Facing and Forming the Tradition.

Illustrated Texts on the Way from Late Antiquity until the Romanesque Times
Interdisciplinary Symposium organized by the National Szchnyi Library and the Pzmny Pter Catholic University 18th 20th March, 2014 Budapest, National Szchnyi Library Abstracts BENCZE gnes Pzmny Pter Catholic University, Piliscsaba The changing contents of a classical literary topos: sacred landscapes from early imperial to early Christian art Landscape compositions and elements were used with predilection by early Christian art, and by the decorative arts of the previous centuries alike. The appearance of this theme is usually regarded as a phenomenon of revival and a case for interpretatio Christiana, as well. The aim of this paper will be to shed a more nuanced light on the background of this phenomenon. My first question concerns the connection of the landscape theme in Roman imperial painting with the Latin renascence of the bucolic theme in poetry, from Vergil to Nemesian. The second point will concern the metaphoric character of landscape representations of Hellenistic and Roman art. Finally, I will try to show how and why the theme of sacred landscape, already rich of complicated abstract meanings in pagan antiquity, proved to be particularly suitable for being reused as a vehicle of Christian eschatological meanings. On the whole, these new contents will appear to be in line with the original, equally non-realistic, poetic character of antique landscape pictures. BOLLK dm Institute of Archaeology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Rediscovering antiquities and constructing the past in ninth-tenth-century Byzantium The problem of how Byzantine political and intellectual elites understood, appropriated and constructed their own past is a perplexing issue from the very birth of modern Byzantine studies. The antiquarian movement of the early middle Byzantine period (i.e. ninthtenth centuries) is an apparent case in point that led to the rise of several explanatory models and inspired continuous debate. The evident interest in the writings of Antique and Late Antique authors, literary genres, as well as classical or classicising artistic styles and visual forms in given periods of Byzantine history (as opposed to seeming disinterest in them in other eras) has been variously interpreted as elements of renaissance phenomena, apparent signs of perennial Hellenism, parts of an encyclopaedic movement or a culture of sylloge, imprints of pure antiquarian interest, etc. None of these explanations proved to be entirely convincing, however, even if they

all contain important insights and clues thereby significantly contributing to a more proper understanding of this intriguing set of phenomena. The present paper focuses on the artistic side of the problem and aims to explore the methods that the members of the Byzantine elite of the ninthtenth centuries developed so as to bolster their self-identity through constructing an unbroken continuum with Late Antiquity from the available shreds of the past. In order to avoid the somewhat misleading explanatory categories, harking back to post-medieval concepts, such as renaissances and encyclopaedism, the author seeks to synchronise the results gained from current philological and historical investigations into the ninthtenth-century literary movement with those of the latest research into the classicising artistic production of the early Macedonian period. BORECZKY Anna National Szchnyi Library Hungarian Academy of Sciences From illustrations in papyrus style to the whole page miniature. Evolution or a variety of narrative strategies? When a few years ago I tried to answer the question whether the 11th century illustrations of the Apollonius pictus manuscript (National Szchnyi Library, Cod. Lat. 4) were conceived in the Ottonian period or the Ottonian illustrator relied on a Late Antique model, I regarded the characteristic layout-structure of the manuscript as one of the most important pieces of evidence that attests to the Late Antique origin of the picture-cycle. The thirty-eight uncolored drawings of the manuscript are placed next to the short passages they illustrate, thus the layout of the pages results from the selection of episodes that were to be visually narrated. The unframed pictures are inserted into the text columns in such a dense sequence that the two columns of one page usually embrace six-seven illustrations. This text-image relationship fits very well into Kurt Weitzmanns concept of Late Antique visual narratives: indeed, Apollonius pictus was considered by him to be an important example of the so called papyrus style illustration. While I am still convinced that the selection and the sequence of the illustrated scenes as well as a good number of the compositions in the Apollonius pictus reflect the characteristics of a Late Antique cycle of illustrations, I think that the phenomenon we would tend to treat as the medieval survival of the papyrus style illustration needs to be reevaluated. Building on Weitzmanns observations on the emergence of the whole page miniature or that of the framed picture I will argue that the different layout-structures of illustrated narratives cannot be interpreted within the concept of their linear development but they were parallel options of visual storytelling for centuries. Martin BCHSEL Goethe Universitt, Frankfurt am Main Die Autoritt des Wortes und die Intellektualitt des Einzelnen. berlegungen zum Autorenportrt des Hrabanus Maurus. In honorem sanctae crucis. Das frhe Christentum hat sich die antiken Bildformen des Philosophen und Dichters angeeignet, um im Bilde auf die Weisheit Christi und der Apostel und auf die Inspiriertheit des gttlichen Schreibers, des Evangelisten hinzuweisen. Dadurch, dass im frhen Christentum das Wort eine

