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Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40:2, Spring 2010
DOI 10.1215/10829636-2009-021 2010 by Duke University Press
a
Problem Portraits: The Ambivalence of Visual Representation in
Byzantium
Paroma ChatterjeeUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel
HillChapel Hill, North Carolina
Perception of an object costs Precise the Objects loss
Emily Dickinson, Poem 1071
Early in the narrative of the eleventh-century Life of St.
Nikon, the reader, or listener, is made privy to a touching episode
of family melodrama.1 Nikons relatives, intent upon retrieving him
from the monastic life, are in hot pur-suit of the saint, while
Nikon flees across a river with the Virgins aid. At this stage,
Nikons father lets out a heart-rending lament: My son, . . . if it
is not your wish to touch me, . . . at least show me your face
which I long to see. . . . therein I will have immeasurable
consolation. Softened, Nikon turns his visage just as much as was
necessary, whereupon his father, taken aback by his withered
countenance, ponders that perhaps it were better I did not see what
I see. But when Nikon finally turns his back and moves out of
sight, resuming his physical and spiritual journey, the father
recovers somewhat. Heartbroken at his sons hasty (and this time
final) departure, he speaks as though Nikon were still present,
murmuring, Farewell, son, farewell, my sweetest (Nikon 15.9
16.26).
This encounter encapsulates poignantly the themes I propose to
investigate: urgent desire (conscious and otherwise) for a glimpse
of the saint; recognition of the holy one attendant upon shock or
wonder; and the equivo-cations in the presence or absence of the
saint in relation to the beholder before, during, and after the
dawning of recognition. All these themes are vitally related to the
workings of vision, a subject that has attracted much attention in
the medieval field. Specifically with regard to Byzantium, a series
of influential studies have examined the status of vision in
relation to
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the other senses, its different, sometimes competing models, and
the nature of the links posited between a visible, material
representation and its holy prototype.2 In the above episode, the
sequence of the brief fulfillment and final bereavement of vision
is enacted between a father and his saintly off-spring. In this
article, I explore the ramifications of that encounter in the
context of the Byzantine artist and his saintly model, or sitter,
where vision is invested with an added urgency because of the
nature of the task at hand: making a portrait of the saint. If
vision and representation were complex and much contested issues in
Byzantium, then the relationship between the artist and the saint
functions as both commentary and critique of those issues.3 In this
context, the contemporary anxieties of visualization are encoded
most effectively in the process of portraiture, when the artist
attempts to make the saints icon. Hagiographic texts are some of
the richest sources detailing the circumstances and consequences of
such interactions.4 But scholarship has accepted them as
straightforward arguments about the general importance of visual
representation indeed, its triumph without considering their
embedded nuances, nor the contemporary, often conflicting,
perceptions of the workings of vision and representation that they
touch upon.
I propose, through a rereading of certain episodes in the
eleventh-century texts of the Life of Nikon and the Life of Irene
of Chrysobalanton, to highlight the contradictions they manifest
with regard to holy presence and the artists role in fleshing out a
sacred countenance. Some hagiogra-phies are as much extended
discourses about visual representation as they are sacred
biographies, taking up the themes that informed the Iconoclas-tic
controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.5 These
eleventh-century examples offer creative responses to the same
issues. In so doing, they reveal the intrinsic difficulties
embedded in the principles of visualization that persisted well
after the end of Iconoclasm, when specific tenets for
repre-sentation had been established.6 These texts, instead, offer
a space in which concrete, hands-on representational practices are
narrativized, problema-tized, and shown to break down in intriguing
ways when a holy person is involved. Just as the artist coaxes into
existence the depiction of the saint, often stumbling and failing
in the process, so these texts are also exercises in delayed
gratification, building up in stages and with the subtlest of
strokes toward their (seemingly) satisfactory dnouements.
Consequently, the texts suggest that the very fashioning of a
portrait of the saint, no matter how arduous or interrupted the
process, attains a central importance in defin-ing the identity of
the holy one in relation to his or her image.7 Indeed, it is
because of the conditions specific to visual representation that
the tenu-
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 225
ous links between the portrait and the holy prototype are
clarified or con-founded, as the case may be.
In the process, these texts also place particular pressures on
the one who paints the holy portrait: the artist. He remains
nameless in each account, but escapes the archetypical notion of
the anonymous medieval craftsman. It is he who is privileged with
direct access to the saint in contrast to the other (often named)
characters, whose encounters with the divine he mediates. Moreover,
the artist assumes a significance beyond the obvious as he enables
an instructive glimpse into the distinct stages charac-terizing
visual representation and its complexities. The activities and
osten-sible success and/or failure of the artist offer a pithy but
provocative rumina-tion on the role of this pivotal character, and
the agency simultaneously powerful and derivative that
post-Iconoclastic theories of representation bestowed on him.8
However, verbal representation is not to be dismissed, not least
since it forms the vehicle for communicating the effects of the
visual, for elaborating upon, and offering variations of its
processes. The holy portrait, even as it is fixed by the artist as
an accurate and seemingly transparent representation for
generations afterwards, in its making betrays unease, and the story
of that making is only accessible through verbal delineation. A
seri-ous analysis of these accounts, however, must consider not
only the events they describe but also their emphatically literary
qualities. This is evident in their allusion to rhetorical
structures and their reflection on the effects of verbal narration.
The Life of Irene of Chrysobalanton, in particular, is regarded as
a hagiographic novel of sorts, with a high degree of literary self-
consciousness.9 The incorporation of aspects of Byzantine rhetoric
urges a reconsideration of the relations linking (or severing)
verbal and visual prod-ucts and processes.10
These texts thus reflect and participate in the broader climate
of the eleventh century when vision and representation were topics
of vibrant engagement for theologians and intellectuals such as
Michael Psellos, Symeon the New Theologian, Leo of Chalcedon, and
others.11 Their writ-ings remind us that the issues debated so
fiercely during Iconoclasm were by no means resolved when that
conflict ended, but were susceptible to contin-uous discourse,
related as they are to that integral component of Christian
Orthodoxy as established after the ninth century: the icon. The
portrayal of those subjects in distinct ways in the texts I will
discuss, suggests the degree to which the nuances of vision and
representation could be opened up to a broad public through the
medium of hagiography, an enormously popular
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226 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 40.2 /
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genre in terms of both production and consumption. If
hagiography could present and disseminate political and social
propaganda, then it could surely also be a medium for discussing
the subjects that were so vital to Orthodoxy. The fact that it was
used for the justification of icons in the ninth century reflects
its potential as a discursive site for exploring issues related to
visual representation. A careful reading of the episodes in
question, therefore, is not only enjoyable, but also essential for
our understanding of how the funda-mental premises of certain
critical issues were interrogated and reformulated at a particular
historical moment. The narrative of the portrait in a hagio-graphic
text like the Life of Nikon or the Life of Irene renders the
portrait as an object flirting on the boundary between presence and
absence, accuracy and failure. Moreover, the narrative does not
invoke a linear trajectory of vision, but the vagaries that vision
is subject to, even in the case of those whose professions are
premised on it.
