Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity

Between Reading and Seeing

Sean V. Leatherbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000023336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity considers the Greek and Latin texts inscribed in churches and chapels in the late antique Mediterranean (c. 300–800 CE), compares them to similar texts from pagan, Jewish, and Muslim spaces of worship, and explores how they functioned both textually and visually.

These texts not only recorded the names and prayers of the faithful, but were powerful verbal and visual statements of cultural values and religious beliefs, conveying meaning through their words as well as through their appearances. In fact, the two were intimately connected. All of these texts – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan – acted visually, embracing their own materiality as mosaic, paint, or carved stone. Colourful and artfully arranged, the inscriptions framed human relationships with the divine, encouraged responses from readers, and made prayers material. In the first in-depth examination of the inscriptions as words and as images, the author reimagines the range of aesthetic, cultural, and religious experiences that were possible in spaces of worship.

Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity is essential reading for those interested in Roman, late antique, and Byzantine material and visual culture, inscriptions and other texts, and religious life in the ancient Mediterranean.

1
Introduction

Upon entering the renovated galleries of ancient art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, visitors come face to face with a monumental mosaic from the Church of Ss. Peter and Paul at Gerasa, the city of Jerash in modern-day Jordan (Color Plate 1).¹ Until the recent renovation, the mosaic, which arrived in New Haven in 1932 after it was excavated by the Yale-British School team in the late 1920s, had been backed with reinforced concrete, which was sensitively removed by a team of conservators and replaced with more modern, lightweight materials, allowing the object itself to take pride of place.² The six-meter-high mosaic dominates the wall with depictions of the walled cities of Memphis and Alexandria, the latter including its famous Pharos (lighthouse), and, at the top, a vase surrounded by vine scrolls. In the center of the panel is a Greek inscription in white tesserae, framed and offset by a brilliant red tabula ansata (a “tablet with handles” in the shape of triangles):

Indeed, each high priest brings very beautiful wonders to the people who inhabit this city and land, wherefore famous Anastasios, teaching faithful beliefs of God, built a house to the first of the apostles, Peter and Paul, for to them the Savior gave power, decorated with ornaments of silver and vividly-colored stones.³

As displayed, the mosaic, with its rich combination of text and image – things both to read and to see – is a fitting introduction to the world of late antique visual culture, a work made in a Roman medium, mosaic, for a Christian building.

For the scholar, the work and its display throw into sharp relief the many issues that frame any examination of objects from the period, especially mosaics and inscriptions. The mosaic was originally part of the pavement of a church, a sacred space for Christians of the city, and was placed in front of the sanctuary, where it likely would have been viewed by the clergy (including the donor, Bishop Anastasios, mentioned in the inscription) and members of the congregation (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).⁴ These viewers may have looked at and understood the mosaic in different ways as they walked over it before, during, or after the liturgy.⁵ The inhabitants of Gerasa, a city with a rich classical past, would most probably have seen the pavement in its local context, as part of a wave of new churches built and decorated with mosaics in the city in the course of the sixth century CE (Common Era), whose decorative programs and dedicatory inscriptions reveal the continued influence of Graeco-Roman artistic and literary traditions.⁶ Some viewers, particularly the clergy and other educated elites, may have appreciated the classicizing language of the inscription and recognized the Egyptian cities of Memphis and Alexandria depicted in the mosaic, the former being the capital of Egypt in the Old Kingdom period that continued to be a population hub in the region into the seventh century, including the Monastery of Apa (Father) Jeremias at Saqqara, on the edge of the ancient Memphite cemetery.⁷ Some might have even visited these cities, especially Alexandria, a hub of both classical and Christian culture in the period.⁸ The floor of the church would have been read with and against the other mosaics of the building, as well as liturgical objects such as lamps, silver vessels, and the vestments of the clergy.⁹

Figure 1.1 Church of Ss. Peter and Paul, Gerasa, Jordan, view from the nave looking towards the apse, photograph taken in 2010

Source: Sean V. Leatherbury/Manar al-Athar

While reconstructing the experience of a sixth-century viewer in the church at Gerasa in all its particulars is of course impossible, we can make inroads towards this goal.¹⁰ We do this by reading, or looking at, artistic and inscriptional ensembles together, evaluating surviving images and inscriptions within their architectural

