Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art

In general surveys of art history in current use, Byzantine art has been separated from Western Medieval art by several strategies. Most often Early Christian and Byzantine art follows Roman art and precedes Islamic art. Advancing as late as the sixteenth or seventeenth century in Orthodox and Islamic countries, the surveys turn back to early medieval Western Europe from which another narrative proceeds directly to the Renaissance. In some survey books, the transition from Rome to Byzantium and Islam is also the moment to introduce the arts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These organizational strategies, which disassociate Byzantium from Western Europe, are encountered in art history's first general handbooks, published in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century by Franz Kugler and Carl Schnaase, and still earlier in the influential Philosophy of History by G. W. F. Hegel. The surveys' chronological inversions and Hegel's general assessment of Byzantium should be understood as a manifestation of Orientalism, a cultural prejudice detected in other aspects of the treatment of Byzantine art in American textbooks. Instead, it is suggested that new accountings of medieval art transcend the rigid conceptual boundaries inherited from European nationalism and explore larger problems across the many cultures and spaces of the Middle Ages. "These petrified relations must be forced to dance by singing to them their own melody. "' When I began studying at the Institute of Fine Arts some twenty-five years ago, the history of art was divided into a number of fields. We grouped these fields together in order to define our work and ourselves. Two contiguous fields made one's major, a third became one's related minor and a fourth, more distant from the others, the unrelated minor. As I remember, the system that applied to us was basically the same as listed in the Institute's current catalogue: ... (15) Greek Art; (16) Roman Art; (17) Early Christian Art through Carolingian Art; (18) Byzantine Art; (19) Islamic Art to the Mongol Conquest, 690-1250; (20) Islamic Art after the Mongol Conquest, 1250-1800; (21) Romanesque Art; (22) Gothic Art; (23) Italian Art from 1300 to 1500... I made Early Christian and Byzantine art my major and minored in Early Islamic art. Fellow medievalists chose to major in Romanesque and Gothic art, or Gothic and Early Renaissance art. Then as now, we were supposed to choose for an unrelated minor a field more distant from our major concentration, and I selected Gothic art. Persuading the faculty that Gothic art was unrelated to Byzantine art was not easy (nor, I confess, educationally wise, if intellectual breadth was the objective). But in the end I was supported by an indulgent adviser and by the classification itself, its construction of time, and the way that, like all temporal systems, it made the same other and the other same, as Johannes Fabian has put it.2 Because Byzantine Art, no. 18 on the list, was numerically distant from Gothic Art, no. 22, the two subjects were deemed sufficiently remote and independent. How and why this might be possible-to understand two coeval periods in the history of Christian art as unrelated-is the subject of my essay. In that past world, whatever choices we made about our fields, most of us gave little thought to the taxonomy into which we fitted our courses, our research, and our lives. We worked contentedly within a paradigm, seldom questioning its borders or its processes of ordering and controlling knowledge. Indeed, why should we have? Then, the problem of art history was art, not art history. In a generation, much has changed. The so-called New Art History is upon us, and exciting new methods sweep through our formerly isolated discipline. But the changing fashions of critical theory seldom affect the deep structures of our subject. Thus, Marxists may tell us much about the social context, for example, of certain Impressionist painters, but in the process merely reaffirm the canon.3 Semioticians might ply their craft on well-known monuments and thereby reinstate traditional genres. Scholars writing from the perspectives of feminism or post-colonialism critique and deny established modes of inquiry, while at the same time acknowledging and to some degree validating the old paradigms, because the act of studying, for example, the "Other" is also to recognize its existence as other. Our periodization of art history and our systems of organizing academic departments have changed remarkably little in the past century. We add to the canon; less often do we re-think how and why it is constructed as it is. Because Byzantine art is and is not a part of the Western tradition, it is a useful place to ponder such issues. In so doing, one might study the scholarship on Byzantine art, the collecting and exhibiting of Byzantine art, revivals of Byzantine architecture, paintings, and minor arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even the visual and verbal representation of Byzantine art in popular literature, drama, posters, GESTA XXXV/1 @ The International Center of Medieval Art 1996 3 and advertising. However, on this occasion, I will concentrate on the ways in which Byzantine art is framed by those popular codifiers and guardians of the canon, our modern survey books, those curious unions of aesthetics, pedagogy, and commerce, used everyday but seldom studied in and for themselves. Here, my concern is less the particular accountings of individual monuments and more the position of Byzantine art within the general sequencing of art history. A summary of that