Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium

Abstract

This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium. Spanning the period from around 1100 to around 1450, it focuses upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on works of art. Epigrammatic poetry, Professor Drpić argues, constitutes a critical - if largely neglected - source for reconstructing aesthetic and socio-cultural discourses that informed the making, use, and perception of art in the Byzantine world. Bringing together art-historical and literary modes of analysis, the book examines epigrams and other related texts alongside an array of objects, including icons, reliquaries, ecclesiastical textiles, mosaics, and entire church buildings. By attending to such diverse topics as devotional self-fashioning, the aesthetics of adornment, sacred giving, and the erotics of the icon, this study offers a penetrating and highly original account of Byzantine art and its place in Byzantine society and religious life.

Moral lessons in late Byzantium: rhetorical models and didacticism in Joseph Bryennios’Forty-Nine Chapters(c. 1402)

“…In Byzantine artistic theory and practice, κόσμος was used with the meaning of order and ornament which, as I. Drpicá rgued, 'enhanced the representation of images, organized their appearance, and communicated sanctity'. 73 Drpićalso convincingly suggested that in late Byzantium, κόσμος, as the adornment of sacred objects, was used abundantly because it responded to aesthetic norms as well as to the pervasive understanding that κόσμος could partake of the object's sanctity. 74 While Bryennios uses κόσμος with the parallel meaning of the created world, he also integrates the notion of an orderly ornamentation.…”

Clockwise–Counterclockwise: Calligraphic Frames in Sephardic Hebrew Bibles and Their Roots in Mediterranean Culture

“…A few of the earliest icons on panels do carry calligraphic complete frames. 35 One well-known image is the seventh/eighth century Maiestas Domini icon in the Santa Katrina monastery. 36 Only one manuscript from the mid-tenth century, known as the Leo Sacellarios Bible or Queen Cristina Bible (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg.…”

“…However, as this system creates a flipped line requiring one to turn the manuscript in order to read the frame's of 895 CE," 184-86; Leila Avrin, "Note on Micrography: A Jewish Art Form," Journal of Jewish Art 6 (1979): 114; Gutmann, Hebrew Manuscript Painting, 18; Gutmann, "The Messianic Temple," 172; J. N. Hillgarth and B. Narkiss, "A List of Hebrew Books (1330) and a Contract to Illuminated Manuscripts (11350) from Majorca," Revue des etudes Juives 3 (1961): 319; Narkiss,Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts,29,69;and Milstein,"Hebrew Book Illumination in the Fatamid Era,Islam and Muslim Art,227. 58 Schlosberg,"RaSaG's Attitude Towards the Islam,[33][34][35] Dan Pagis, Poetry Aptly Explained (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 90.…”

The staurotheke of the church of Sts. Peter and Paul in Ras, Serbia. A contribution to research

“…The vogue for this poetic form may have also been one of the consequences of the fact that epigrammatic poetry flourished in the Palaiologan era. 47 Judging by what research into this subject has come up with, the content of the epigram on our staurotheke is in full conformity with the character and purpose of the object itself. Namely, recent research-especially Wolfram Hörandner's specialist studies-has shown that the repertoire of motifs in Byzantine epigrams relating to the True Cross includes a few typical ones, the motif of the cross as protector holding the central place.…”

“…Some of these models were especially popular, such as the story of the widow's mite, Gregory of Nazianzus' favourite. 38 The parable of the widow's mite was widely used in Serbia too. 39 It is indicative that it appears at the very beginning of the fourteenth century, in King Milutin's charter for the monastery of Hilandar's pyrgos of St.…”