An important question that is raised by all written sources used by historians, but especially by Byzantine documents, is how to characterize the engagement of texts with objective reality. In the case of Art History, much of the discussion of this issue in recent years has focused on the rhetorical genre of ekphrasis. In the ancient rhetorical handbooks, ekphrasis was defined as the description of‘persons, deeds, times, places, seasons, and many other things’ (Rabe 1913: 22; Webb 1999a: 7-18). However, by the late antique period ekphraseis were frequently devoted to works of art and architecture, and the ekphrastic description of art continued to be a popular literary form in Byzantium until the fifteenth century. These ekphraseis sometimes were composed as separate pieces, to stand on their own, but more frequently they were incorporated into other texts, such as homilies or panegyrics.
The many ekphraseis of buildings and works of art that have survived from Byzantium, coupled with the disappearance of many of the described monuments, have prompted some scholars to use the Byzantine descriptions as guides to the reconstruction of lost monuments and works of art (Webb 1999&: 61). But an ekphrasis was not a straightforward description, and several authors have pointed out the problems inherent in using the Byzantine ekphraseis for the purpose of archaeological reconstruction.
Because ekphrasis was a rhetorical form which had been formulated in antiquity, it deployed the conventions of ancient rhetoric, especially the use of topoi, or quotations. The extensive use of topoi can give a strongly archaizing character to later Byzantine examples of the genre; an ekphrasis of an icon of the Virgin and Child by the fifteenth-century author John Eugenikos (Boissonade 1844: 335-40), for example, quotes extensively from a third-century ekphrasis of the education of Achilles which had been written by Philostratos the Elder {Imagines 2.2.2). A particularly puzzling feature of the Byzantine ekphraseis is that they borrow from antiquity topoi whose original purpose was to praise the realism and verisimilitude of ancient art. Some modern commentators, who have admired Byzantine art for its abstract qualities and for its resemblance to twentieth-century modernist art, have seen the application of such topoi to Byzantine art as inappropriate. Cyril Mango has spoken of the Tossilisation of artistic criticism in the face of completely different artistic phenomena’ (1963: 66).
A more positive evaluation of the role of rhetoric in Byzantine writing on art was given by John Onians, who pointed out that the rhetoric of praise became the most important form of oratory during the absolutist political system of the Roman Empire, and that amplification, or exaggeration, was an essential element of panegyric (1980:12-17). Thus, from the second to the sixth centuries, orators, as they embroidered what they saw, increasingly read more into images than was actually there. Amplification encouraged the development of the imaginative faculties of the orators and of their hearers, who, by the sixth century, were actually able to see more in an abstract image than their predecessors. Through rhetoric, according to Onians, there was a kind of inflation of the imagination, and at the same time a progressive disengagement of the spectators’ response from the actual appearance of the object.
An article by Liz James and Ruth Webb also argues for a positive evaluation of the role of rhetoric in Byzantine writing on art (1991:1-17). Pointing out that all representations of reality are partial and selective, they claimed that the ekphraseis are irrelevant to the reconstruction of the material appearance of art, but should be appreciated as cultural artefacts in their own right, not merely as sources of archaeological information. They described the ekphraseis as providing a ‘living response to works of art, one which is perceptual rather than objectively descriptive’. Furthermore, the tendency of the ekphraseis to provide a chronological narrative that goes far beyond what could have been seen in the images means that they fimctioned as descriptions of the events that were depicted in the paintings (for example, stories from the gospels), rather than as descriptions of the images that depicted them. As such, according to James and Webb, the ekphrasis is a form of description that is parallel to the image, and not dependent on it; it is therefore not a reliable description of the work of art.
The debate over the relationship of the ekphraseis to the works of art they purported to describe centres on the question of whether it is possible to reconstruct archaeological data from written accounts or whether one can only create a history of perceptions or interpretations. In this respect, art historians have an advantage over other historians, in that a text can no longer be checked against a battle, for example, but it can be against a surviving work of art. Even though perceived discrepancies have led to doubts concerning the subjects of some ekphraseis— for example, the homily which the ninth-century patriarch Photios devoted to an image of the Virgin and Child in the church of Hagia Sophia at Constantinople (Maguire 1995:109)—in other cases the subject matter of the description is certain and still survives. Thus, when the courtier and historian Psellos described the eleventh-century gardens constructed by Constantine IX Monomachos at his urban palace at the Mangana, he rhetorically set up an implied comparison {synkrisis) between the scale of the gardens laid out by Constantine and those extravagantly created by Nero in the centre of Rome {Chron. 6.173-5,186-7, 201). However, the site of the Mangana gardens, which still survives today with its extensive terracing, confirms the accuracy of the description given by Psellos; in this case rhetoric and objective reahty come together to illuminate each other (Maguire 2000: 260-1).
In general, it can be seen that the Byzantine authors of ekphraseis often did describe precisely what they saw in the works of art themselves, and did not limit themselves to expanding on the stories that the art reproduced. However, the Byzantine writers made their observations in a descriptive language very different from our own. Their language was not the language of formal analysis, as created by critics of art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, nor was it the language of semiotics or contemporary critical theory. Rather, as shown above, the Byzantine writers employed a critical vocabulary derived from ancient rhetoric, a vocabulary that had originally been formulated to describe a different kind of art. Because the Byzantines used the language of ancient art criticism to characterize their own art, their descriptions have often appeared stilted to modern readers, and have frequently been misunderstood to indicate that the Byzantines had no awareness of the element of abstraction in Byzantine art (see, especially, Grigg 19B7: 3-9). In fact the Byzantines were acutely attuned to the distinctions between what modern observers would describe as reahstic and abstract styles, such as, for example, the distinction between passages of drapery executed with illusionistic modelling in light and shade and those rendered in the more stylized technique of gold chrysography (Maguire 1995: no). Such stylistic distinctions were described by the Byzantines not in aesthetic terms, but in terms of what they signified, such as the human and the divine natures of Christ, or the spiritual characteristics of different categories of saints.
Another consequence of the Byzantine employment of the vocabulary of ancient art criticism is that they often used topoi not as precise descriptions, but in order to convey a general impression. For example, it was conventional to describe a multicoloured floor or building as similar to a meadow in the springtime, with its covering of variegated flowers. This toposy which can be traced back to the second-century author Lucian (Dc Domo: 9), was applied by medieval writers to pavements composed of pieces of cut marble (opus sectile), as in the case of a description of the twelfth-century floor of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo by the contemporary Greek preacher Philagathos (Rossi Taibbi 1969: 175). Since the Cappella Palatina floor is an abstract composition that does not portray any flowers, it can be seen that in this case Philagathos employs the topos not as a precise description of the floor, but as a metaphor to convey the general idea of its colourfulness.
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