data and a listing of the books surveyed follows the conclusion of this article. I will first consider those histories of art in current use, reviewing as many of their editions as I found in my personal library and my university's library. Next, I extend this review back to various general books from earlier in the century and before them to the beginnings of the genre in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. Of the most popular surveys in current use, the oldest is Art Through the Ages, first published in 1926 by Helen Gardner of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later reworked by a changing cast of authors. Gardner prepared editions One through Three, reviewing the last, of 1948, in galleys before her death.4 Thereafter, the book became a corporate endeavor in two senses, and, consequently, editions vary considerably in their arrangement of the material. The fourth edition of 1959 was "revised under the editorship of Sumner McK. Crosby by the Department of the History of Art Yale University." The names of Horst de la Croix and Richard C. Tansey of San Jose State University and later Diane Kirkpatrick of the University of Michigan appear on the title pages of later editions. For my purposes the most relevant aspect of the book is the progression from antiquity to the Middle Ages. After Greek and Roman art, Gardner's first edition moves to chapters X: Early Christian and Byzantine Period, XI: Mohammedan Period, XII: Persian Period, and so through chapters XIII and XIV, the Romanesque and Gothic Periods. Except for the term Mohammedan (appropriately changed to Islamic in the fourth edition), Gardner's sequence is identical to that of the Institute of Fine Arts. The sequence continues to the present. As indicated in Table 1, Byzantine art is routinely followed by Islamic art in current books: Gombrich, Janson, Hartt, Honour/Fleming, and the latest of Marilyn Stokstad, the first volume of which has just appeared. Occasionally Islamic art is omitted entirely or, as in Gardner IV, relegated to a section entitled "NonEuropean Art," one of four larger categories that the Yale faculty created." But in the main, Islamic art is a standard feature even of the survey books with the most strongly Western orientation like Janson, Hartt, or Trachtenberg and Hyman, Architecture...The Western Tradition. Thus, despite the widespread critiques of Orientalism, inspired by Edward Said's fundamental book of that name,6 Islam or at least its art actually has some claim to be a part of the West. Its status in that tradition, however, is scarcely the equal of, say, French Gothic art, and both the historical study of Islamic art and the production of art in the modern world by Muslims have been subjected to the many strategies and consequences of colonialism.7 In the survey books, the position after Byzantine and Islamic art is one in which it was evidently deemed permissible to insert "exotic" material. For example, in his Story of Art, first published in 1950, E. H. Gombrich devoted chapter 6 to Byzantine art. Chapter 7, entitled "Looking Eastward, Islam, China, Second to Thirteenth Century A.D.," is even broader than advertised, ranging from Islamic Spain to nineteenth-century Japan. In Wilkins and Shulz (1990), Byzantine art is followed by a chapter on Anglo-Saxon and Hiberno-Saxon Art, but immediately afterwards, the authors introduce chapters on Art in Japan, Art in China, and Islamic Art before returning finally to the standard medieval sequence of Carolingian Art, Romanesque Art, etc. In Stokstad's new book, even more diverse material is located after the Byzantine chapter, including the obligatory chapter on Islamic Art, but also Art of India before 1100, Chinese Art before 1280, Japanese Art before 1392, Art of the Americas before 1300, and Art of Ancient Africa. In these books, no matter what comes after Byzantine art and the exotic interlude, the narrative ultimately returns to Western medieval art, most often in the period of the early Middle Ages-Hiberno-Saxon or Carolingian art-, as in Gombrich, Janson, Hartt, Wilkins/Schulz, or Stokstad. The same pattern is observed in the textbook surveys of medieval art, e.g., Calkins and Snyder, but not Zarnecki.8 The variations on this structure in Honour and Fleming are less radical than they first seem. Choosing section titles that depart from the usual Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, etc., they create a Part 2, "Art and the World Religions" after Part 1, "Foundations of Art" or prehistoric through Roman art. Thus they interpolate chapter 6, "Buddhism and Far Eastern Art," between Hellenistic and Roman art (ch. 5) and Early Christian and Byzantine art (ch. 7). The latter chapter also treats "Christian Art in Northern Europe." Part 2 concludes with Early Islamic art (ch. 8). Part 3, "Sacred and Secular Art," opens with Ottonian through Gothic art (ch. 9). Thus, the standard western narrative resumes, albeit a bit later than usual, and in this respect has antecedents in earlier books on medieval art.9 Survey books, then, create a conceptual break between Byzantium/Islam and Western Europe. Introducing chapters about the arts of Asia and even Africa and the Americas has the effect of isolating Byzantine art from the art of Western Europe to which it is connected in many ways from the early Middle Ages into the Renaissance. A second distancing mechanism is the chronological inversion by which the narrative moves from Byzantium, which, of course, lasted until 1453, back to early medieval art, so that the rise of the West from late antiquity to the present can be told without interruption and, more importantly, without distracting