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19-08-2015, 04:57

Fading of the Dark Ages

Given the depth of hostility toward the early Christians in the beginnings of modern art-historical scholarship, it is difficult to fathom how a gradual overturning of the anti-Christian view was accomplished. Its persistence long after Vasari, in scholarly accounts of the fall of the Roman Empire, insured that early Christian art, in studies of artistic developments in western Europe, would be forcefully subsumed within the postclassical artistic morass that Ghiberti set so firmly aside as belonging to a middle or ‘‘dark’’ age. The reflections of Edward Gibbon and the more recent analysis of the Arch of Constantine by Bernard Berenson (1954) illustrate just how strong the ‘‘Dark Age’’ momentum was, and how firmly entrenched in scholarly opinion it has been (fig. 21.5; I shall discuss the Arch further below). It has taken a succession of scholars across several generations to loosen Ghiberti’s period divisions and set the art of Late Antiquity into its own place, just as medieval and Byzantine art came only slowly to be valued in its own right. And it is this process of revising the significance of late antique and early Christian art that is itself worth briefly reviewing.

For late antique art specifically, this loosening began with a vibrant polemic conducted between two members of a ‘‘Vienna School’’ of art history, Alois Riegl (1858-1905) and Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941). Both scholars established new methods and patterns of interpreting Roman art and the so-called medieval and Byzantine art that emerged by the sixth century. Riegl, along with Franz Wickhoff (see Von Hartel and Wickhoff 1895) argued for the Roman origin of the late antique style (Riegl 1901). Strzygowski, on the other hand, argued that style changed in Late Antiquity as a result of Semitic or oriental influence (see Strzygowski 1901, which followed a dissertation on the iconography of the baptism of Christ, 1885, and a study of the Byzantine sources of Cimabue, 1888).

Their debate hinged on a shift of emphasis: the historical period between the late third century and the sixth could be read as an age of transformation of the classical heritage, as opposed to one of decline. One means of illustrating this was examination

Publisher's Note:

Permission to reproduce this image online was not granted by the copyright holder. Readers are kindly requested to refer to the printed version of this chapter.


Figure 21.5 Arch of Constantine. c. ad 315. Detail: north facade, the Congiarium, or Distribution of Largess. Rome, Italy. Archivi Alinari, Florence.

Of ancient religious images and myths and their continuing impact on post-antique visual and intellectual culture. This emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as one of the most important, but complex and potentially confusing, themes in writing the history of western civilization. The history of art in the late antique period was thus effectively established as an academic discipline in its own right, and ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ then first emerged as a clearly definable art-historical period (Elsner 2002). It was Ernst Kitzinger who introduced to an English-speaking audience the methods associated with this Vienna School, and continued to use them himself (Kitzinger 1955, 1977).

Elsewhere, almost contemporaneously with Riegl and Strzygowski, the careful exposure of a broader continuity of tradition, from antiquity through to its recovery in fifteenth-century Italy, was under way at the hands of cultural historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and his followers, including Fritz Saxl (1890-1948), Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), and Edgar Wind (1900-71). Instead of the strenuous study of forms associated with the Vienna School, Warburg espoused the iconographic method. Pointing to the use of classical motifs and themes in representations of Christian subjects and to the repeated lapses into classical style that occurred across the Middle Ages, including the emperor Charlemagne’s very deliberate revival (Weitzman 1979: 2), Warburg and his associates revealed that the pagan gods had survived, both in people’s memory and in their imagination. They determined that an essential difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance resided in a general change in attitude toward antiquity: the former ‘‘accepted and developed rather than studied and restored the heritage of the past’’ (Panofsky 1955: 26). If this was accurate, the judgments of Ghiberti, Alberti, and Vasari were, at best, half-truths. Panofsky argued that they were right insofar as the attitude toward antiquity was changed in the Renaissance; but they were wrong in believing that there was a clear severance between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages (Panofsky 1955: 67-8).

