Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

886 30. the visual arts
term which characterizes the production of these centuries, and any term
proposed is likely to have conceptual undertones. So to speak of an ‘age of
Justinian’, for example, may seem to express historical reductionism,
however much the texts of the court writers such as Procopius, Paul the
Silentiary and Corippus may be adduced as contemporary witnesses of the
cult of the individual emperor.
The yardstick against which the changes of this period are most often
defined is ‘antiquity’. The analysis, therefore, has differed according to the
definitions of antiquity adopted by the art historian, and how far antiquity
was seen as a monolithic concept or itself a complex and changing construct.
For some viewers, then, the change from antiquity over this period
involved an over-all and radical transition from ‘naturalism’ to ‘abstraction’.
For others, the phases through which early Byzantine art went can be
related to separate episodes in the history of the art of antiquity, and might
represent phases of ‘renaissance’ or episodes of the more prominent emergence
or development of other classical styles and devices (such as frontality
in portraiture). All these analyses are open to the criticism that the art
historian has exaggerated the history of style over the recognition that
Christian art was responding to a whole matrix of demands from religious
beliefs and practices.
The formalist treatment of the surviving material has at least enabled a
particular set of stylistic stages and issues to be defined, and these have had
their various explanations. 4 The most influential commentator has undoubtedly
been Ernst Kitzinger: he initially set out his formalist approach in a
book constructed within the framework of the British Museum materials
(Early Medieval Art in the British Museum, 1940), and then subsequently in a
series of articles (the majority brought together in a collected edition in 1976)
and most systematically in his book Byzantine Art in the Making (1977) where
he refined his conceptual framework and conclusions. 5 Interestingly, the
British Museum has kept his first book in print, in an updated edition, and
so one might almost speak of ‘British Museum’ scholarship to refer to the
empirical approach. 6
i. artistic evidence and its interpretation
The traditional approach has always involved the collation of as many surviving
materials as possible in order to build up a deductive picture of the
period, while allowing for the ‘distortions’ due to the disappearance of so
much of the original production. Within this frame of reference, the period
4 A key formalist textbook is Morey (1942 and 1953). For a review of the field, see Kessler (1988).
5 For sweeping criticisms of Kitzinger see C. Mango in the TLS, 25 March 1977: 381, followed by a
reply on 6 May and subsequent rebuttal.
6 The empirical approach is maintained in the British Museum exhibition catalogue, Buckton (1994).
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