Organizer and co-chair

Organizer and respondent

Organizer and co-chair

‘Numerous Escort’: Liturgical Objects in Concert during the Late Byzantine Great Entrance

By the Late Byzantine Period, the Great Entrance served as a culmination of the Divine Liturgy for lay worshippers. With a lack of frequent participation in communion and visuality impaired by the ever-expanding icon screen, the laity’s closest experience of the Eucharistic elements occurred as the bread and wine were processed through the nave, as priests and deacons carried them to the altar. The bread and wine were accompanied, as Symeon of Thessaloniki evocatively notes, by “numerous escort”: deacons bearing rhipidia on long poles overhead flanked those carrying the chalice and paten, while a large liturgical veil, the epitaphios picturing the dead body of Christ, was also carried through the midst of the congregation. The chalice and paten were themselves covered by smaller embroidered liturgical veils, all as the entire procession was perfumed by deacons carrying censers and lit by candle-bearers. The Great Entrance clearly had a powerful impact. Sources attest to lay worshippers’ blocking the path of the procession, literally throwing themselves on the ground and interrupting the priest’s movement and his prayers, while straining to touch the objects.

Despite the ritual importance of liturgical objects, they have received somewhat sporadic attention from art historians. While liturgical objects were experienced as a group by Byzantine worshippers, in contemporary scholarship they are studied primarily as examples of a type of media or technique, or part of a collection or corpus, isolated from both their ritual context and the other liturgical objects with which they were used. This paper reunites the various liturgical objects, investigating how they created a multi-sensory worship environment.

Together, liturgical objects engaged a variety of senses and encouraged the movement of the worshipper’s body. Incense burners, such as a fourteenth-century bronze katzion in Belgrade, enveloped the procession in scent. Rhipidia, the ceremonial liturgical fans carried by deacons and signaling their angelic function, provided sound. A post-Byzantine set from the Banja Monastery (1557), for example, feature tassels which rubbed against the objects’ surface and created noise when it moved. Epitaphioi, such as the earliest extant example now in Sofia and dating to ca. 1300, were carried down the backs of clergy, and lay worshippers bent and stretched their bodies in order to see and touch them. The objects all worked together to create a climactic moment. This paper, in addition to tracing the relationship between the various liturgical objects, examines their role in orchestrating lay experience of the divine during the Great Entrance.

Woven Architecture and the Early Byzantine Sense of Human Space

The primary function of columns on textiles is not to deceive the early Byzantine or early Islamic eye. In this respect, textiles representing columns may differ from architectural elements painted on wall surfaces in imitation of marble or another stone. Instead columns on furnishing textiles make reference to architecture purely as images without trompe l’oeuil; they enhance or define the social environment, relating people to both real and imaginatively projected spaces.

The challenge for scholarship today is to propose possible scenarios or settings for these images, which usually survive only as parts or fragments of unknown wholes.  With this goal in mind it is interesting to look at examples of textiles presenting human figures or heads or busts in relation to columns or arches.  Single arches and horizontal arcades make convenient framing units; but the history of their use by weavers reveals that both columns and arches are often honorific design elements chosen for their indexical and metaphorical power.

Specifically, the presence of these architectural units may be contrasted to the use of other framing devices in textiles of architectural scale. Some of these alternatives have precedents in Roman or late antique painted walls or ceilings, or in mosaics on walls or on pavements. Design units playing telescopically with scale include a detailed jeweler’s motif appearing in large scale on a tapestry border, or a figural arcade in miniature stretching across the torso of a person wearing a tapestry-embellished tunic, as if the person were a wall. Such pre-digital zooming in and out to enlarge or diminish the scale of a motif demonstrates that such motifs were part of a repertory through which textiles added intimacy to iconic strength. 

Shaping Experience: Curtains and Veils in Middle and Late Byzantium

In contrast to the period of Late Antiquity, which has yielded a number of fragments of curtains, hardly any Middle or Late Byzantine curtains or screening veils have come down to us. Our knowledge about their continuous use in the home, in the palace and the church, as well as information about their appearance and mode of suspension derives mainly from written sources and, to a lesser extent, from representations in art. The purpose of the paper is twofold. The first goal is to present Middle and Late Byzantine curtains and veils as objects themselves using the available evidence and discussing materials, texture, colors, decoration, length, and suspension or lifting devices. The various terms used to describe the textiles in written sources (e.g. βῆλον [παραπέτασμα, κο[υ]ρτίνα [καταπέτασμα, βηλόθυρον, ἔπιπλον, πέπλος, σκέπη, ἐγχείριον, μανδήλιον) will be critically assessed. Secondly, it is aimed to analyse the functions – practical, ritual, and symbolic – in secular and religious contexts and to explore how the material properties of curtains and veils shaped the experience of spaces, other objects, and persons by manipulating, regulating, and, not least, ritualizing sensory and perceptual access and emotive response.