Figure 1.2 Plan, Church of Ss. Peter and Paul, Gerasa

Source: Courtesy of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, Mount Nebo, and the American Center of Oriental Research, Amman

contexts and against information provided by primary literary sources, including biblical exegesis, theological writings, and other genres of literature popular in the period. Certain scholars of late antique art have long been engaged with this relationship between inscribed words and images, but only in the past several decades has the wider community of art historians begun to investigate more deeply the relationship between texts and images.¹¹ This new sub-field has been approached from a number of angles, as in the volume of essays edited by Liz James, Art and Text in Byzantine Culture, which provides a good view of the scope of recent areas of research and shows how far scholarship has come from its initial interest in ekphrasis (description) alone.¹² Interest in the junctions and disjunctions between art and text has not been limited to the late antique and Byzantine period, and scholars have undertaken similar examinations for the arts of Assyria,¹³ Pharaonic Egypt,¹⁴ classical and Hellenistic Greece, imperial Rome,¹⁵ the medieval west,¹⁶ early modern Rome,¹⁷ and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,¹⁸ among other periods. The field is a vibrant one at the moment, as the existence of the series in which this book is published, Image, Text, and Culture in Classical Antiquity, testifies, and those working within it have begun to engage with the wide range of verbal and visual potential of texts written into public spaces: thus the recent spate of edited volumes that focus on the role of inscriptions as things to be looked at (art, or “design”) as well as read,¹⁹ or as signs of faith, power, and identity.²⁰

Recent work has aimed to put inscriptions like that from Gerasa into a more global, trans-temporal context, and has opened up a range of interesting material and visual approaches to the texts, some of which will be echoed here.²¹ However, the ability of many recent studies to discuss the range of inscribed texts from the late antique period has been limited by a focus on cross-cultural similarities and differences, which discourages a drilling-down into the rich web of texts produced in the period. The vast majority of studies on late antique inscriptions continue to pay more attention to the messages they convey, and the names, dates, and titles they provide, than to their relationships to the buildings in which they were written.²² In the realm of late antique epigraphy (the study of words written onto surfaces other than scrolls or the pages of books), summary investigations of the relationship between inscriptions and images, and the visual and physical context of inscriptions, have been undertaken for certain monuments and programs, as well as the literary features of inscriptions written in verse,²³ but the large number of inscriptions which survive from late antique churches, synagogues, and mosques has thus far deterred work on the larger themes that emerge from the texts across regions and religions. Despite the riches of the corpus of mosaic inscriptions, in particular, art historians have been slow on the whole to incorporate the study of these texts into their work.²⁴

This book, then, considers a large group of donor, prayer, invocation, and other types of inscriptions, mainly (though not exclusively) in mosaic, from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim spaces of the late antique period, considered here to be the period from the fourth to the eighth centuries, from both sides of the Mediterranean, in order to examine these texts within their particular spatial contexts.²⁵ As it zooms between a wider Mediterranean perspective and a close consideration of particular monuments, its primary aim is to place inscriptions within the spatial, visual, religious, and cultural contexts of the period. This goal corresponds with that articulated by Amy Papalexandrou more than a decade and a half ago, to “put the texts back on the buildings.”²⁶ We should continue to analyze individual monuments and their programs, but we must also develop our knowledge of the range of textual possibilities across spaces sacred to different cults and creeds, as many of these were similarly rooted in the literary and visual traditions of the Roman world.

A second aim of this book is to investigate which features, if any, differentiate “Christian,” or “Jewish,” or “Islamic,” inscriptions from their own or classical predecessors, as well as features or themes which persist throughout.²⁷ While the languages in which these texts are written differ in some cases – for example, inscriptions from synagogues are sometimes written in Hebrew and sometimes in Greek – they share a number of features, including forms of address, information presented, quotations of sacred texts, and engagement with the architecture of the building. In this context, I argue that, through the texts written into their buildings, late antique patrons, especially Christians, expressed their cultural and religious affiliations in more complicated, and sometimes playful, ways than has previously been thought.²⁸ Words written in churches enabled educated patrons to employ what has been termed “Christian classicism,” the continued use of classical language, literature, and cultural references, to express their new faith in old terms and put their education (paideia) on display.²⁹ However, these texts were not produced by a backward-looking culture, but by Christians who used familiar forms of expression in order to make innovative, sophisticated points about their religion and culture.

A third aim is to shift the focus onto different components of the inscriptions from those that have been considered by previous work on the texts. A large number of extant inscriptions from the period have dedicatory components, and they have been studied for the information that they provide, including donors’ names, dedications of buildings, and dates. Late antique inscriptions have been explored in terms of the relative popularity of church building,³⁰ the epigraphic formulae of donation,³¹ the identification and self-promotion of donors,³² as well as identity more broadly.³³ Because of the prevailing focus on the donor, certain themes that emerge from the inscriptions have gone under-examined, including vision and visuality.³⁴ As a result, while this study engages with the donors who paid for, and who in some cases may have composed, the inscriptions, the focus here remains on other facets of the texts. By reading these elements within and against the larger context of late antique approaches to the visual, we may glimpse the ways in which texts were intended to complement, supplement, or complicate visual experiences. This book, then, plays in the rich sandbox that the corpus of late antique inscriptions offers, and focuses on themes th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Material texts
• 3 Framing texts, framing belief
• 4 Ekphrasis and experience
• 5 Embedding texts into images
• 6 Embedded prayers
• Conclusion: reading and seeing faith
• Bibliography
• Index