As this scholarship gathered momentum, the traditional antithesis between culturally stagnant Middle Ages and artistically brilliant Italian Renaissance began to diminish. In the introduction to his book La Survivance des dieux antiques, French scholar Jean Seznec was able to demonstrate that the ‘‘Dark Age’’ epithet was becoming less and less relevant (Seznec 1940). While Seznec had nurtured an interest in the visual arts, he had no professional training in art history. His singular achievement was providing for a general audience a rich discussion of mythology in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and an account of what became of the ancient gods after the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity. Seznec’s book is, essentially, a vibrant, elegantly written and indeed compelling synthesis of the work of Warburg, Saxl, and Panofsky. Translated into English thirteen years after its original publication in French, La Survivance became pivotal in the gradual overturning of‘‘Dark Age’’ vocabulary more widely. It thereby made one of the most significant contributions to the understanding of the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The title of Seznec’s book - in its English translation, The Survival of the Pagan Gods - implied a new account of the relationship between early Christian art and classical antiquity. Was early Christianity in fact a conduit through which Greco-Roman ideals were passed to artists of subsequent generations, or was it the instrument that insured those ideals were lost? Following the methods established by his more prominent predecessors, Seznec examined the intellectual and imaginative lives of thinkers and artists in the ten centuries before the Renaissance. ‘‘The essential function of the visual image,’’ he wrote, ‘‘which plays so important a part in this book, is the summing up of trends or currents of thought’’ (Seznec 1940, tr. Sessions 1953: 7). By his own admission, he selected and analyzed images mostly on the basis of their role as documents and witnesses, not on the basis of style or form. Iconography, he argued, serves as a constant auxiliary to the study of the history of ideas.

If, as Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky, Seznec and others had suggested, the traditional boundaries of art history could thus be pushed, just as the boundaries between the ‘‘megaperiods’’ (as Panofsky called them) within art history could be blurred, there were new possibilities for the definition of late antique art, for its study, and thus for the recognition of its broad significance in the understanding of western European art history. And that was certainly what Riegl, Stryzgowski, and successors had envisaged, each using his favored methods.

The Warburg-influenced study of the continuing impact of ancient religious images and myths on post-antique visual and intellectual culture was focused very little on early Christian art. Yet Saxl, who directed the Warburg Institute after Abby Warburg’s death in 1929 and presided over its transfer to London in 1934, displayed a keen awareness of Christianity’s importance in the transition of classical art into Late

Publisher's Note:

Permission to reproduce this image online was not granted by the copyright holder. Readers are kindly requested to refer to the printed version of this chapter.


Figure 21.6 Church of Santa Pudenziana: apse mosaic. Late 4th-early 5th century ad. Rome, Italy. akg-images/Andrea Jemolo.

Antiquity and the medieval period. In a lecture delivered at the Courtauld Institute in January 1944, four years after the publication of Seznec’s book, Saxl took pains to emphasize the importance of beginning with the early Christian period in order to understand medieval art. The subject of his lecture was ‘‘Pagan and Jewish Elements in Early Christian Sculpture,’’ a synthesis of the kind more commonly found today, and he highlighted the basic premise of German scholarship in this field: that there were bonds linking pagan and Christian art, the former essential to an understanding of the latter (Saxl 1957: 45-6).

Their successors in the field of early Christian art history drew on these insights, which included an observed connection between the post-Constantinian images of Christ and the iconography that developed in Roman imperial art of the fourth century for the representation of the emperor. We can return to the Arch of Constantine to see how this theory works: the hieratic presentation of the emperor amid his adoring retinue that we find in that frieze (fig. 21.5) is seen to influence nearcontemporary images of Christ that emerged in the fourth century, particularly as they survive on sarcophagi. Within the same symmetrical composition, the same iconographic devices were used to denote Christ as the center (enthroned, elevated, and depicted on a larger scale), the same gestures of adoration taken from the emperor’s subjects and given to the apostles. In mosaic (fig. 21.6) and in the minor arts too (fig. 21.7), the repetitive format of disciples lined uniformly on either side of

Publisher's Note:

Permission to reproduce this image online was not granted by the copyright holder. Readers are kindly requested to refer to the printed version of this chapter.


Figure 21.7 Engraved gem (intaglio). Mid-4th century ad. Carnelian. Syria(?). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Christ to offer adoration could be adapted to a variety of other situations, as we shall see below.

The continuity with the classical tradition, explored through this evolutionary approach to iconography, was expressed in the 1977 exhibition and symposium organized by Kurt Weitzman (with Margaret Frazer) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘‘The Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century.’’ Weitzmann introduced the exhibition as follows:

The transition from the dying classical to the rising and finally triumphant Christian culture was a complex process, extending over several centuries, in which the two coexisted and competed with each other. Christianity owed much of its ultimate success to the fact that it outgrew its Jewish heritage and adopted many elements from the very classical culture it had set out to dethrone. (Weitzmann 1979: xix)



 

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