“What is art?” is hardly a new question, but it seems to have become more exigent in the past century as novel forms of creativity, spurred by emerging technologies and social change, constantly appear and are frequently contested. I am concerned in this book with visual arts, not with literature or music or other creative spheres of human activity, but that restriction scarcely narrows the possible answers. Found art, environmental art, performance art, digital art are all “new” types of art that are valid to some viewers, and presumably to all of their creators, yet neither serious nor even “art” to others. It is crucial to acknowledge that definitions of art are culturally and temporally specific and, in particular, that Renaissance notions of art are not relevant to the millennium that preceded it. Despite its widespread impact over the past five centuries, the Renaissance idea of art as something finely crafted, a product of unusual skill or inspiration to be appreciated principally for its aesthetic value, is much too limiting.2 Before the European Renaissance (and also in non-European contexts), visual art had a much broader scope.
Objects that qualify as art share three features: they are made to be seen; they are indexes of, and products of, social agency; and they fascinate, compel, or otherwise command attention, whether because they are difficult to execute or because they require a spectator to think as well as to see.3 These essential features of art accommodate a wide range of visual production: from objects (clothing, jewelry, painted ceramics) to decoration and embellishment (inscriptions, wall paintings, churches) to spectacles (liturgies, civic processions, funerals). Such an expansive definition of art is much closer to that used by archaeologists and anthropologists than to the one typically employed by historians of postmedieval art.4 It deliberately unites the categories of visual culture, material culture, and traditional fine art.5 All of these visual and artificial intrusions into the natural landscape had an effect on their viewers. Indeed, pre-Renaissance art was always intended to do something; it was never commissioned, produced, collected, or exhibited for its own sake.6 Exploring the motives for and the effects of visual communication, broadly defined, are among the objectives of this book.
Visual communication before the Renaissance was not limited to pictorial means; it also involved texts. All texts are symbolic means of communication, but they also have visual and material qualities that make them more (or less) effective. They fully satisfy the three criteria for “art” outlined above, and at least some are meant to be seen by more than just their authors. These latter texts are those in the public domain, created to be read or viewed by multiple audiences over time and usually in perpetuity. Like many other forms of visual and material culture, public texts may be costly (e.g., professionally carved marble inscriptions) or humble (e.g., incised graffiti); what they share is the attention of readers/viewers whose experience of the visual is dictated by the text’s fixed location in a public space with multiple viewers. This is very different from the visual experience afforded by portable and private objects, which have limited viewership and, because they may be seen in varied settings, can change their messages according to context. Words that appear in a public context are just as important as those found in documents and should be accorded the same respect.
The subjects of this study, then, are visual products—architectural, performative, pictorial, and textual—that are associated with specific places and intended from the outset to be viewed by multiple persons. These are the visual and material objects most likely to have a social impact because they were always meant to be seen and talked about. I include in this visual-cultural corpus buildings and their furnishings; wall paintings and mosaic pavements; relief (not portable) sculpture; painted and carved inscriptions; incised and painted graffiti (both verbal and pictorial); graves, their markers, and their contents (visible at the time of interment and again when the grave was reused); and any evidence for the built environment and groups acting within it (rituals, regular practices). All of these features of the visual landscape were produced or enacted for public consumption, crafted with the express intent of communicating information and initiating or shaping human (re)action. They were not, or at least not principally, objects of aesthetic pleasure. Books are excluded because of their intentionally limited accessibility, although they do figure here in the background, and panel paintings (icons) are omitted because no locally produced examples survive from the centuries under consideration.7 Because they were mainly, if not exclusively, part of a limited viewing experience, books and portable paintings provide scant information about the agency of public art.
It is my contention throughout this book that pictures and words mattered because they had a critical social role and that art in the public domain had the ability to influence social realities. Art is a form of representation: the images and texts “present” or stand in for their patrons, authors/artists, and viewers. Even ostensibly mimetic art is not the same as reality; it re-presents selected realities, inevitably distorting them in the process. Buildings, images, and inscriptions all need to be “read”—that is, to be analyzed and interpreted in culturally specific ways—and every interpreter naturally brings something different to the task. In this book, I apply selected theoretical perspectives about visual representation to a region and historical period whose visual culture typically has been approached according to more traditional methods of stylistic, iconographic, and textual analysis.
Identity
The theoretical construct “identity” has been for some decades a topic of scholarly and popular interest, but, like “art,” it remains difficult to define.8 A working definition is “that bundle of verbal and corporal [and visual] statements persons and groups use to recognize one another.”9 Identity involves “individuals’ identification with broader groups on the basis of differences socially sanctioned as significant.”10 People acquire identities through social interaction, but these identities are multiple and unstable because all individuals simultaneously occupy more than one position in society and because identity “is a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process.”11 Identities become more and less relevant “depending on the context of specific social situations” (I am, at various and overlapping times, primarily a scholar, an editor, a mother, a wife, and countless other things).12 Social-identity groups may be based on interpersonal interactions (such as family or village groups), or they can be looser categories based on impersonal symbolic links (the elites, the Byzantines, Christians).13 The sum of overlapping personal and social identities composes the self; and representations of the self, and of groups of selves, through visual means is a principal subject of this book.
One of the significant finds of identity theorists of the past half century is that identity is often an etic perception, imposed from outside, and not just by modern interpreters.14 But it is also emic, internal; identities are situational; they “harden” when challenged.15 Thus a local Orthodox response to increasing papal pressure—usually called, erroneously, “Latinization”—was to increase cultural production in Greek in the late thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries, as witnessed by a wealth of new manuscripts.16 However, calling the scribes or their patrons “Greek” or “Byzantine” is a misleading etic categorization. Prior to the fifteenth century, notions of religion, ancestry, and culture were fluid; only in the early modern era, or even later with the rise of nationalism, did these taxonomies become more rigid.17 Because identity is not unilateral, labels inevitably elide important distinctions and risk essentializing their subjects. While this has been rightly criticized by poststructuralist theorists, the “affirmative action” necessary to counteract totalizing discourse about “Greeks,” “Latins,” and “Jews” relies on those very labels.18 In fact, we need labels, and I use them in this book, but I try to be precise in my definitions and therefore use “Greek” and “Latin” to refer to languages rather than cultural groups.
While postpositivists do not claim to “know” historical selves, we can study their representations and the material culture they produced. Indeed, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued, identity is constructed within representation.19 The visual information permits some proximity to historical
