Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus. - Review - book review

LESLIE BRUBAKER Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1999 561 pp; 177 b/w ills. $95

single of the art historian's greatest ravishments is spending large chunks of sanctioned professional time in the company of visually interesting things. These are not just the thing perceiveds in which one has a reaching far down professional stake: the Rembrandt scholar is at liberty to wander into the 20th-century galleries of a museum and disburse as much time there as she wishes. This happy situation does not clinch for students of illuminated medieval manuscripts. Because manuscripts are typically in libraries rather than in museums, scholarly access to them is cumbersome at best, shut to impossible at worst. And there is almost no freedom to range outside one's have narrowly defined field. While my scholarly credentials allow me with considerable effort and calling in of favors, to realize my hands on most 9th-century Western manuscripts, the possibility that I would be able to turn round the pages of one of the great Romanesque manuscripts is slight; it is as if our Rembrandt scholar were unable to gaze even at the Vermeers in the nearest gallery, much l ess the Matisses single floor up. But even those familiar with the restrictive (dare I say Byzantine?) regulations governing access to manuscripts must pity Leslie Brubaker. She has wearied much of her career (this work had its origin in a 1983 John Hopkins dissertation) working upon a manuscript that she has not ever seen and will never diocese the 9th-century copy of the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus preserv in the Bibliotheque nationale de France with the shelfmark manuscrit grec 510 The ban upon seeing the manuscript has considerable legitimacy; the miniatures are flaking in the way that badly that any consultation damages them. level in the eccentric world of manuscript studies, however, the tale of Paris gr 510 is an unusual single [1]

In the light of the postmodern insistence that simulacra are omnipresent, authenticity a chimera, this frustrating situation might have l many contemporary art historians into a contemplative speculation about originality and fact (something along the lines of Michael Camille's Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator [1996]) on the other hand that is not Brubaker's style; she is hardheaded and avoids flights of fancy. She has an agenda of important, if relatively standard questions to ask about the Paris Gregory: by what mode and why was Paris gr 510 made and used? What did Paris gr 510 mean to the tribe who produced and used it? Brubaker is interested in reconstructing, as largely and as accurately as possible, the meanings ascribed to the volume when it was made. Fortunately, the Paris Gregory is closely dated and its original audience known; a series of miniatures of the Byzantine emperor Basil I and his family indicate that the volume was made in Constantinople between late 879 and 882 for presentation to Basil. Further, it is all on the other hand certain that the manuscript's patron was the Byzantine patriarch, Photios. The meaning given to the images in Paris gr 510 in this closely circumscribed geographical, chronological, and sociopolitical connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts is Brubaker's subject.

The exhortations of the 4th-century Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nazianzus were among the greatest in quantity important and influential Byzantine religious writings; there are more of greece manuscripts of his homilies than of any other nonscriptural body This tremendous proliferation of Gregory manuscripts was largely the flow of the popularity of an edition of them arranged according to the liturgical calendar; Paris gr 510 however, contains the abundant rarer full text of Gregory's religious discourses (Brubaker reports that only 1 percent of Gregory manuscripts have this version). This is single one of many anomalies that distinguish the Paris Gregory and make it individual of the most outstanding of all middle Byzantine manuscripts. The manuscript's decoration is lavish: it contains 46 full-page miniatures, painted headpieces and initials, and above a thousand gold letters. solitary the miniatures are Brubaker's control in this book; [2] all are conveniently reproduc in a succession of black-and-white plates in a separate, unpaginated section near the front

The format of many of these miniatures is extremely unusual. While a certain number of are conventionally medieval and consecrate the full page to individual or more scenes in a single frame, others are divided into sum of two units three, four, or five equal or unequal registers or split into 2x2 3x3 or 3x4 grids. In individual case, an oval frame is put inside the more normal rectangular frame (fol 438v); in another, a horizontal frame split into three equal squares fills the top third of a page, while the bottom two-thirds contains a separately framed rectangular miniature (fol 264v) These diverse framing techniques are individual manifestation of the varied ways in which the manuscript's images relate to its body Typically in medieval manuscripts the pictures are more or les direct illustrations of the body or they follow a conventional program of illustrations. Neither of these familiar schemes is lay the foundation of consistently in the Paris Gregory. While there was a pictorial tradition of illustrating Gregory's homilies, [3] Paris gr 510 is independent of that tradition, having unbind connections with only one other Gregory manuscript (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, codfish E.49/50 inf.). Because even cursory application of mind indicates that the text-image relationship in the Paris Gregory cannot be classified as simple illustration, earlier scholars had believed like a relationship was loose or nonexistent. on the contrary in her most important achievement, Brubaker, following the path-breaking article by dint of Sirapie Der Nersessian, [4] exhibits that there are significant connections between true copy and image throughout the Paris Gregory, on the contrary that these connections are frequently oblique and obscure to a fresh audience. The pictures take their hints from Gregory's sermons, but they do for a like reason in eccentric ways, sometimes interpreting the true copy by emphasizing certain passages at the outlay of others (this, as Brubaker quite rightly points on the outside is something that all illustrations do), on the contrary also going outside the body to expand it and make notes on it (the "image as exegesis" of the subtitle). While Der Nersessian had pointed the way here, Brubaker's work is comprehensive in examining the connections between true copy and image in the Paris Gregory. The cast is a daunting one for, as Brubaker writes, Paris gr 510 "is arguably the greatest in quantity complex and internally sophisticated illustrated manuscript at any time produced in Byzantium." With prodigious and rigorous scholarly effort, however, she has been able to reveal that complexity and sophistication.