Nikon and the failed artist
An episode in the Life of Nikon effectively raises the question
of holy presence and the ability of a portrait to substitute for
this presence. As the episode relates, Malakenos, a beneficiary of
Nikons favors, commissions a portrait of the saint from a skillful
artist. Malakenoss desire for a portrait is fueled primarily by the
fact that Nikon had prophesied that Malakenos would see him, but
the saint died before this could come about. Malakenos, disturbed
at this disruption of the saints prophecy, tries to fulfill it by
his own efforts. Thus, the commission acquires a value beyond the
expected. Not simply an aid to the remembrance of the holy person
and therefore an explicit marker of his absence in the way that
portraits usually functioned, this portrait is posited as an agent
that will fulfill the saints promise.12
What follows is a saga of frustration crowned by a miracle.
Malak-enos describes the saints appearance in great detail to the
artist, mentioning Nikons stature, hair, and dress, but the artist,
on attempting to paint the portrait, finds that he is unable even
to begin the task, let alone finish it. As the text explains, the
artists inability is due to the fact that he has never before seen
the saint. Then a monk fortuitously enters the artists house,
claiming to have a perfect likeness to Nikon. This monk is Nikon
himself, but the artist does not recognize him as the saint. The
artist rushes to paint this sitter, so conveniently provided, but
only to find that the appearance of the saint is already imprinted
upon the panel. Meanwhile, the mysterious monk has vanished. The
artist then finishes the painting and brings it to a
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 227
delighted Malakenos, who declares it to be a perfect and
indistinguishable likeness of Nikon (Nikon 44). Recounted in this
manner, the episode might seem typical of other episodes of saints
appearing to artists, venerators, and even emperors in dreams and
visions, often uninvited, in order to assist them to good fortune
or avert them from catastrophe, and to facilitate the making of an
icon. But if read carefully, examining each stage in the making of
the portrait in the context of contemporary Byzantine visuality,
this episode in the Life of Nikon reveals itself as a peculiarly
convoluted instance of failure at every level.
The episode begins with a perfectly comprehensible commission of
the saints portrait. When Malakenos describes Nikon to the artist,
men-tioning the saints physical characteristics, he follows a
standard procedure, for as Henry Maguire has shown, in the
post-Iconoclastic period the picto-rial definition of the holy one
was based on his or her hagiographical text.13 The texts furnished
pointers to artists creating the saints likenesses, which they then
embellished and finally codified. It is in accordance with such a
code that different categories of saints came to be identified,
their codes fixed by the late tenth or eleventh century. For
instance, military saints such as George were described in written
versions of their lives as being more corporeal than ascetic saints
such as John the Baptist, who were described as being emaciated.
Accordingly, the icons of George and John the Baptist depict them
as robust and lean respectively, the modeling and use of color in
their portraits calibrated so that the differences articulated in
their scripted biographies are immediately evident. Even within the
same hagiographic category, individual saints were delineated so as
to distinguish each from his or her counterparts.14 Nikon,
specifically, had an advantage over most of his fellow saints in
that he had a recognizable attribute, a staff with a cross on its
top given to him by the Virgin (Nikon 15.45 46), which, as Maguire
claims, was much rarer in the depiction of Byzantine saints than in
those from the Latin West.15
However, in spite of the diegesis or narration furnished by
Malak-enos, the artist of Nikons portrait is unable to translate
the verbal cues into pictorial terms. According to the Life of
Nikon, he is unable to portray a man he has never seen on the basis
of a verbal account alone (Nikon 44.18 20). Yet the artists
stumbling block is surely surprising, for the internal details of
the narrative imply that it is reasonable for Malakenos to presume
that the artist would be able to paint a likeness when given the
code. And the artist trusts his own ability to do so, for he
accepts the commission. In fact, the text mentions that the artist
thinks he can quite cleverly produce
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results with his art (44.15 18). The point of the ensuing events
is to offer an extended and miraculous version of a process that
would otherwise have been familiar to the artist. His inability, I
suggest, is the first point of curi-osity in the narrative,
signaling the flaws in a fundamental post-Iconoclastic tenet of
representation.
Word and image were posited as distinct representational modes
in Byzantium after that upheaval, but equal in value, as argued by
the leading ninth-century Iconophile, Patriarch Nicephoros, against
the unique privi-lege that Iconoclasts such as John the Grammarian
bestowed on words.16 Word and image, despite their obvious
differences as representational sys-tems, were believed to share a
basic similarity in that both were reposito-ries of memory and
mimesis in relation to the prototypes they sought to embody.17 The
artist in the Life of Nikon, however, reveals that despite their
parallel status, difficulties persist in moving from one system to
the other precisely because the sheer arbitrariness of words means
that they cannot, in all circumstances, be seamlessly translated
into images.
This is an interesting reversal of a rhetorical mode of viewing
that was widely prevalent among and cultivated by the Byzantines:
ekphrasis. In an ekphrastic mode of viewing, the power and
potential seductiveness of images is transferred to verbal
exposition, the words striving to keep up, compete with, and
overcome the image, whether real or imagined.18 Accord-ing to the
Progymnasmata, the ancient rhetorical handbooks used in Byzan-tium,
the defining features of ekphrasis are clarity (sapheneia) and
vividness (enargeia).19 Accounts of ekphrastic responses to images
of saints and their lives reveal that this was an exceptionally
effective channel of response, pre-mised on the intensification of
the affective qualities of the image by the word, and thereby
maneuvering the viewer (or listener) into a suitably emo-tional
state, ready to imbibe the moral lessons offered by
hagiography.20
In the case of Nikons portrait, however, the opposite is posited
as an impossibility: the image refuses to take its cues and form
itself from the ver-bal delineation. Moreover, the text specifies
that Malakenos did not offer an ekphrasis, but a diegesis, to the
artist. Diegesis is defined as a narration in the rhetorical
handbooks, which could potentially include an ekphrastic
pas-sage.21 In this case, the diegesis encompassed a detailed
account of Nikons form (morphe), his outline, or monastic habit
(schema), his hair, and clothes. Even as the words are offered as
tools to facilitate the task of embodying the holy one, the image
that should take shape from them remains elusive. Its power
resides, paradoxically, in its nonexistence. Would the artist have
been better equipped by a vivid narrative fulfilling the
requirements of a success-
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 229
ful ekphrasis rather than a diegesis? Furthermore, are the words
themselves adequate to describing the saint, as the patron (and
initially, the artist) take them to be? By subtly posing these
questions, the text interrogates the con-ceptual categories laid
down for the representation of a holy person, and the nature of
response to it, be it in the form of a narrative or a
description.22 The artist in this case is not just one who
represents; he is also an audience to Malakenoss rhetorical choice
for representing the saint. The final prod-uct crafted by the
artist is the required response to that descriptive perfor-mance.23
If the response falters or fails completely, it indicates some
funda-mental difficulty in the nature of holy representation and
the responses to it, verbal and visual, that are considered
valid.
Moreover, representation here is construed as an act informed by
and conducive to communication. Just as Malakenos communicates a
set of verbal coordinates to the artist, so the artist is expected
to fashion a visual matrix that communicates Nikons holy identity
back to Malakenos and other viewers. But if the vital links in the
chain remain unconnected, if an artist cannot make the leap from
words to image, then how does one bridge the gap? This is not an
idle dilemma but one with a disturbing urgency, for it provokes a
similar and immeasurably more significant question: If it is
difficult to switch from one representational system to another
when each is posited as the others equal in value, how much more
difficult is it to forge the link between a representation (in word
or image) and an entity posited at a different ontological plane
altogether: the prototype?
