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Model and Copy in Byzantium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Anthony Cutler
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Extract

Few aspects of social behavior tell us more about a culture than those practices that involve the roles it assigns to models and copies. Under interpretation, such conduct reveals its attitudes toward authority and antiquity, its sense of identity and regard for security, and the relative importance that it attached to imitation and invention. To varying degrees, all societies display these concerns, but in none were they so firmly grounded in a considered theory of the relation between prototype and derivative as they were in Byzantium. An example from the domain of law will illustrate, though not explain, this cultural difference. As against the Roman tradition in which the use of copies as evidence in court was prohibited, at least from the tenth century on Byzantine tribunals accepted the legitimacy of certified copies of documents. The very word used for an official copy—ison, meaning equal— suggests the conceptual distinction between it and the terms copie, Kopie, kopiya, and so on, in modern languages, all derived from the Latin word for abundance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 46 , Issue 183 , September 1998 , pp. 57 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

Notes

1. See N. Oikonomides, s.v. "Copy official" in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, New York, 1991, p. 530.

2. Traité du Saint-Esprit, XVIII, in Sources chrétiennes, vol. 17 bis, ed. B. Pruche, Paris, 1968, p. 406.

3. De fide Orthodoxa IV in Patrologia graeca 94, col. 1158.

4. Oratio I, in Patrologia graeca 94, col. 1269.

5. Epist. ad Platonem, in Patrologia graeca, 99, col. 500. For more on this question, and particularly the model-image relation that connects the members of the Trinity, see G. Ladner, "The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy," Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 7 (1953): 8-10.

6. A charge levied at the Iconoclastic Council of 754. See G.D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio XII, col. 252.

7. Most succinctly argued by the Patriarch Nicephorus (c. 750-828). See his Dis cours contre les iconoclastes, trans. M.-J. Mondzain-Baudinet, Paris, 1989.

8. The original wording is to be found in his Antirrhetikos in Patrologia graeca 100, col. 777C.

9. A. Guillou, ed. Recueil des inscriptions grecques médiévales d'Italie, Rome, 1996, no. 56. The chrysobull, dated 1218, was drawn for Theodore Comnenus Doukas, ruler of Epirus.

10. G. Vikan, "Ruminations on Edible Icons. Originals and Copies in the Art of Byzantium," Studies in the History of Art 20 (1989): 47-59.

11. For this case and its ideological context, see A. Cutler, "Originality as a Cul tural Phenomenon," in Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art and Music, ed. A. Littlewood, Oxford, 1995, pp. 203-216, esp. 205. The studies in this volume, on which I have drawn in the present paper, contain valuable observations on the topic specified in its title.

12. Chronographia, ed. C. de Boor, Leipzig, 1883, I, pp. 149-150.

13. P. Magdalino, "Observations on the Nea Ekklesia of Basil I," Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 37 (1987): 52-53.

14. The classic study of these replications by R. Krautheimer, "Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture,"' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1-33 has not been replaced.

15. N. Oikonomides, "Pour une nouvelle lecture des inscriptions de Skripou en Béotie," Travaux et Mémoires 12 (1994): 481.

16. See the body of texts usefully assembled and commented by P. Magdalino and R. Nelson, "The Emperor in Byzantine Art of the Twelfth Century," Byzantinische Forschungen 8 (1982): 123-183.

17. On this matter, a controversial issue, see A. Cutler, "Mistaken Antiquity. Thoughts on Some Recent Commentary on the Rosette Caskets," in AETOS. Studies in Honour of Cyril Mango, ed. I. Sevcenko and I. Hutter, Leipzig, 1998, pp. 46-54, with bibliography.

18. Thus compare the famous observation of Sylvester Syropoulos when, attend ing the Council of Ferrara in 1408, he encountered forms that were alien to him: "When I enter a Latin Church, I do not revere any of the saints that are there because I do not recognize any of them." See V. Laurent, Les ‘Mémoires' du grand ecclésiarque de I'Eglise de Constantinople … sur le Concile de Florence (1438-1439), Paris, 1971.

19. The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843- 1261, exhib. cat., ed. H.C. Evans and W.D. Wixom, no. 140 (I. Kalavrezou). The same strategy is used in images of emperors anointed by the patriarch of Con stantinople in the illustrated Skylitzes manuscript in Madrid.

20. The Glory of Byzantium, no. 147G (W.E. Metcalf).

21. A.W. Epstein, Tokah Kilise: Tenth-Century Metropolitan Art in Cappadocia, Wash ington, D.C. 1985, p. 33, pp. 35-36, 79-80.

22. L. Rodley, "The Pigeon House Church, Çavusin," Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 33 (1983): 301-339.

23. A. Grabar, Sculptures byzantines du moyen âge II, Paris, 1976, no. 145. For this and other derivatives, see A. Cutler, "Art in Byzantine Society: Motive Forces of Byzantine Patronage," (1981), reprinted in his Image and Ideology in Byzantine Art, Aldershot and Brookfiel, Vermont, 1992, study no. XI, esp. pp. 780-787.

24. A. Cutler, The Aristocratic Psalters in Byzantium, Bibliothèque des Cahiers Archéologiques XIII, Paris, 1984, fig. 67.

25. In my turn, I derive this information from the forthcoming study of R. Ouster hout, Byzantine Masons at Work.

26. Idem, The Architecture of the Kariye Camii in Istanbul, Washington, DC, 1987, pp. 19-20.

27. P.M. Mylonas, "Le plan initial du catholicon de la Grande-Lavra au Mont-Athos et la genèse du type du catholicon athonite," Cahiers archéologiques 32 (1984): 89-112.

28. See note 3 above.

29. I have in mind the difference between mosaics in the Chora in Constantinople and the church of the Holy Apostles in Thesalonike, noted by T. Gouma-Peterson in Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art and Music, p. 138 and figs. 11.4, 11.5.

30. Ibid., pp. 133-137 and figs. 11.1-11.3.