Art and Text, Antiquity to Byzantium

Catalog description

This seminar explores the relations of art, artifact, and architecture with text - both material texts and literary remains - in the Greco-Roman, Late Antique and Byzantine worlds. There, the written word was a source of power and authority as much as a means of communication; script itself could be sacred. Important literary models and genres persisted over that long arc, even while new genres of description and text-image media arose; many have had a lasting impact in the post-antique world down to our contemporary moment. By Late Antiquity, texts - whether read, spoken, remembered, or inscribed - were often intertwined with things on multiple levels. The writing on statue bases was meaningful aesthetically; the portrait in words complemented the image it inscribed. Script, sometimes illegible and nonsensical, featured as calligraphic ornament and visual sign in both secular and sacred contexts. Ancient debates concerning the role of images in religious devotion came, in the Christian era, to generate a huge body of theological and homiletic writings; this seminar especially visits the period called Iconoclasm, and traces its historical roots. Descriptions of works of art, either independent or inserted into larger literary compositions, proliferated; they could problematize the acts of seeing/reading, writing/making. We will look at some of the `catalogues' of described things and images real and fictional, in prose and in poetry. Topics sample the vast array of objects that bore inscriptions, often in the form of poetic texts, or epigrams, from monumental architecture to drinking wares, personal seals and pieces of jewelry. (Sometimes these made images and objects actually speak, as if alive, to people seeing /reading them, touching them.)