The debates over the validity of icons in Byzantium in the
eighth and ninth centuries unfurled precisely over the issue of the
relationship sus-tained between an image and its prototype.24 John
of Damascus formulated the theoretical defense that icons did
indeed share in the essence of the per-sons they represented;
therefore, dishonoring an image of Christ was tan-tamount to
dishonoring Christ himself.25 Recognizing the near-idolatrous tenor
of this theory, it was reformulated by Patriarch Nicephoros, who
argued that the link between the image and the prototype was not
essential-ist in nature, but formal. The image was tied to the
prototype by memory, or resemblance, not by a share in the
substance of the prototype itself.26 Nice-phoross formulation
posited the Byzantine icon as a directed absence, as art historian
Charles Barber elegantly puts it; the icon points or tends toward
(pros ti) the prototype while being itself empty of any vestige of
the latter.27 However, as Barbers studies have shown, the earlier,
essentialist cast of the icon persisted with a tenacity well after
Iconoclasm had ended, certainly for ordinary viewers of icons who
often believed that they stood in for the holy
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people they depicted, but also in the views of eleventh-century
clergymen such as Leo of Chalcedon, who went so far as to hurl
accusations against a Byzantine emperor on the basis of it.28 These
instances of switching a for-malist conception of the icon for an
essentialist one and vice versa indicate a broader, sustained
problem regarding the issue of holy presence and its manifestation
in visual terms.
The flip (or dark) side of this problem may be summed up in the
following question: Since the representation, or image, is
theoretically con-sidered to be a signifier removed from the
signified (the holy prototype) in material and substance, is it
then at best an arbitrary exercise, a complete fantasy with no
concrete relation to the ineffable domain of the holy, or at worst,
a fruitless enterprise for mere mortals such as the artist who
tries to capture Nikons countenance in vain? The Life of Nikon
raises this question forcefully once more later in the narrative,
which I shall treat at length below. For now, we can say that even
as the narrative voices these crippling doubts, puncturing the
heart of representational theory in Byzantium and exposing the
dangerous instability of the very definition of an icon, the text
blithely proceeds to furnish a miraculous answer and response but
without ever divesting itself of its ambiguities. Indeed, the
recourse to the miracle that occurs may be regarded as intensifying
rather than resolving them.
Meanwhile the artist in the Life of Nikon remains in a state of
anxi-ety, as the text mentions, underscoring the contrast to his
prior confidence. Mary Carrutherss investigations have suggested
that worry, even ill health, were the preparatory stages deemed
necessary to induce contact with the divine in the medieval
period.29 Although Carruthers situates her visionar-ies in a
monastic context in the Latin West, one may still presume that the
Byzantine artists perplexity is partially responsible for what
occurs next in the account of Nikons portrait. A monk appears to
the artist and inquires why he looks anxious and worried. When the
artist explains, the monk enjoins him to observe his countenance,
for the saint to be painted was in all respects similar to himself
(Nikon 44.34 35). By drawing attention to his own appearance, the
monk also directs us, the reader or listener, to a crucial insight:
the artist is unable to recognize that the monk, who now stands in
front of his own eyes, corresponds to the verbal description of the
saint. The lack of recognition is emphasized in the text, which
clearly connects the description of the monk to that of the saint
supplied by the patron, and this as the monk appears to the artist:
tall in stature, eremitic in appearance, squalid head, black hair,
black beard, and carrying Nikons defining feature,
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 231
his staff (44.21 29).30 The artist, at the monks urging, looks
at the monk intently and believes that it is the same man as has
been described by the patron, but even then, the artist cannot, or
does not, equate the monk with the saint he is supposed to
portray.
The theme of appearance and nonrecognition both echoes and
reverses the circumstances of Nikons encounter with his father that
occurs earlier in the text (described above). In that episode,
Nikons presence is fer-vently desired and beseeched, whereupon
Nikon obliges with a measure of stinginess, turning his countenance
just as much as was required. The fathers recognition of this
partial vision is immediate but tinged with shocked grief at how
changed it is, because of the rigors of the monastic life. Yet, in
spite of the drastic alteration and absence of the whole visage,
his father does not fail to recognize the saint. In pointed
contrast, in the episode of the artists encounter with Nikon, not
only is there no indication of the artist praying to Nikon for an
appearance, but when the saint does appear unbidden in the form of
the monk, unaltered and whole, conforming exactly to the patrons
description, the artists cognitive faculties fail.
The twin encounters raise the issue of the tenability of
theories of vision in the medieval period and their application.
Extramission, Robert S. Nelson has argued, was a broadly accepted
model in Byzantium, whereby the beholders eye sends out rays to the
object of vision, captures it, then returns to imprint it on the
beholders retina.31 Bissera V. Pentcheva describes this process in
terms specific to the making of images of saints in Byzantium:
[T]he active eye of the artist casts optical rays over the
saint. They touch the sacred form and return, impressing the
gathered shape into the memory of the craftsman. This first image
(the imprinted vestige of touch) is thus internal. Like a negative
intaglio, it is subsequently impressed by the hands of the artist
into a material surface.32
When applied to Nikons artist, however, the process does not
quite work, revealing the gaps that punctuate the optical
trajectory, from the rays that emanate from the artists eye, to
their return, to their final material shaping by yet another
physical organ the hand. The artist certainly looks at the monk
with some attention, during which time his form impresses the
artist as being that of the same man as the saint (presumably
impressed into his memory), but appreciation of the congruence of
countenance does not equal comprehension of sanctity.
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In short, vision, which is posited, after Iconoclasm, as the
faculty par excellence for comprehending the divine, is here
revealed as merely effi-cient, not ideal.33 Instead of being active
and continuous, vision is sluggish, and when aroused to function it
works in a piecemeal fashion, identifying the letter but not the
spirit of what it sees. A parallel implication underlying the
artists nonrecognition is that the efficacy of vision is contingent
on the beholders relationship to the object of vision. A father
recognizes his son, no matter the circumstances, whereas an artist
whose very livelihood depends on the responsible working of vision,
may grasp the outer form but not its holy significance.
The play on the lack and sudden dawning of recognition is
pre-sented in an extended tableau in the text. Gilbert Dagron has
argued that a saint nearly always appeared to mortal venerators as
his icon, and was recognized because of his likeness to the image.
Dagron observes that the icon tells the faithful under what form he
will see the saint appear, and the saint what face he must assume
and what clothes he must wear in order to be recognized.34 In
Nikons case, there exists no prior image to which or against which
the artist can relate and identify the form of the monk. However,
the Byzantines were expected to be alert to the visual signs that
distinguished sacred people and their portraits, even without the
aid of inscriptions.35 In this instance, if anyone were best
equipped to recognize Nikon, apart from the patron Malakenos, it is
the artist, precisely because he holds the verbal code.
The artist does finally recognize the saint in a repeated play
of gazes that pulls the narrative, crescendolike, to its
conclusion. Repeatedly the artist looks at the monk, but only when
he sees the outline of the image impressed on the board does the
verbal description of the saint coalesce with his recognition of
the holy being. It is only now that the form [morphe] of the monk
is alluded to as the holy form [ten hagian morphen] and a miracle
[thaumatos] (Nikon 44.39 41). When the artist turns his gaze back
to the prototype, now possessed of knowledge, he finds empty space.
It is as though vision, which failed to recognize the saint
initially, will continue to fail even after recognition comes. No
physical faculty not the hand, nor the eye can confront the holy
presence except in retrospect.
