R. Franses, Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art

Georgi Parpulov

https://doi.org/10.1017/s0075426920000634

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R. Franses explores the representation of donors in Byzantine art, notably through the concept of 'contact portraits' that create a paradoxical connection between the divine and the earthly. He distinguishes between general contact portraits and specific donor portraits to highlight the role of royal imagery in asserting power and the theological importance of pious gifts as reflections of one's devotion. The analysis extends to the complexity of interpreting these art forms, considering both the creators' intentions and viewers' receptions, ultimately framing donor portraits as metaphors bridging the physical and supernatural realms.

292 REVIEWS OF BOOKS (1081). Despite its wide popularity in its own time (over one hundred manuscripts still survive, some lavishly illustrated), Yuretich’s The Chronicle of Constantine Manasses, with minimal introduction and explanatory notes, is the first English translation of the work. Yuretich’s translation is part of a recent scholarly reappraisal of the genre that has begun to recognize its literary merits in addition to its historical value. Thus, though the Synopsis Chronike (likely composed between 1143 and 1148) follows the generically mandated chronological arrangement of the division of time into discrete units organized around the lives of rulers and the succession of empires, it also ‘demonstrates most of the literary devices inculcated by the Byzantine rhetorical tradition: encomium (praise), psogos (invective), ekphrasis (description), diegema (anecdote), and gnome (pithy sayings)’ (9). Despite these rhetorical flourishes, readers looking for narrative historiography, either epic, as in the Alexiad (1148) of his older contemporary Anna Komnene, or tragic, as in the History (ca. 1207) of his younger contemporary Niketas Choniates, will be disappointed. Compare, for instance, Herodotus’ masterful portrait of Xerxes’ reign and the second Persian invasion of Greece (480/479 BC), which comprise all of books 7 and 8 of the Histories, with Manasses’: ‘After Darius, his son Xerxes ruled the Persians. He attacked the Greeks on land and from the sea, with his fleets and cavalry, and by all sorts of contrivances. He both destroyed his army, and alone escaped, with difficulty, by boat. He fled, and returned in shame’ (52). To her credit, Yuretich has captured the tone of both the more intricate passages, such as the ekphrasis on Helen’s beauty, and the more laconic ones, like the description of the reign of Xerxes. The volume Yuretich has produced, moreover, is actually a kind of double translation: her translation following Lampsidis’ Greek edition of the Synopsis Chronike (Constantini Manasses Breviarum Chronicum, Athens 1996) in the main text is supplemented by a parallel translation in footnotes of a mid-14th-century Bulgarian translation of Manasses. Since, as Yuretich notes, ‘The anonymous Bulgarian translator has followed the Greek original closely … in a methodical fashion, almost word-by-word’, the translation of the Greek into English is almost already a translation of the Middle Bulgarian into English (10). In approximately 3,000 footnotes, Yuretich notes the differences between the Greek and Middle Bulgarian, which range from innocuous substitutions such as Romanos Diogenes ‘smiting’ the Turks at the 1071 Battle of Manzikert in Greek to ‘slashing’ at them in the Middle Bulgarian (256), to extended passages on Bulgarian history absent from the original. Elsewhere, however, the alter- ations offer some insight into translation not just as a philological practice of transferring words from source language to target language, but as an act of cultural domestication as well: where Manasses compares Romanos to ‘the hundredhanded Briareus’, the Middle Bulgarian translator opts for ‘steadfast with one hundred hands’ (256), suggesting either the Middle Bulgarian translator himself did not understand the reference to the giant of ancient Greek mythology or thought perhaps his audience would not. The principle drawback of the volume is the brevity and orientation of its introduction. Yuretich gives only a brief sketch of the background information necessary to appreciate fully Manasses’ achievement: political and historical issues such as the centrality of Byzantine performance and patronage systems to elite 12th-century literary production, the relationship of the Synopsis Chronike to the other works in Manasses’ corpus and Manasses’ handling of the dozens of sources from which he drew are insufficiently addressed. Much more attention (slightly over half of the introduction) is devoted to the Middle Bulgarian versions, such that the description of the five surviving manuscripts of the Middle Bulgarian text is given more space than the sections devoted to Manasses’ sources and style combined, and the section entitled ‘The Middle Bulgarian translation’ runs to nearly half the length of the entire introduction. Perhaps this is less problematic for a Byzantine specialist, for whom Manasses may be a wellknown figure, but it may be more problematic for a broader audience. Nevertheless, Yuretich has admirably performed a valuable service in making Manasses’ text available in English for readers of all kinds. ADAM J. GOLDWYN University of Münster and North Dakota State University adam.goldwyn@ndsu.edu FRANSES (R.) Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art: The Vicissitudes of Contact between Human and Divine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 247. £75. 