ART
The Islamic Tide and Byzantium
Vatican Museums
A beautiful small samit, or compound silk twill, displays Annunciation and Nativity scenes in interlacing roundels.
By SOUREN MELIKIAN
Published: May 25, 2012
NEW YORK — The fascinating art show “Byzantium and Islam,” subtitled “Age of Transition, 7th-9th Century,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum through July 8, is one of those rare exhibitions that make one marvel about the unpredictable twists of history.
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Israel Antiquities Authority
A church screen carved with crosses displays the same motifs found in a fragment from a synagogue erected around 604 A.D.
Here, the name Byzantium refers to the ancient Semitic lands that made up historic Syria from Antioch and Edessa (Antakia and Urfa in southwestern Turkey), to Israel, Palestine and the western edge of Jordan. Regardless of their respective identities in the more distant past, by the seventh century these lands shared a common language, Aramaic.
Centuries earlier, Alexander’s conquest of the Near Middle East left in its wake Greek as a second Kultursprache alongside Aramaic. That by no means implied a love of Greece, which was resented as an occupying power. As Steven Fine notes in a remarkable essay on “Jews and Judaism Between Byzantium and Islam,” included in the important exhibition book edited by Helen C. Evans and Brandie Ratliff, the intrusion of Arab armies was actually welcomed by Jews and by a majority of Christians when Islam pushed into the empire.
Jewish life was precarious under Byzantine rule. Christians began attacks against synagogues with official approval, and Jews were banned from entering Jerusalem. It was only under the Arab caliphate that a prosperous Jewish community was established in a city that was and is equally holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims. In Mr. Fine’s words, “Many Jews saw the Islamic invaders as nothing less than harbingers of the Messiah rescuing them from ‘the Evil Empire’ made up of Bible-reading super-secessionist Christian ‘pagans.”’
Christian worshippers of holy images, who experienced severe difficulties during the century-long enforcement of iconoclasm, were equally relieved when Byzantine domination collapsed. Havoc had been wrought in some shrines under the Byzantine administration. A spectacular floor mosaic from a church in present-day Ma’in, in Jordan, reveals, for example, the mutilation of an ox that was part of a scene.
Most important, the Arab conquest of the Syrian and Palestinian area meant that the Greek Empire ruling from its capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul in Turkey), no longer dominated an Aramaic-speaking Semitic population.
A striking revelation of this show is the cultural commonality of the entire region, despite the multiplicity of religious allegiances. Judaism is often understood to frown upon figural representation. Yet, as the excavations carried out by Israeli archaeologists in recent decades demonstrate, the designers of mosaic patterns on synagogue floors drew on the same figural repertory, handled in the same style, as those who planned church floors. On the floor mosaic from the fourth- to fifth-century synagogue at Hammath Tiberias, a panel depicts the Ark of the Covenant where the Torah was preserved, flanked by two menorahs. Below, a larger panel encloses the signs of the Zodiac represented by animals and humans as in the Hellenistic tradition.
A Christian artist painting a Crucifixion icon in early Islamic Palestine three centuries later or so retained a surprisingly similar style. In some cases, the same workshops would carve the menorahs on synagogue marble screens and the crosses on church chancels. The ornamental motifs on both would be drawn from the same repertory. A beautiful fragment from a synagogue erected around 604 A.D., presumed to have been dug up at Ashkelon, and a church screen carved with crosses both display roundels with formal motifs borrowed from the same artistic vocabulary.
Comparable connections cutting across religious barriers are seen elsewhere. The human figures in an eighth-century Crucifixion icon from Mount Sinai and on two icon panels with saints that Kathleen Corrigan attributes to mid-10th century Palestine, ultimately go back to the Hellenistic legacy, and so do the female characters in the nude painted on the walls of a bathhouse erected for an Arab caliph at Qusayr Amra in Jordan around 705 to 715. They all belong to the school of painting that thrived in the south of historic Syria.
