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‘New Art History’ vs. ‘Old History’: writing art history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Robin Cormack
Robin Cormack*
Affiliation:
Courtauld Institute of Art
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Extract

Readers of the judicious paper by John Haldon on ‘“Jargon” vs. “the Facts”?’ Byzantine History-Writing and Contemporary Debates’ will have looked in vain for comment on the status of visual evidence. It is not that art is entirely unmentioned — a reference is made to the history of art and of cultural production in general as belonging to the history of the human past. But no consideration is given to the role of the visual as communication in Byzantine society or as a particular kind of ‘unwritten’ figural evidence which might form a characteristic arena of expression separate from the discourses of texts. Yet it is clear that one outcome of the current theoretical debates on how to read texts and images has been a new questioning of the meanings of visual evidence and of its value in history writing. Contrary to the belief of some historians, methodological changes in history writing have a direct impact on art history writing too. The most obvious result has been an increasing emphasis on ways of understanding how images worked in Byzantine society in preference to an exclusive concentration on the categorization and arrangement of art in line with modern and often anachronistic notions. The inevitable outcome is that the study of art can no longer be considered the preserve of the traditional art historian.

Type
Critical Studies
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 10 , 1986 , pp. 223 - 232
Copyright
Copyright ©The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1986

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References

1. In BMGS 9(1984/5) 95–132.

2. This question is a key concern of Cormack, Robin, Writing in Gold. Byzantine Society and its Icons (London 1985).Google Scholar

3. A similar point is made for Classical art history by Smith, R.R.R., ‘Roman Portraits: Honours, Empresses, and Late Emperors’, review article in JRS 75 (1985) 209–21 Google Scholar; see also Osborne, R., ‘The Myth of Propaganda and the Propaganda of Myth’, Hephaistos 5/6 (1983/4) 61–70 Google Scholar; for approaches towards non-European art, see Anderson, R.L., Art in Primitive Societies (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1979)Google Scholar; Layton, R., The Anthropology of Art (London 1981)Google Scholar; and Vansina, J., Art History in Africa (London 1984)Google Scholar. See on Byzantium, Vikan, G., ‘Byzantine Art as a Mirror of its Public’, Apollo 118 (1983) 164–7.Google Scholar

4. For example Parker, R. and Pollock, G., Old Mistresses. Women, Art and Ideology (London 1981)Google Scholar; one of the writers who has in particular influenced approaches towards the ‘beginning’ of the Renaissance and the ‘beginning’ of Modernism, both being treated as periods of ‘revolution’ is Lyotard, J.-F., Discours, Figure (Paris 1971)Google Scholar; the difficulty for the Byzantinist posed by these discussions is where their comparative interest lies (could the beginning of Christian art in Late Antiquity be seen as a ‘revolution’? How does one treat a period such as that of Byzantine art which was devoid of obvious revolution?).

5. Hadjinicolaou, N., Art History and the Class Struggle (London 1978 — translation of the original French edition of 1973)Google Scholar and Wolff, J., The Social Production of Art (London 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar set out the theoretical issues. More involved in stating a particular position is Bryson, N., Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze (London 1983).Google Scholar

6. Demus, O., The Mosaics of San Marco (Chicago 1985)Google Scholar. Until more archaeological information is published about the mosaics, controversy will no doubt continue over the extent of medieval and restored areas and about the relative order of the mosaic phases (as, for example, in the east dome). In a review of this book in TLS (1985), C. Mango suggested a historical interpretation for the relative quantity of Byzantine mosaics in Italy: that the vast amount of work done there indicated that the medium of mosaic was an ‘export’ from Byzantium, and less important within its own society. This inference from the surviving material seems to me as odd as saying that in Classical Greece the importance of the production of Attic pottery lay in its export to Italy. But one sees that the challenges to the study by Demus of San Marco is as likely to come from positivistic ‘archaeological’ art history as from elsewhere.

7. I am using terms in the senses defined by Haldon, as in note 1.

8. See Mango, C., Byzantinum. The Empire of New Rome (London 1980)Google Scholar and his collected essays Byzantium and its image (Variorum reprints 1984). See his own statement in the preface of the latter (ii): ‘The task of the Byzantine historian is to identify the layers of distortion — some of them clear and palpable, others barely perceptible, yet all the more insidious — and to peel them away in order to uncover the reality beneath. I hope I shall not be charged with excessive positivism in assuming that such a reality exists and that it can be apprehended to some extent, even if our understanding of it is ineveitably conditioned by the gradual shift in our own viewpoint’. For comments on Mango (among others) see A. Kazhdan in collaboration with Franklin, S., Studies on Byzantine Literature of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Cambridge 1984)Google Scholar esp 1–22, ‘Approaches to the history of Byzantine civilisation: from Krause to Beck and Mango’.

9. Esp. Christopher, Vlshzx, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church (London 1982)Google Scholar: see his statements in the Introduction, 1–6. Other papers are collected in the Variorum Reprint, C. Walter, Studies in Byzantine Iconography (London 1977).

10. Walter, C., ‘Expressionism and Hellenism. A Note on Stylistic Tendencies in Byzantine Figurative Art from Spatantike to the Macedonian ‘Renaissance’, REB 42 (1984) 265–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Cutler, A., Transfigurations. Studies in the Dynamics of Byzantine Iconography (Pennsylvania State University 1975)Google Scholar. In the same year E. Kitzinger gave the Slade Lectures at Cambridge University dedicated to analysing the meaningfulness of visual forms themselves in the belief that the formal aspects of works of art hold important clues to understanding the period which produced them; see Kitzinger, E., Byzantine Art in the Making. Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean Art 3rd-7th Century (London 1977) esp 1–6.Google Scholar

12. Belting, H., Das Bild undsein Publikum im Mittelalter. Form und Funktion Früher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin 1981)Google Scholar; see also the version of part of this book, ‘An Image and its Function in the Liturgy: the Man of Sorrows in Byzantium’, OOP 34–5 (1980–1) 1–16.

13. Sinding-Larsen, S., Iconography and Ritual. A Study of Analytical Perspectives (Oslo 1985).Google Scholar

14. There is a previous treatment of continuity by Kazhdan, A. and Cutler, A., ‘Continuity and Discontinuity in Byzantine History’, Byzantion 52 (1982) 429–78.Google Scholar

15. J. Haldon, as note 1, refers to this book (p. 127, note 33a), while also hinting that it might belong to the category of a ‘fashionable reworking of the material within the traditional empiricist paradigm’. This seems to me broadly justifiable, but it does less than justice to the methodological suggestions made in chapter eight (‘In search of Indirect Information’), although it may be that these suggestions are not yet worked through by the authors.

16. Most specifically in Change, p.3.

17. For a sketch of some of the currently influential writings which confront the problems of describing and explaining historical change see some of the contributions to Skinner, Q., The Return of the Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge 1985).Google Scholar

18. The changing dimensions of power in the Roman Senate and the subtleties necessary for their analysis are well discussed in Martin, S., ‘Images of Power: the Imperial Senate’, JRS (1985) 222–228.Google Scholar