Jaś Elsner

Archaeologies and Agendas: Reflections on Late Ancient Jewish Art and Early Christian Art

There are (at least) two ways to approach the history of religious art in Antiquity. One is to study what was going on in the ancient world, to tell the story as they (the subjects of our inquiry) saw it and as they did it. Another is to ask how we know how they saw it and did it. The first might be called ‘history’, the second ‘critical historiography’. Both are crucial to the historical enterprise, and I in no way intend to demean the first by saying that this paper is largely of the second kind. My project is to examine what are the grounds for our assumptions in creating the generalizations of ‘Late Ancient Jewish Art’ and ‘Early Christian Art’ as real categories of visual production in Late Antiquity with specific and discrete audiences and constituencies of patrons and producers. Both fields are venerable, with long historiographies and complex guiding-agendas of the sort that are perhaps inevitable given the kinds of ancestral investments made by scholars and indeed members of the general public (which is to say, also adherents of the two faiths) in both fields. In addition to prising apart the history of some of these investments, I want to question the methodological basis for many of the assumptions about what can rightly be classified under either the heading of ‘Jewish’ art or of ‘early Christian’ art.

The Itinerarium Burdigalense : Politics and Salvation in the Geography of Constantine's Empire

The shift from a traditional polytheistic dispensation for empire to a Christian-oriented ‘commonwealth’ is unarguably one of the most significant historical processes that took place in the Roman world. Its ramifications were manifold, and not least in the arena of how empire and its territory would come to be conceived within Late Roman and Byzantine culture. In this paper I want to explore the ways one text, written in the lifetime of Constantine, takes a series of traditional forms within the established genres of Graeco-Roman travel-writing and transforms them into a new Christian paradigm not only of travel (in the form of Christian pilgrimage) but also of empire as a territorial concept defined by particular privileged places and their privileged mythologies. The surprise lies, in part, in how swiftly a Christian author was willing implicitly to re-arrange and redefine deeply entrenched institutional norms, while none the less writing on an entirely traditional model. The text I shall be exploring, the Itinerarium Burdigalense (henceforth IB), is an account of a journey to the Holy Land made by an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux in A.D. 333.

The Genesis of Iconology

Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapter of Studies in Iconology— his landmark American publication of 1939 — contains ‘the revised content of a methodological article published by the writer in 1932’, which is now translated for the first time in this issue of Critical Inquiry.1 That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos, is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his series of philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history,2 that reach back, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on Heinrich Wolfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst Cassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky from 1915

Iconoclasm as discourse: from Antiquity to Byzantium

Iconoclasm was an attack on the real presence of the depicted prototype through assault on the image. Iconophile and iconoclast thinkers in the eighth century, for the first time, considered the image entirely as representation. A transformative moment in the discourse of images, it liberated the image from an emphasis on ontology to place it in an epistemological relation to its referent. The impulse to rethink the meanings of images emerged from debates within pre-Christian culture, between Christians and pagans, and between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, deeply influencing the understanding of images in the later Middle Ages and the Reformation.

Visual Culture and Ancient History: Issues of Empiricism and Ideology in the Samos Stele at Athens

Through a specific example, this paper explores the problems of empiricism and ideology in the uses of material-cultural and visual evidence for the writing of ancient history. The focus is on an Athenian documentary stele with a fine relief from the late fifth century bc, the history of its publications, and their failure to account for the totality of the object9s information—sculptural and epigraphic—let alone the range of rhetorical ambiguities that its texts and images implied in their fifth-century context. While the paper reflects on the Samos Stele (the meanings of the dexiosis of the figures represented, and the repeated references to the “goodness” of the Samians with respect to the Athenians, for instance), it also considers the broader hermeneutic problems of approaching the different discourses ofword and imagewithin antiquity andworries about the distortions introduced into ancient history by modern formulations, descriptions, and translations of the past.

M. J. Versluys, Aegyptiaca Romana: Nilotic Scenes and the Roman Views Of Egypt (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 144). Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pp. xvi + 512, 170 illus. ISBN 90-04-124403. €125.00/US

This archaeological study investigates the meaning of the Egyptian and egyptianising artefacts that have been preserved from the Roman world in different ways. Its point of departure is a detailed study on the so-called Nilotic scenes or Nilotic landscapes. The book presents a comprehensive and illustrated catalogue of the genre that was popular all around the Mediterranean from the Hellenistic period to the Christian era as well as a contextualisation and interpretation. Drawing on the conclusions thus reached the whole group of Aegyptiaca Romana is subsequently studied. Based on a general overview of this material in the Roman world and, moreover, a case-study of the Aegyptiaca from the city of Rome the different meanings of this cultural phenomenon are mapped. Together with other Egyptian deities popular in the Roman world, the goddess Isis plays an important role in this discussion. Aegyptiaca Romana, among them the Nilotic scenes, are part of the reflection of the Roman attitude towards and thoughts on Egypt, Egyptian culture and the East. The concluding part of the book illustrates and tries to explain this Roman discourse on Egypt.