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Meaningful mingling: classicizing imagery and Islamicizing script in a Byzantine bowl
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2008 by Alicia Walker
[FIGURE 24 OMITTED]
The elite owner of the S. Marco bowl satisfied unorthodox intellectual and supernatural interests by marshaling the imagery and language of non-Christian cultures to empower this divinatory tool. In magic traditions inherited from antiquity, words and images share an essential role, endowing objects with supernatural force. The classicizing imagery and exoticizing script on the S. Marco bowl facilitate divination, while allowing the maker of the object to employ exclusively non-Christian, non-Byzantine sources for occult purposes. The bowl reflects an engagement with antique and Islamic sources that is well informed, if not erudite, and anything but generic.
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This conclusion refutes an interpretation of the Byzantine appropriation of Islamicizing, and even classicizing, motifs as derivative, confused, and meaningless. The S. Marco bowl demands that the modern viewer rethink familiar categories of the antique, the exotic, and the secular in the medieval world. The vessel illuminates the hybrid nature of divination as both ancient and Islamic and provides insight into the means by which occult knowledge was pursued and preserved in Byzantium. Ultimately, this delicate, unassuming glass bowl makes a profound statement about medieval Christian negotiation of visual and textual traditions from the Greco-Roman and Islamic worlds. As such, it offers valuable and rare perspective on how Byzantine material and intellectual culture maintained a dynamic, meaningful, and complex connection with non-Christian traditions, both past and present.
Alicia Walker is assistant professor of medieval art and architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on cross-cultural exchange in the medieval world, and she is currently completing a book on the role of foreign elements in middle Byzantine imperial imagery and ideology [Department of Art History and Archaeology, Washington University in St. Louis, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Mo. 63130-4899, awwalker@wustl.edu].
Notes
This article is part of a larger study on the role of pseudo-Arabic in middle Byzantine art and architecture, which grew from a footnote in my doctoral dissertation. Aspects of my research were presented at the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy, Seattle, 2004, and the College Art Association, Atlanta, 2005. I thank the audiences and participants of those sessions for their valuable suggestions. The bulk of this project was undertaken with the support of a Mellon Post Doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Generous assistance from the Department of Art History and Archaeology, Washington University in St. Louis, supplemented the cost of illustrations. I am greatly indebted to numerous individuals for their helpful advice and perceptive criticism, especially Ioli Kalavrezou, David Roxburgh, Maria Mavroudi, Kirsten Ataoguz, Diliana Angelova, Emine Fetvaci, Ludovico Geymonat, Sheila Blair, and the two anonymous readers for The Art Bulletin. Any mistakes or shortcomings remain, of course, my own.
