘The Stories of Helen and Menelaus (Odyssey 4.240–89) and the Return of Odysseus,’ American Journal of Philology 110/3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 387–94. 63 – Anne T. Bergren, ‘Helen's “Good Drug” Odyssey IV 1–305,’ in Contemporary Literary Hermeneutics and Interpretation of Classical Texts, ed. Stephen Kresic (Ottawa: Ottawa University Press, 1981), pp. 201–14. 64 – Lillian Eileen Doherty, Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 57. 65 – Bergren, ‘Helen's “Good Drug,”’ p. 210. 66 – Helen's first appearance in the Iliad is when she is engaged in weaving a tapestry depicting the battle between the Trojans and the Achaeans; in other words, she weaves a tale just as the poet weaves his epic narrative. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer for this insight. 67 – Historia, p. 652. 68 – Ibid., p. 653. 69 – Roderick Saxey, ‘The Homeric Metamorphoses of Andronikos I Komnenos,’ in Simpson and Efthymiadis, Niketas Choniates pp. 120 – 43, here p. 126. 70 – Historia, p. 652. 71 – Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 9. 72 – Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 73 – Historia, p. 4. 74 – Ibid., p. 4. 75 – W.H. Auden, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage International, 2007), p. 188.