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Meaningful mingling: classicizing imagery and Islamicizing script in a Byzantine bowl
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2008 by Alicia Walker
The pseudo-Arabic motifs are typically explained as a decorative and generic appropriation of an Islamic artistic form. (11) The combination of Islamicizing ornament and classicizing vignettes is said to evince aesthetic eclecticism--perhaps intended to bring the Greco-Roman decorative motifs "up to date"--but no deeper association is perceived between the two. (12) In all these discussions, the original function of the bowl has received little consideration. A clearly secular object, the vessel is presumed to have been used in a private context and has been related to an "Arab" drinking cup cited in a letter written by a mid-tenth-century Byzantine emperor. (13)
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No doubt, some medieval viewers saw only an aesthetically pleasing array of antique figures--or a dangerous gathering of pagan idols--when they gazed on the S. Marco bowl. But others may have perceived a meaningful mingling of classicizing and exoticizing elements. By perpetuating an assumption that the program of the bowl lacks particular significance, earlier interpretations instigate a rupture between the pagan and foreign elements on the object and in Byzantine culture more broadly. Although the hybrid nature of the vessel's program defies easy explanation, eclecticism and idiosyncrasy need not be equated with confusion or lack of meaning. Rather, the active selection and combination of classicizing and Islamicizing features may reflect the artistic innovation of the medieval maker, who adapted art forms from the Greco-Roman past and Islamic present to express the particular associations that these non-Christian cultures held for the Byzantine user. It may be fruitful, therefore, to focus not on the deficit of meaning between the Byzantine object and its iconographic and inscriptional models but rather on the creation of meaning within the vessel itself, on the significant relation this object establishes between Islamic and classical cultures, on the one hand, and between these groups and Byzantine culture, on the other.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
It is possible that the hybrid program of the S. Marco bowl reflects a perception prevalent among the middle Byzantine educated elite that both the ancient Greek and contemporary Islamic worlds were sources for occult learning, specifically, divination. The vessel may reflect knowledge of antique divinatory culture and may even have been used in lecanomantic hydromancy, that is, divination through containers filled with water. Lecanomancy and hydromancy were ancient mantic, or divinatory, techniques with relatively consistent textual traditions until at least the fifteenth century. (14) The practitioner gazed into a vessel and witnessed revelations communicated in the surface of the liquid. Information was sought from demons, spirits, or deities, depending on whom the medium conjured. The small size of the S. Marco bowl limited the area in which the message appeared, serving to concentrate the diviner's attention and enhance the efficacy of the device. (15)
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