9781108290517. doi:10.1017/S0075426920000634 Any holy image presupposes contact between human and divine: through an icon, one prays to the person(s) whom that icon depicts. Sometimes this act of prayer is visualized by actually portraying the individual who commissioned the icon: Δέησιν προσάγω σοι, ἁγνὴ Παρθένε, ἐξ ὅλης μου τῆς ψυχῆς πρὸς σὲ τὸ γόνυ κλίνας Γεώργιος ὁ ἐλάχιστος καὶ σὸς οἰκέτης (‘On bended knee I, lowly George, your servant, now pray to you from Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Balfour Library (Pitt Rivers Museum), on 18 Dec 2020 at 11:52:18, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075426920000634 BYZANTINE AND MODERN GREEK STUDIES all my soul, pure Virgin’) (fig. 1.13; all references are to figures in the book under review). The individuals thus portrayed ask, first of all, for pardon of their sins: Λύσιν πταισμάτων μου, Μῆτερ τοῦ Λόγου, ζητῶν ἀνιστόρησα σου [τὴν εἰκόνα] Σάβας οἰκτρότατος καὶ ναζιραῖος (‘Seeking release from my errors, I, Sabas, most piteous of hermits, painted your image, God’s Mother’) (fig. 3.10). Their desired but as yet uncertain acquittal at the Last Judgment can be illustrated by showing them among the saved, on Christ’s right-hand side (for example Paris. gr. 74, fol. 93v, not discussed by Franses). Rulers in particular are, without being guaranteed God’s ultimate mercy, assured of His support in this life: ἡ παγκρατής μου δεξιά σε κρατύνει (‘my allmighty right hand gives you strength’), Christ tells Emperor Alexis I (fig. 1.6). On occasion, prayers may be accompanied by a pious gift: Ἡ παναγία Θεοτόκος μετὰ Χριστοῦ προσδεχόμενοι τὴν βίβλον παρὰ Λέοντος πραιποσίτου, πατρικίου καὶ σακελαρίου (‘The most holy Mother of God and Christ receiving the book from the praepositus, patrician, and saccellarius Leo’) (fig. 0.2). In this case the donor explains that he is offering (θύω) the book εἰς ἀντάμειψιν τῶν ἐμῶν ἐγκλημάτων (‘in recompense for my misdeeds’). The Virgin often acts as intermediary between mortals and her son: a short δούλου δέησίς σου Γεωργίου τοῦ ἀμήρα (‘prayer of your servant George the emir’), for instance (fig. 1.26), is amplified by her request τέκνον, φυλάττοις παγγενεὶ πάσης βλάβης νέμοις τε τὴν λύτρωσιν ἁμαρτημάτων (‘may you, my child, preserve [both him] and all his kin from any harm, and may you grant him pardon of his sins’). Byzantine ‘contact portraits’, as Franses terms them, present a paradox because they depict an impossible, face-to-face encounter between God and His saints, on the one hand, and people like us, on the other. It must have been an unsettling experience to see oneself, as if in a mirror, actually kneeling at the feet of those who permanently dwell in heaven. Outside viewers, especially priests officiating in church, were reminded by such images to include the ‘sitter’ in their prayers for the living or, as the case might be, the deceased. Dedicatory inscriptions urge us to do so, too: οἱ θεωροῦντες αὐτῷ, διὰ τὸν Κύριον μακαρίσατε [αὐτούς] (‘you who look at this [sc. the writing, or perhaps the church building itself], pray to the Lord [for them, viz. the donors]’) (206 n.24). Franses discusses his difficult material slowly, methodically and with admirable clarity. He neatly maps out the field by distinguishing between contact portraits in general and donor portraits in the narrow sense of the word, i.e. compositions where an act of giving is actually represented. In what is to my mind the finest section of his book, he subtly analyses the ways in which royal contact 293 portraits emphasize a monarch’s power by showing him next to, and sometimes almost on a par with, his celestial sovereign. He then goes on to ponder, employing the example of a famous lunette mosaic at the Hagia Sophia (fig. 2.1), the dilemma as to whether one should interpret an image through the lens of its makers’ presumed intentions or try to reconstruct its historically conditioned reception; the latter, of course, involves multiple possible ‘readings’. This is followed by an informative summary of the views that Byzantine theologians held about the posthumous fate of one’s soul: because this fate remains undecided until the very moment of the Last Judgment, prayer and pious deeds are valid means of propitiating God. The role which devout offerings (such as the codex in fig. 0.2) played in the quest for salvation forms the subject of the next chapter: Franses rightly points out that gifts for the Church were never meant to buy one an entry ticket to Paradise but simply represented, like the widow’s mite in the Gospels, a token of one’s piety. In conclusion, he interprets donor portraits as metaphors: like the Eucharistic Gifts, which are both bread/wine and the body/blood of Jesus Christ, such images bridge the gap between two separate worlds, the physical and the supernatural. If the book has a weakness, it is, for me, only this: the discussion often reaches high levels of abstraction and gives one the feeling of watching a pantomime to the accompaniment of music by Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, et al. But the show does in fact have overtitles: all the Greek inscriptions quoted above form, beyond doubt, integral parts of the respective images. Their texts are, to be sure, conventional, but so is academic prose. It is striking that Franses mentions none of them. Still, his thought-provoking work will be of interest to anyone studying Byzantine art. GEORGI PARPULOV University of Birmingham g.r.parpulov@bham.ac.uk PSONI (A.) The Image of the Feminine in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Angelos Sikelianos. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. Pp. xxxxv + 435, illus. £67.99. 9781527505827. doi:10.1017/S0075426920000646 This engaging book by Psoni details the image of the feminine in the work of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and his Greek nearcontemporary, Angelos Sikelanios (1884–1951). The book is not a contribution to reception studies, since there is no direct link between the two poets. Rather, it is a contribution to comparative literature and to what Psoni terms affinities. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Balfour Library (Pitt Rivers Museum), on 18 Dec 2020 at 11:52:18, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075426920000634

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