This is an astonishing climax (or rather, anticlimax) in a
narrative that exposes the fallibility of sight in one whose very
profession is predi-cated on it, and more importantly, one who
creates the vital link between the sacred prototype and its mortal
venerators. The artists failure occurs on two levels: first, when
he fails to translate Malakenoss words into an image;
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 233
and second, when he fails to translate his verbal knowledge of
the saint into knowledge of the saintly presence granted to him. In
both cases, the artist is unable to switch from one register of
representation to another. But per-haps the point driven home is
that the fault lies not in the artists powers of image-making and
recognition, but in the very nature of the relations he is expected
to draw between word and image, and word and prototype. The
relations themselves are artificial, even impossible to make
because of the intrinsic inadequacy of words and the difficulty of
reconciling two distinct representational systems trying to
generate the same product. And perhaps that is why the artist is
absolved of his faults and granted a saintly vision. However, at
the end, he is left only with the representation. He embel-lishes
the outlined image and presents a likeness of Nikon to an overjoyed
Malakenos.
The conclusion offers a success story that masks the tensions
informing the original legend from which it is inspired. The
miraculous imprint of Nikon has obvious parallels to the famous
Mandylion or the image of Christs face, as scholars have noted.36
In the legend of the Man-dylion, briefly, an artist is sent to
capture Christs likeness but is unable to do so because of the
radiance of the sacred countenance and its constantly shifting
appearance. Christ helps the artist by pressing his face upon a
cloth, leaving behind an outline. This influential and widely
venerated image was known as an acheiropoietos or an image
not-made-by-the-hand, stressing the inability of the human body to
engage in the task of making or reproducing the sacred.
Interestingly, Christ too does not use his hands to produce his
self-portrait; his face itself generates the image.37
The portrait of Nikon is also an acheiropoietos, a miraculous
imprint of the holy one, embellished afterwards by the artists
hand. Yet, it cannot justly be said to approximate the legend of
the Mandylion. In this legend, Christ is an active agent who
presses his face on a receptive surface. In the Life of Nikon, on
the other hand, there is no indication that Nikon does any such
thing. Indeed, the visit of the monk-saint is structured
deliberately on the motif of distance: the spiritual distance
between the monk and the art-ist; the distance of the artists own
faculty of sight from ideal perception; and the spatial distance
between the monk and the artist, and the artists painting board.
This instrument is close at hand to the artist but is not in the
monks vicinity. The imprint miraculously impressed on the board is
not direct like a footprint or Christs face on the cloth; nor can
it be said to have been fashioned by the artist alone. Yet it
reproduces the paradigmatic artist-sitter relationship, in which a
spatial gap between artist and sitter is neces-
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234 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 40.2 /
2010
sary for realizing the portrait. The ideal conditions of such a
relationship are outlined in those panels depicting Saint Luke in
the act of painting the Vir-gin and Child from life, with the
latter seated at a distance from the painter and his easel. This
portrait formula, ostensibly by the hand of Luke, pro-liferated in
Byzantium and the Latin West as icons of a particularly potent
pedigree.38 Where the Mandylion acquired the status of a revered
relic-icon with a specific physical point of origin emanating from
Christ himself, what is the status of Nikons imprint, which results
from the physical conditions informing a traditional
portrait-sitting, but is devoid of its process: the input of the
artist?
Perhaps the answer (insofar as this narrative ever supplies one)
lies in the curious detail that the artist recognizes the monk only
after he sees the imprint on the panel, and when he looks up he
finds not the prototype but a yawning gap in space where the monk
should have been. This moment is heightened by the drama of the
visible suddenly becoming invisible; as such, it also questions the
link between a material representation and the sacred presence,
which, only a moment ago, enabled that representation to exist.
What the artist and the reader/listener apprehend is the distance
between the image and the prototype. The empty space where the monk
formerly stood now underscores eloquently the severance of the
relationship between the representation on the panel and the
saint.
The nature of that representation, moreover, is not a direct
like-ness of the saint. It is an image, to be sure, but in the form
of an imprint, a mere outline, which the artist has to fill in
order to complete. In the Byz-antine context, this implies the
application of color to a sketch or an under drawing. Color was the
element that literally breathed life into an icon. Liz James has
argued that it was the addition of color that rendered imprecise
the difference between the artists imitation and the object.39 In
the final count, it is the artists labor in filling in colors that
restores the outline, or imprint, to its proper state as an
indistinguishable likeness of the prototype, a true image.40
If we accept this notion of color, then the image enabled by the
presence of the monk is, paradoxically, incomplete. As an imprint
that requires the artists subsequent activity, the image left
behind on the panel is a marker of absence, or at least the vestige
of a partial presence, which it is the artists task to flesh out in
the full. In other words, the appearance of the prototype functions
only to ensure that the ensuing representation is removed from it.
And surely the finished icon wrought by the artist is also,
according to the theory of the icon, a directed absence, an image
that does
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 235
not contain any vestige of the saints presence, even more so
when viewed against the circumstances that surround its making.
Certainly the narrative implies that the artist acutely registers
the absence of the monk, most of all when he undertakes the
embellishment of the imprint in the aftermath of the monks
disappearing act.
The narrative might well have concluded at this point in a
satisfac-tory resolution of the icon as the object it was
theoretically decreed to be in the first place: a sign of the
prototypes absence. Instead, absence is con-founded by the patron
Malakenoss happy but (for us) puzzling response. On receiving the
icon and being informed in detail [kata meros] (Nikon 44.49) of the
events of its making, he is overjoyed since he believes them to
have fulfilled the saints prophecy. Malakenos, in other words,
believes that the portrait of Nikon constitutes a sighting of the
holy man; that is, the portrait contains Nikons presence itself.
This reaction coincides uncannily with the reaction of Nikons
father long after his son had escaped from him across the river.
Nikons father is shocked at his sons altered countenance and wishes
it to go away, but once the saint is no longer there, the father
speaks as though he were present, addressing him several times
directly with the melancholy words, Farewell, son, farewell, my
sweetest.
The relentless equivocations over presence and absence informing
the making of Nikons portrait in this episode of the Life of Nikon
are ren-dered even more stark when compared to a similar episode
described later in the narrative among the posthumous miracles of
the saint. When Lace-daemon is threatened by an earthquake, Nikon
stands at a certain spot pray-ing for the disaster to be averted.
The form of Nikon is then miraculously inscribed and engraved on a
stone slab. The text is pithy but underscores in no uncertain terms
that this engraving is accomplished without human hand or art, a
true acheiropoietos. It goes on to say that the slab narrates, more
eloquently than any human voice or tongue, the events that brought
about the astonishing image, thus disavowing its own verbal
abilities. More-over, the text states that this image of Nikon is
colorless. But it flashes from time to time, which is proof of the
fact that the holy man once stood at that very spot (Nikon 66).