But alongside that school, presumably patronized by courts and well endowed religious establishments, radically different artistic strands reveal an astounding diversity in the living culture that curiously anticipates today’s fractured artistic world.
One of the most striking works of art in the show, a basalt block carved in low relief that Gabrielle Mietke from the Sculpture Department and Museum for Byzantine Art dates to the fifth or sixth century, was first spotted 70 years ago by the great French archaeologist Jean Lassus at Qasr Abu Samira in Syria.
Saint Symeon climbing to reach the top of his pillar-like abode and the dove of the Holy Spirit flying will seem familiar to viewers acquainted with the world of Picasso and Basquiat. This ultra-simplified style has antecedents in southern Arabia, which the exhibition book does not mention.
Considerable differences could occur in figural art within the same religious context. An aesthetic abyss thus separates the elaborate style of the floor mosaic from the synagogue at Hammath Tiberias and the floor mosaic in the sixth-century Beth Alpha Synagogue. Both purport to depict the signs of the Zodiac and the Ark of the Covenant. But the sophistication of the former is far removed from the cartoon style of the latter. This suggests that different groups co-existed within the same broader religious communities.
Considerable diversity of inspiration was sometimes displayed in the same monument. The mosaic patterns in the Dome of the Rock, Qubbat as-Sakhara, erected in Jerusalem in 682 reveal multiple influences. The continuous scrolls running along the arches are Hellenistic in origin. By contrast, the composite blossoms go back to Iranian models from the Sasanian period transformed by Syrian aesthetics.
With the spread of Islam, Iranian influence, long established in Syria, increased further. On a silver coin minted in Damascus in the year 74 (around 693 or 694 A.D.), the Caliph ’Abd al-Malik is seen standing on one side. His title, “Amir al-Mu’minin, (Commander of the Believers), is spelled out in Arabic. On the obverse of the coin, the effigy of the Sasanian Emperor Khosrow Parviz is struck, implicitly hailing the caliph as “the Second Khosrow,” a eulogistic title that would be adopted by many sultans. Around the portrait, an inscription in Pahlavi, the Iranian language from which Persian is derived, intones “Khosrow, may his glory increase,” while in the margin the Islamic profession of faith is proclaimed in Arabic.
While the show sheds much light on cultural trends, its weakness lies in the number of objets d’art that are assigned regional provenances and dates on the basis of speculation. Occasionally, divergent opinions are mentioned but their respective merits are not assessed.
A beautiful small samit or compound silk twill from the Vatican Museums that displays Annunciation and Nativity scenes in interlacing roundels is catalogued as “Alexandria or Egypt [sic] (?), Syria (?) or Constantinople (?), 8th-9th Century.” It might have been useful to mention that the blossoms between the roundels call for comparison with Syrian-Palestinian motifs derived from Sasanian Iran in the Dome of the Rock. This speaks in favor of a Palestinian provenance.
One entry presents as an established fact the implausible attribution to Basra in Iraq of a famous bronze ewer based on a mistaken reading of an Arabic inscription made long ago. The vessel, on loan from Tbilisi in Georgia, shares multiple characteristics with a group of ewers from the province of Khorasan in northeast Iran.
Some of the most remarkable works of art remain altogether enigmatic — none more than some beautiful ivory plaques carved in low relief with Old and New Testament scenes and Greek inscriptions. These are broadly classified as “Eastern Mediterranean or Egypt” while carbon-14 dating points to 550-650 A.D. as the likely time frame. The flow of the drapes and the nimble postures in “The Annunciation” and “The Prophet Joel” have no parallel in Egypt or Syria. Could Sicily, where Greek was also used, perhaps be the source of objects that have a rather European look?
Sadly, our knowledge of the cultural and artistic context of events that shook the world more than 1,000 years ago and continues to resonate to this day, remains patchy. We forget this all too easily when definitive pronouncements are made, be it on art, religion or political history.
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