Curtains served as partitions and screens, albeit – being made of fabric – they were movable and permeable, billowing in a draft and – depending on texture and color – allowing light and disembodied sound to filter through. They were hung from doorways and openings protecting interior spaces from extreme cold or heat, and regulated the natural lighting of interiors both for ritual and for mundane purposes. They also helped articulate larger rooms by dividing them into smaller segments, and they screened off areas dedicated to specific functions that required privacy or other restricted access.

As artifacts, especially in the case of the more luxurious examples described in the sources, curtains contributed to the adornment of spaces, affording aesthetic pleasure and imparting a sense of opulence to their surroundings. As barriers and screens, they provided an ideal and relatively easy-to handle means for controlling vision, for directing physical movement, and for shaping perceptions and behavior. Being found in liminal spaces, simultaneously as physical boundaries and as points of access, they became associated with concepts of the private and the public, inclusion and exclusion, ignorance and knowledge, the visible and the invisible, concealment and revelation. Withdrawal of an object, a person, or even a specific area behind an opaque textile screen made it automatically appear significant, distinguished, sacred, or potentially dangerous, while at the same time creating the desire to attain what was hidden and, thus, ensuring an emotive engagement as well as conditioning specific behavioral responses. To paraphrase Daniel Miller, the fascination of Byzantine curtains and veils lies not only in their own inherent value as artifacts, but in their power to endow other artifacts, persons, and spaces with value and, not least, mystic. (D. Miller, "Materiality: An Introduction," in D. Miller (ed.) Materiality. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp 1–50).

Furnishing the Household Memory Theater in Late Antiquity

In the following fourth-century accounts of the transfer of garments, clothing changes its function through gifting to become a repository of memory and a cue to memory.  Upon the death of the elder hermit, Paul, Anthony used his own pallium for Paul’s shroud.

… and then, that the affectionate heir might not be without something belonging to the intestate dead, [Anthony] took for himself the tunic which after the manner of wicker-work the saint had woven out of palm-leaves.  And so returning to the monastery he unfolded everything in order to his disciples, and on the feast-days of Easter and Pentecost he always wore Paul's tunic.
(Jerome, The Life of Paulus the First Hermit, P. Schaff and H. Wace (ed.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, volume 6, (Buffalo, NY, 1893), p. 302).

Upon his own death, Anthony left his clothing as his legacy to his spiritual heirs.

Distribute my clothing. To Bishop Athanasius give the one sheepskin and the cloak on which I lie, which he gave to me new, but I have now worn out. …And each of those who received the blessed Anthony’s sheepskin and the cloak worn out by him, keeps it safe like some great treasure.  For even seeing these is like beholding Anthony, and wearing them is like bearing his admonitions with joy.  
(Athanasius, Life of Antony, 91–92, P. Schaff and H. Wace (ed.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, volume 4, (Buffalo, NY, 1892), p. 452–3.)

In each account, items of clothing function as a particular kind of aide-memoire symbolic of the intimate bond between the men involved in the transaction, prompting continued reflection upon lessons learned, and aiding continued teaching to successive generations (Anthony’s disciples, Anthanasius’s readers).  

The emulation of virtuous men of the past depended upon memory of them. In this paper I explore how actual clothing could be used as memory prompts much like the imaginary instrumental settings and furnishings of advanced memory techniques employed by educated members of Late Antique society.  First, I establish close affinities between outerwear (mantles, cloaks) and furnishings (covers, blankets).  In Late Antiquity, clothing and furnishings were both understood to clothe the household, and the multipurpose mantles/covers of these tales provide a useful starting point for the study of the commemorative potential of household furnishings.  Building upon previous research on the architectural framing of conceptual spaces for remembering, seeing, and being seen by ancestors in Graeco-Roman architectural traditions, I turn to compare the roles of these mantles in the display of Late Roman ancestral imagines in elite homes (which constituted in legal and popular terms a particular type of home furnishing) to the roles of similar mantles in portrayals of ascetic forefathers in roughly contemporaneous monastic dwellings.  Of particular interest for this comparison is evidence for the use of such portrayals in the ongoing construction of memory for the aristocratic family and the monastic family.