Can this engraving in stone devoid of color be considered a true
image of Nikon? Is it invested with his presence, since it would
seem to be an impression of the saint himself, or does presence
periodically flash through it, leaving it lifeless the rest of the
time?41 Furthermore, does this peculiar image possess more
eloquence than a text describing the events of its mak-ing?42 Here
we would do well to recall, however, that even as the
superiority
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of the image is hinted at, the fact that its innate powers are
explicated by the text complicates such a reading. If anything, the
text gestures at the fact that all media, whether images or texts,
are mixed media, in W. J. T. Mitchells formulation.43 As Cynthia
Hahn has pointed out, saints lives are character-ized by
intertextuality and interpictoriality, such that the representation
of saints, in particular, constitutes a domain in which image and
text are nested in each other in complex ways, each reinforcing the
other even as it subverts, or appears to subvert, the others
effects.44
When read in sequence, the episode of Nikons miraculous
imprint-ing on the stone echoes as a fainter, seemingly less
complex reverberation of the earlier episode of Nikons painting by
the artist. However, even as this episode does away with the role
of the artist and patron, replacing both with an ineffable,
almighty will, it reiterates the themes informing the ear-lier
episode. Like the latter, this one gestures toward a series of
open-ended statements, or variations, on the processes of vision,
and on the uneasy alli-ance between representational systems that
sometimes threatens to be trans-formed into an insidious
competition. Rather than offering a reassuring account of the
triumph of visual representation, these episodes hint at the
contradictions built into its very processes, which are
dramatically exposed when the sitter happens to be a holy man.
Irene of Chrysobalanton and the successful artist
The Life of Irene, about the abbess of the convent of
Chrysobalanton in Con-stantinople, opens with a declaration of the
triumph of icons after Icon-oclasm and the efforts of the empress
Theodora to have God pardon her husband, Theophilos the iconoclast,
for his sins in having had holy icons destroyed during his reign.45
As one may expect from such a stirring pro-logue, the entire
narrative is replete with accounts of the behavior of icons, the
deployment of vision, and Irenes own manipulation of that faculty
in her efforts at sainthood. For reasons of space, I shall confine
my analysis to one such instance that parallels but also departs in
interesting ways from the experience of the artist who attempted to
paint Nikon.
Unlike the events in the Life of Nikon in which devotion
motivates the commisioning of Nikons portrait, the events leading
to the commission-ing of Irenes portrait are ominous and imbued not
with faith but with fear and doubt (Irene 21). The saint is
approached by the relatives of a man who is unjustly condemned to
death by the emperor Basil II. Irene, who is reclusive by nature
and seldom ventures forth from her convent, supplicates God on
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behalf of the man. The text does not explicitly say so, but
implies, from past accounts of Irenes behavior, that she does not
approach the Emperor directly. Nevertheless, that night the Emperor
sees Irene standing before him in his bedchamber, commanding him to
release the unfortunate man on the threat of her bringing war and
massacre upon the empire. Furious and frightened, the Emperor
demands to know who she is and how she entered his private
quarters. Irene answers by giving her name and identity, I am
Irene, abbess of the convent of Chrysobalanton, not once but three
times, drilling home the message by pricking him in the side at her
final announcement.
The narrative opens with the statement that the above dialogue
occurs while the Emperor is awake and not dreaming.46 However, once
the emperor receives the prick in his side, the narrative declares
that the pain awoke the Emperor, who watches in terror as the
figure of the nun calmly makes its way out of his apartments.
Already the narrative insists on the ambiguity of the status of
this self-possessed figure, if not of its iden-tity: the figure
refers to itself as Irene of Chrysobalanton, thereby naming the
saint, but its ontological status remains unclear. Is the figure
the saint herself, or a dream, or a vision of her?47 If it is a
dream or vision, as one may plausibly conclude from the cues in the
narrative, then why insert the detail of touch, and, moreover, a
touch that wounds the Emperor so as to catalyze him from sleep to
wary wakefulness? Last but not least, why is the emperors physical
state (awake, sleeping, dreaming, awake again) allowed to remain so
ambiguous? I suggest that the prick functions as a pivotal point,
the role of which is precisely to enable the conflation of such
contradictory states, thereby offering an illuminating take on the
faculty of vision.
As discussed before, the most influential model of vision in
Byzan-tium was that of extramission, which assumed the existence of
an active eye casting forth optical rays extending to the object of
vision, touching it, then returning to that eye bearing the essence
of the object. Vision was both haptic and optic.48 By pricking the
Emperor, the figure of Irene literalizes the haptic dimension of
vision, making certain that the Emperor realizes the import of what
he has seen and what has touched him. Furthermore, the prick allows
for the possibility of a nascent instability in defining the
physi-cal state of its object, the Emperor, thus turning the
ambivalent status of the saint back toward the dreamer or
visionary. In Byzantine oneiromancy, divine dreams believed to
occur in the states between sleep and wakefulness were considered
to rank highest in dream classification.49 In this instance, even
as the Emperor is engaged in a course of injustice and perhaps
because of it he is amenable to receiving a stern command to revert
his
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action issued when he is himself poised in a precariously
liminal, even para-doxical state.
Thoroughly disconcerted, the Emperor demands to know which of
his guards has allowed the woman to trespass his chambers, and upon
meet-ing denial after denial of any such transgression on their
part, and of their even having seen Irene, he realizes that he has
experienced a divine vision made available only to his eyes (Irene
21.74.5 8). But the realization does not in any way lead to a
dawning of faith on his part, for the next day the Emperor accuses
the hapless prisoner (for whose sake Irene has appeared) of having
conjured her through the forbidden means of sorcery. The prisoner
passionately protests his innocence, but when asked whether he has
heard of Irene of Chrysobalanton, he replies in the affirmative,
telling the Emperor of her whereabouts and her general renown.
Wishing to know more about Irene, the Emperor dispatches a group
of courtiers to her convent, including an artist in the retinue so
that he might capture her countenance in a portrait and bring it
back. When they see the holy woman, they are struck by such a
bright flash of lightning emanating from her face that they fall
backwards in agony. The stricken attitude of the courtiers is
compared to that of the men who had come to arrest Christ, Irenes
teacher and bridegroom (Irene 21.77.1 2), thereby underscoring the
hints of treachery and bad faith that infuse the entire epi-sode,
carrying over like an infectious disease, as it were, from the
Emperor to his very henchmen.
Irene asks the courtiers not to be afraid, remarking with a
certain disingenuousness that she is a human being like any other,
and then com-mands them to assure the Emperor that whatever was
told him in the dream would come true if he does not act as bidden.
The courtiers, still frightened, beg Irene to share her wisdom with
them before they undertake her com-mand, and Irene obliges. Her
countenance now restored to normal so that the courtiers can look
upon her, she converses with them while the artist makes her
portrait.
So far so good. This artist is successful in his efforts in a
way that his counterpart in the Nikon episode is not. He manages to
make and finish a portrait of Irene, which he presents to the
Emperor at the palace. But as soon as the Emperor sets his eyes on
it, a blinding flash of lightning ema-nates from the portrait,
forcing him to avert his gaze and cry aloud in terror. Only after
the flash subsides is the Emperor able to look upon the portrait
and recognize the woman therein as the one who had appeared to him
the night before.
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The account of the artist in this episode is nowhere near as
detailed or tortured as that of his counterpart in the Life of
Nikon, but both share a remarkable similarity in their inability to
capture the saints likeness. What this episode in the Life of Irene
reveals, in particular, is a subtle turn from the apparent success
of the artist to his failure. He is able to paint Irenes portrait
without mishap, but he does not capture the one quality that
sig-nals her holiness in no uncertain terms and, therefore, was
central to her identity her blinding radiance. (It is clear from
the text that the flashing light of the portrait is not the
handiwork of the artist.) Even as the portrait signals the saints
holiness, it also indicates the limits of the artists powers of
production and of vision in general. The artist and the courtiers
are able only to look upon a partial or incomplete aspect of Irene,
which does not flash forth her peculiar form of charisma. Like the
artist in the legend of the Mandylion who is sent to capture
Christs countenance and fails because of its overpowering radiance
and shifting appearance, these courtiers, too, fail to look upon
Irenes complete self. The artist, therefore, paints a partial
portrait, one that is devoid of the very essence of Irene. It may
be termed an adequate image in that it articulates her physical
features satisfactorily, but it intimates its own lack of sacred
essence, here figured as Irenes charisma. In the words of Susan
Stewart, To describe more than is socially adequate or to describe
in a way which interrupts the everyday hierarchical organization of
detail is to increase . . . the unreal effect of the real.50
Although Stewart refers specifically to the realist novel in her
remark, the sentiment is appro-priate to the product crafted by
Irenes artist. He makes an adequate image that is divested of the
unreal effect of the real presence of Irene. The image is,
therefore, not one that increases but diminishes its subject.
