Meaningful mingling: classicizing imagery and Islamicizing script in a Byzantine bowl

7. George C. Miles, "Classification of Islamic Elements in Byzantine Architectural Ornament in Greece," Actes du XIIe Congres Internationale des Etudes Byzantines 3 (1964): 281-87; idem, "Byzantium and the Arabs: Relations in Crete and the Aegean Area," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 20-32, with earlier bibliography; Anthony Cutler, "A Christian Ewer with Islamic Imagery and the Question of Arab Gastarbeiter in Byzantium," in Iconographica: Melanges offerts a Piotr Skubiszewski, ed. Robert Favreau and Marie-Helene Debies (Poitiers: Universite de Poitiers, Centre d'Etudes Superieures de Civilisation Medievale, 1999), 63-69; and Robert Nelson, "Palaeologan Illuminated Ornament and the Arabesque," Wiener Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte 41 (1986): 7-22. Pseudo-Arabic was also used in medieval Islamic, Western medieval, and Renaissance art, although the significance of the motif shifts depending on the context. Don Aanavi, "Islamic Pseudo Inscriptions" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1969); S. D. T. Spittle, "Cufic Lettering in Christian Art," Archaeological Journal 111 (1954): 138-54; Richard Ettinghausen, "Kufesque in Byzantine Greece, the Latin West and the Muslim World," in A Colloquium in Memory of George Carpenter Miles (1905-1975) (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1976), 28-47; Michele Bernardini, "Un'iscrizione araba in una vetrata nella chiesa della SS. Annunziata a Firenze," in Arte d'Occidente temi e metodi: Studi in onore di Angiola Maria Romanini, vol. 3, ed. Angiola Maria Romanini and Antonio Cadei (Rome: Edizioni Sintesi Informazione, 1999), 1023-30; and Rosamond Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 51-71.

8. Cutler, "The Mythological Bowl," 239.

9. Kalavrezou, "The Cup of San Marco," 168-73. See also Hans Belting, "Kunst oder Object-Stil?" in Byzanz und der Westen: Studien zur Kunst des europaischen Mittelalters, ed. Irmgard Hutter (Vienna: Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984), 65-83.

10. Unlike Byzantine icons of saints, which accurately identify holy people to ensure the efficacy of the devotee's veneration, representations of pagan characters, it is argued, avoid idolatry by maintaining a degree of uncertainty regarding the identity of the figure depicted, thereby neutralizing any supernatural force they might possess. Eunice Dauterman Maguire and Henry Maguire, Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 165-67.

11. William Tronzo, The Cultures of His Kingdom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 139-40. To my knowledge the sole exception to this trend is Anthony Cutler's suggestion that the pseudo-Arabic might have been deployed as an archaizing device, functioning in tandem with the classicizing imagery. Cutler, "Parallel Universes of Arab and Byzantine Art [with Special Reference to the Fatimid Era]," in L'Egypte fatimide: Son art et son histoire, ed. Marianne Barrucand (Paris: Presses de l'Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999), 639.