The episode thus indicates that a true portrait icon must be
invested with saintly presence. The portrait assumes the flashing
quality of its proto-type, but all too briefly before it lapses
back to normality. In this, it is unlike the image of Nikon carved
in stone, which retains its privileged status because it flashes
periodically.51 Irenes portrait, on the other hand, has no value
(at least for the Emperor) beyond identifying the holy woman and
(unexpectedly) communicating her holiness, after which he loses all
inter-est in it and longs for direct access to the saint herself,
to her presence as opposed to the directed absence that the image
becomes. Furthermore, representation enabled by a normal condition
of vision, in which the object is clear and perceivable to the
beholder and artist, is posited as a form of nonrepresentation.
Only when the object becomes blurred and intolerable to sight is it
construed as being true. As in the legend of the Mandylion, the
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presence of the holy one manifests itself in the circumstances
of its nonvis-ibility to mere mortals. It is only when the flash
subsides that the Emperor is able to look closely at the portrait,
but, ironically, its (previously) blinding quality is what leads
him to realize the divine nature of Irene. Vision and knowledge are
thus enabled at two distinct temporal moments in a sub-version of
their usual coexistence.52
The episode ends with the Emperor beseeching the presence of
Irene herself, a request that sharply contrasts the patron
Malakenoss joy in the Life of Nikon. Where Malakenos accepts the
portrait of Nikon as a sign of the holy ones presence, the Emperor
is sadly aware of the gap between the portrait and the holy woman,
wishing to close it by having her grace him with an audience.
Irene, however, refuses on the grounds that it would be neither
fitting for the Emperor to come all the way to her convent for a
mere sight of her, nor would it befit her to go to the palace.
Neatly deflecting all pious responsibility to the Patriarch, the
bishops of the Orthodox Church, and the holy fathers in the
Constantinopolitan monasteries (a purely male domain), Irene
excuses herself from the Emperors presence. In a final admo-nition,
she declares that were the Emperor to persist in his desire to see
her, he would annoy God greatly. The Emperor decides not to pursue
Irene but receives comfort through her teachings and prayers
transmitted through fre-quent messengers to her convent.
It is a strange conclusion, as dissatisfying to a reader as it
is gratify-ing for the unfortunate man imprisoned by the Emperor
and then released. Not only is the portrait set aside without
further mention (we are not told of its subsequent fate), but the
Emperor derives spiritual succor from Irenes teachings, her words,
delivered through the medium of messengers. The epi-sode thus
breaks down every possible dimension of Irenes presence the sight
of her, her voice and sets about to transmit these in a thoroughly
mediated fashion back to the palace such that the Emperor is always
posi-tioned at a remove from the holy woman.
Epilogue
The seventh-century Life of Theodore of Sykeon relates how an
artist is sum-moned to make a portrait of Theodore, but in
surreptitious circumstances, through a tiny aperture in the wall,
without the saint knowing.53 The artist succeeds in producing an
accurate portrait despite the distorted, miniature view he is
afforded. Indeed, the portrait is so accurate that when Theodore is
shown the image, he accuses the artist of being a fine thief. In
this account,
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 241
Theodore regards the painting of his portrait as a form of
dispossession of some object or quality intimately associated with
him that was surrendered without his will or knowledge when the
artist positioned him as an unwit-ting sitter. Here, it is the
saint who is left feeling bereft after the sitting, even though he
smilingly consents to bless the theft.
In the eleventh-century accounts of Nikon and Irene, on the
other hand, the situation is starkly reversed. In each case, the
artist is the one to feel a sense of deprivation, which is
experienced in the loss of his artistic powers of production, or in
a dawning knowledge that the presence of the holy prototype has
vanished irretrievably, or in the acknowledgement that his product,
the portrait icon, lacks the essential quality that constitutes the
sitters sanctity. The bereavement trickles into the texts
themselves, wishing as they do to privilege the artists role and
the image, but are instead forced to describe a trajectory of loss.
In each case, the loss is dramatized and ironized by the fact that
it is the artist who is granted immediate visual and physical
access to the holy one in a fashion that is denied to the other
characters and to the narrator, including, amazingly, the Byzantine
Emperor himself.
And yet both artists fail at their enterprise despite their
privileges. It is almost as though the ruling principle behind
these brief but sugges-tive episodes decrees that the very
immediacy of contact with the saint will result in failure, an idea
captured succinctly in the epigraph to this article. These episodes
imply that a successful icon is one that can never, perhaps should
never, measure up to or be commensurate with the holy one. The
project of visual representation after Iconoclasm, then, appears to
be imbued and informed with a sense of loss, with the certain
knowledge that its final product, even if enabled by the presence
of the saint, ultimately stands at a remove from the presence of
the holy one. This distance is only further increased by the
embellishing hand of the artist, who acts as the distancing agent
even as he is allowed immediate access to the prototype.
This process of deferral constitutes the heart of Byzantine
theol-ogy, and these episodes of hagiographic portraiture are an
instance of the grander, more ambitious project of the pursuit of
the divine that occupied Byzantine thinkers and theologians over
centuries. Gregory of Nyssa sums up this issue in the Seventh
Homily on Ecclesiastes:
God is unspeakable and unknowable. Why so? Because created
nature is unable to comprehend what is beyond its limits without
transcending itself; and if it were to transcend itself, that would
mean it had ceased to exist.54
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The possibility of knowledge of the divine is foreclosed in
Gregorys for-mulation, emphasizing instead the confinement of
created beings and their knowledge to their own sphere. To leave
that sphere is impossible, or implies death. We find variations on
this theme in the eleventh century, particularly in the writings of
Symeon the New Theologian, who argues for the very pos-sibility of
the transcendence that Gregory denies.55 It is not my intention to
ponder the details of this debate, but its very existence, and the
involvement of eleventh-century contemporaries of the New
Theologian such as Michael Psellos and Leo of Chalcedon, is proof
enough of the vigor attending this debate.56 Icons, as objects
integral to the Orthodox faith, were positioned at the core of
theological contention. Did they, or did they not possess the
ability to impart knowledge of the divine to a beholder? The texts
I have considered take up this fundamental question in their
slippery, gossamer-like recountings, and spin it into a vertiginous
web of queries related to the role of visual representation and the
divine, but they scrupulously deny clear answers.57
Byzantine visual representation, of course, need not be seen as
an unqualified failure; the patron Malakenos is proof against such
a pessimistic view. When we recall that most Byzantine viewers of
icons of saints reacted to them as Malakenos did, as though they
contained holy presence itself, we are offered a sobering (or
joyful?) reassurance of the prevailing power of the portrait icon.
But we would do well to remember that, like Malakenos, we too are
recipients of the hagiographic text of the icon. Like him, other
Byzantine readers as well as modern ones are offered a choice to
accept the icon as presence or absence. Indeed, Byzantine
hagiographic texts enjoin the task of choice, opening themselves as
they do to further redactions and nar-rations by its receivers.58
Severed from the narrative of its production, the portrait icon may
stand as a confident sign of the saint. Presented as the climax of
a miraculous and painfully contradictory process of visualization,
it may equally stand as a sign of powerlessness, an arbitrary
representation of the holy one with no essential relation to the
saint.
Perhaps it is in extending the possibility of such a choice that
the episodes I have discussed contain their own narrative power. In
their per-plexing play with the prevailing rules of representation
and reception and their insistence on the contingency of vision,
these episodes do not enforce any hegemonic view of saintly
presence and representation, but instead chal-lengingly critique
them. They may or may not be read as maintaining the status quo of
the triumph of icons and visual representation.59 Apart from this
Janus-faced quality of their reception, their slyness lies in their
almost
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 243
incidental mentions within the lengthy, often unwieldy, fabric
of the larger hagiographic works in which they occur. Close
reading, however, reveals the self-reflexive nature of these
narratives and their questioning of the very principles on which
their subjects saint, icon, vision are predicated.
a
Notes
I thank Robert S. Nelson, Ja Elsner, Kristine Hess, Galina
Tirnani, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Charles Barber, Anthony Kaldellis,
and Aditya Behl, and two anonymous JMEMS reviewers for their
suggestions regarding the issues discussed in this essay. This
article is dedicated to the memory of Aditya Behl, whose astute
reading contrib-uted immeasurably to its development.
1 D. Sullivan, ed., The Life of Saint Nikon: Text, Translation,
and Commentary (Brook-line, Mass.: Hellenic College Press, 1987).
Further citations in the text are to this translation by chapter
and line numbers
2 For an excellent history of vision in the medieval period, see
David C. Lindberg, The-ories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and Suzanne Conklin
Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval
Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). On
Byzantium, see Robert S. Nelson, To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and
Vision in Byzantium, in Seeing as Oth-ers Saw: Visuality before and
beyond the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 143 68; and Charles Barber, Contesting the
Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century
Byzantium (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
3 On vision and representation, see particularly the studies by
Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of
Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2002); and Contesting the Logic of Painting.
4 Alexander Kazhdan and Henry Maguire, Byzantine Hagiographical
Texts as Sources on Art, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 1 22. See
also the excellent study by Maguire, The Icons of Their Bodies:
Saints and Their Images in Byzantium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1996).
5 Alice-Mary Talbot, ed., Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight
Saints Lives in English Translation (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton
Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998).
6 For a detailed study of the problems in understanding icons in
the eleventh century, see Barber, Contesting the Logic of
Painting.
7 The subject of the medieval portrait has received recent
attention in the essays col-lected in Contemporary Encounters with
the Medieval Face, ed. Clark Maines, a special issue of Gesta 46.2
(2007), devoted to contemporary approaches to the medi-eval
face.
8 The holy icon was posited as existing and deriving from
traditions prior to the art-ist, the latter being construed as one
who embellished upon and displayed the image.
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244 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 40.2 /
2010
Thus, the artist was placed in a paradoxical situation, being
endowed with a certain agency which was, nevertheless, limited. For
a discussion of this point, see John J. Yiannis, A Reexamination of
the Art Statute in the Acts of Nicaea II, Byzantinis-che
Zeitschrift 80 (1987): 348 59. For a discussion of the concepts of
artifact and artificer, see Barber, Figure and Likeness, 111
15.
9 Jan Olof Rosenqvist, The Life of St. Irene Abbess of
Chrysobalanton: A Critical Edition with Introduction, Translation,
Notes, and Indices (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell International,
1986), xliii xlviii.
10 For a study of how Byzantine art incorporates and displays
Byzantine rhetorical struc-tures, see Henry Maguire, Art and
Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-ton University
Press, 1981).
11 For a detailed discussion, see Barber, Contesting the Logic
of Painting.12 For an extensive study of the portrait icon in
Byzantium, see Barber, Figure and Like-
ness, 107 23. 13 Maguire, The Icons of Their Bodies, 1 47.14 The
so-called calendar icons located in the Monastery of St. Catherine
at Sinai,
Egypt, are an outstanding example of the minute details that
distinguish each saint from his or her counterparts, thus
indicating a scrupulously precise visual code that had been
established for the depiction of every single saint to grace the
Orthodox calendar.
15 Maguire, The Icons of Their Bodies, 18.16 John the
Grammarian, for instance, states, It is hopeless to characterize a
man,
unless one has been led to this by words. It is not possible . .
. to grasp them or render them by visual means. For a complete
account and further discussion, see J. Gouil-lard, Fragments indits
dun antirrhetique de Jean le Grammarien, Revue des tudes Byzantines
24 (1966): 173 74; and Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word: Byzantine
Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (New York: E.
J. Brill, 1996). It is important to keep in mind the fact that the
Iconoclast position(s) might have been distorted by the triumphant
Iconophiles; however, the accounts still indicate the issues that
were considered relevant to representation and the points of debate
that the Iconophiles considered most salient (and most threatening)
to their own stance, which inspired their painstaking refutations.
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of this article for the
above insight.
17 Charles Barber, Mimesis and Memory in the Narthex Mosaics of
the Nea Moni on Chios, Art History 24 (2001): 323 37.
18 The literature on ekphrasis is vast. For studies on classical
ekphrasis, for example, see Shadi Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient
Novel: The Reader and the Role of Descrip-tion in Heliodorus and
Achilles Tatius (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1989); Don P. Fowler, Narrate and Describe: The Problem of
Ekphrasis, Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991): 25 35; J. A. W.
Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to
Ashbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Ja Elsner,
Genres of Ekphrasis, Ramus 31 (2002): 1 18; Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis,
Imagi-nation, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and
Practice (Burlington, Vt.: Ash-gate, 2009). On Byzantine ekphrasis,
see the influential article by Liz James and Ruth Webb, To
Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places: Ekphrasis
and
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 245
Art in Byzantium, Art History 14 (1991): 1 17; and Nelson, To
Say and to See. For a recent collection of essays on ekphrasis,
classical and otherwise, see the special issue Ekphrasis in
Classical Philology 102.1 (2007).
19 See the extensive discussion of ekphrasis in Webb, Ekphrasis,
Imagination, and Persuasion.
20 See Leslie Brubaker, Perception and Conception: Art, Theory,
and Culture in Ninth-Century Byzantium, Word and Image 5 (1989): 19
32; and Ruth Webb, Accomplishing the Picture: Ekphrasis, Mimesis,
and Martyrdom in Asterios of Amaseia, in Art and Text in Byzantine
Culture, ed. Liz James (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press,
2007), 13 32.
21 Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion, 70 71.22 Susan
Stewart offers an insight into description as a category of
experience by asking,
What does it mean to describe something? Stewart answers by
remarking that the unsaid assumption underlying all descriptions is
experience beyond lived expe-rience. . . . In description we
articulate the time and space that are absent from the context at
hand, the lived experience of the body. This account of description
is remarkably applicable to the Byzantine notion. See Stewart, On
Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984),
26.
23 For an account of the artist as audience or viewer, see Ja
Elsner, Viewing and Cre-ativity: Ovids Pygmalion as Viewer, in
Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 113 31.
24 See Peter R. L. Brown, A Dark Age Crisis: Aspects of the
Iconoclastic Controversy, English Historical Review 88 (1973): 1
34; and Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byz-antine Apologia for
Icons (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). For a
recent interpretation that draws on the documents of Iconoclasm,
see Barber, Figure and Likeness.
25 John of Damascus, On the Divine Images: Three Apologies
Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, trans. D. Anderson
(Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1980), 58 59.
26 Patriarch Nicephoros, Antirrheticus I adversus Constantinum
Copronymum, in Patro-logiae cursus completus, Series Graeca, vol.
100, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1865), cols. 205 533, at col. 277.
Charles Barber offers a discussion of these conflicting views in
his article, From Image into Art: Art after Byzantine Iconoclasm,
Gesta 34 (1995): 5 10.
27 Barber, Figure and Likeness, 121.28 Barber, Contesting the
Logic of Painting, 1 22.29 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought:
Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of
Images, 400 1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
174.30 Once again, Susan Stewarts formulation of description as
absence is appropriate here.
See On Longing, 26.31 Nelson, To Say and to See, 151 55.32
Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Performative Icon, Art Bulletin 99
(2006): 636.33 Nelson, To Say and to See, 143 68.34 Gilbert Dagron,
Holy Images and Likeness, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 23
33.
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246 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 40.2 /
2010
35 Maguire, Icons of Their Bodies, 42.36 For essays discussing
the origins and transmission of the Mandylion image, see Ger-
hard Wolf and Herbert L. Kessler, eds., The Holy Face and the
Paradox of Representa-tion: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the
Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, and the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996
(Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1998). For the links between the Man-dylion
image and the image of Nikon, see Maguire, Icons of Their Bodies,
9.
37 For essays discussing various aspects of the Mandylion image,
see Gerhard Wolf, Col-lette Dufour Bozzo, and Anna Rosa Calderoni
Masetti, eds., Mandilion: Intorno al Sacro Volto, da Bisanzio a
Genova (Milano: Skira, 2004).
38 Michele Bacci, Il Pennello dellEvangelista: Storia delle
immagini sacre attribuite a San Luca (Pisa, GISEM: Edizioni ETS,
1998).
39 Liz James, Color and Meaning in Byzantium, Journal of Early
Christian Studies 11 (2003): 223 33.
40 For further discussions on color, see Herbert L. Kessler,
Medieval Art as Argument, in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. B.
Cassidy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 59
74.
41 In this context, one may think of what Hans Belting has
called living painting (empsychos graphe), in which the living
quality is evident because of the addition of narrative elements
and the depiction of emotions. This enormously influential
inter-pretation of Byzantine painting in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries may be found in Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History
of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 261 96. For critiques of Beltings notion of liv-ing
painting, see Charles Barber, Living Painting, or the Limits of
Painting? Glanc-ing at Icons with Michael Psellos, in Reading
Michael Psellos, ed. Charles Barber and David Jenkins (Leiden:
Brill, 2006), 117 30.
42 A discussion on verbal discourse figured as an animate statue
is found in Stratis Papaioannou, Animate Statues: Aesthetics and
Movement, in Reading Michael Psellos, 95 116. If we take the
narration of this particular episode to be animated (which is not
self-evident, since the idea of an animated discourse was framed in
specific terms not necessarily transferable to all verbal
discourses), then it approx-imates the very quality that it
ascribes to its object of narration: Nikons image sculpted in
stone.
43 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and
Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
5.
44 Cynthia Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in
Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 319.
45 Rosenqvist, ed., Life of St. Irene, 3 7. Further references
are given in the text.46 Rosenqvist discusses the contradiction in
Life of St. Irene, 91 n. 4, remarking that only
the very end of Irenes appearance is a waking vision, the Greek
text indicating a dis-tinction between a real vision and an
imaginary sight, both of which may appear in dreams.
47 See the seminal study on dreams by Patricia Cox Miller,
Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), which
discusses these issues in some detail.
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Chatterjee / Problem Portraits 247
48 Nelson, To Say and to See, 143 68.49 See the Oneirocritica of
Daniel, Achmet, Nicephoros, and Artemidoros for discus-
sions of dreams and their interpretation. See also Christine
Angelidi, The Writing of Dreams: A Note on Psellos Funeral Oration
for His Mother, in Reading Michael Psellos, 153 66.
50 Stewart, On Longing, 26 27.51 This is not unlike the
miraculous animation evident in the images of the Virgin
Hodegetria and of the image of the Virgin at the church of
Blachernai, both of which displayed their animation on certain
specific days of the week at a particular hour in specific ways.
The best accounts of these miracles, in my view, are Barber, Living
Painting, or the Limits of Painting?; and Alexei Lidov, The Flying
Hodegetria: The Miraculous Icon as Bearer of Sacred Space, in The
Miraculous Image in the Late Mid-dle Ages and Renaissance, ed. E.
Thun and G. Wolf (Roma: Bibliotheca Hertziana, 2004), 285 86. See
also Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in
Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2006).
52 Akbari, Seeing through the Veil, 3 20, points to the
tenacious links drawn between vision and knowledge in the medieval
period, when intellectual reasoning and divine revelation were both
metaphorically described as visual experiences.
53 The episode is discussed in Robin Cormack, Writing in Gold:
Byzantine Society and Its Icons (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), 39.
54 For the translation, see Stuart George Hall, ed., Gregory of
Nyssa: Homilies on Eccle-siastes; An English Version with
Supporting Studies (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 124 25. For a
discussion of the homily that is pertinent to my argument, see
Colin Macleod, Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 292 305.
55 Barber, Contesting the Logic of Painting, 23 59.56 Ibid., 1
22.57 I use here the elegant descriptive terms of Annemarie Weyl
Carr, from personal corre-
spondence with her. 58 The Life of Nikon, 269, for instance,
remarks, And other things which are beyond
writing or narration . . . we have left to others tongues. A
similar, if decidedly more taciturn move appears in Gregory of
Nyssas Life of Macrina, which Gregory ends by flatly refusing to
recount the many miraculous deeds of Macrina, saying that what
exceeds the capacity of the hearer is received with insult and
suspicion of falsehood, thus explicitly placing the onus of belief
and the job of extending the narrative on the reader, or listener.
See Grgoire de Nysse, Vie de Sainte Macrine, ed. Pierre Maraval,
Sources chrtiennes, vol. 178 (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 1971),
39.
59 A discussion of a similar mode of two-facedness in the
Byzantine novel may be found in Panagiotis Roilos,
Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medi-eval Greek
Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). I
hesitate to posit any direct connections between the
eleventh-century hagiographies and the twelfth-century novels
without further research; however, the preoccupation of both with
episodes dealing with verbal and visual relations suggests that
this was an impor-tant subject of discussion in the period.
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Problem Portraits: The Ambivalence of Visual Representation
in Byzantium
Paroma Chatterjee
This study offers a close reading of the processes involved
in crafting a Byzantine holy portrait by focusing on
certain episodes in the Life of Nikon and the Life of Irene
of Chrysobalanton, hagiographies dated to the eleventh
century. The article argues that the anxieties of visual
representation in Byzantium are encoded in those episodes
in the narrative in which an artist prepares to make a
saints portrait. In the process, the episodes offer
provocative ruminations on the relations between a
representation and its prototype, words and images, sight
versus hearing, and the roles of the artist and the viewer.
They reveal that these issues were by no means resolved
with the official end of Iconoclasm in 843, but remained
vibrant arenas of philosophical and theological reflection
well into the eleventh century.
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