autoritative Fixierung erfahren hat, wurde es aber kaum mehr mglich, dass der Autor theologischer oder liturgischer Texte noch bildlich auf seine Intellektualitt hinwies. Was fr Autoren weltlicher Texte nach wie vor mglich war, blieb christlichen Autoren, die keine Heiligen waren, versagt. Typisch ist das Bild geworden, dass der Autor einer kirchlichen Autoritt oder einem Heiligen seine Schrift bergibt, um so die Akzeptanz seines Werkes zu erbitten. Einen Weg, dies dennoch zu tun, hat Hrabanus Maurus in seinem letzten Figurengedicht von In honorem sanctae crucis gewiesen. Durch die vielfltigen Mglichkeiten des Figurengedichts verschafft er einem stereotyp erscheinenden Bild eines kniefllig betenden Tonsierten, das er mit seinem Namen signiert, intertextuelle Bezge. Diese erlauben, das Bild des Mnchs, der gnzlich seine Individualitt im Dienst am Kreuz aufgehen lsst, in das Bild des Dichters zu berfhren, der das Weltgesicht besingt und dabei selbst Angst vor diesem entwickelt, sich aber zugleich seiner Kunstfertigkeit und seines Rechtes bewusst ist, als Autor zu signieren. Milagros GUARDIA Universitat de Barcelona Iratusque est Cain vehementer...Cain being wroth, a gap in the iconographic transmission of the Pyrenees Within the lengthy and intense debate referring to the transmission of iconographic models from Late Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages, the first fratricide and its context, that is, the story of Cain and Abel, has had a frequent role. I do not intend either to review or pursue over issues fairly well known, yet I aim to arise new arguments and, in particular, new doubts concerning the issue. My starting point is the confirmation of the great variety and abundance of the representation of this drama in the monumental art and manuscript illustration within the Pyrenean region during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. I will briefly introduce the sites where some of the scenes concerning the history of Cain and Abel have been preserved, either related to the biblical texts, for example the land rejecting the blood of Abel (Rodes and Ripoll Bibles) or non-biblical, such as the burial of Abel (portal of Ripoll, mural paintings of St. Quirze de Pedret), in order to devote my attention to the analysis of a particular feature, the one which gives title to my lecture: the representation of Cains wroth as a result of his unwelcome sacrifice observed in three Romanesque mural painting sites, its models and interpretation (Sant Climent de Tall, Sant Andreu de Baltarga, Ginestarre). Herbert KESSLER Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Carolingian Late Antique Manuscripts and their Place in Modern Scholarship Until very recently, many scholars have treated some of the greatest manuscripts of the Carolingian revival more or less as copies of lost Late Antique originals. Not only have they considered books with clear classical content such as the Bern Physiologus, Bamberg Boethius,

Leiden Aratus, and Vatican Agrimensores and Terence to be little more than facsimiles, but they also understood illustrated Christian books as more or less as transparent windows onto a rich but largely-lost Early Christian tradition, notably the Godescalc Evangelistary, Utrecht Psalter, and Touronian Bibles. Drawing on new research, including the authors own, this paper will argue that Carolingian illuminators were, in fact, quite inventive, transforming and augmenting even scientific illustrations and confecting new works in the classical manner by quarrying Late Antique (and also more recent) illuminated manuscripts they and their patrons had systematically collected. It will offer some explanations for why they undertook their ambitious agendas to recycle the ancient heritage. And it will analyze the effect their success at forgery had on scholarly methods. Peter K. KLEIN Eberhard Karls Universitt, Tbingen The Role of Prototypes and Continuity of Tradition in the Transmission of Medieval Picture Cycles: The Case of the Beatus Manuscripts Medieval illustrations of texts were generally based on models and their prototypes. A specific kind of illustration of a text was often copied over centuries, thus establishing a more or less coherent tradition. The genealogy and filiations of these cycles are generally well studied. However, seldom has the question been raised whether the character of the prototypes or the models used in the transmission had any impact on the uniformity of the tradition of these cycles. This question will be studied here using the example of the Beatus manuscripts, i.e. the manuscripts of the Apocalypse Commentary by the 8th-century Asturian monk Beatus of Libana. The extant Beatus manuscripts, dating from the 9th to the 13th century, can be classified into different groups which derive from separate editions (776, 784 and two posthumous 10th-century versions). Apparently, Asturian art and the original Beatus illustration (Branch I) were similar to the schematic, abstract-linear style of the earliest preserved Beatus fragment, dating from the late 9th century. This schematic abstract style led to numerous misunderstandings, deviations, expansions and conflations in the later transmission of this branch of the Beatus tradition, a disparity still enhanced by the fact that the Branch I tradition was not limited to a specific region but was dispersed all over the Iberian peninsula and various European countries. In contrast, the prototypes of the two posthumous 10th-century editions (Branch IIab) were illustrated in the Mozarabic style, also used in its 10th- and 11th-century copies, which were limited to the Kingdom of Len, while the later Romanesque copies were restricted to the region of Castile. Moreover, the strongly enlarged Branch II illustration did not invite later expansions (as in the Branch I tradition). For all these reasons the posthumous Branch II tradition is much more uniform and coherent than the transmission of the original Beatus editions. Vinni LUCHERINI Universit degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

The role of Late Antique and high medieval narrativity in the construction of the Hungarian Illuminated Chronicle Although the Hungarian Illuminated Chronicle, now kept in the National Szchnyi Library in Budapest, is a late medieval manuscript, this important manuscript shows a real continuity in the way of using history, texts and images from the Late Antiquity and through the Romanesque period. The Hungarian Illuminated Chronicle is the first Hungarian manuscript that uses images to show Hungarian history, or better, the story that the writers of the Hungarian chronicles compiled during the Middle Ages to narrate the arrival of the Hungarians in the country and to construct the identity of the Hungarian nation. The main questions this paper addresses are the following: how the Hungarian royal court dealt with its high medieval history, how the artists that illuminated the manuscript used Hungarian texts about ancient Hungarian history, how these texts were transformed into images, and how the gothic artists used Late Antique and high medieval narrativity and imagery transmitted through Romanesque art. The aim of this paper is to recognize the visual ways and the narrative strategies in which high medieval Hungarian history was put into images some centuries later and the continuity of methods and practices. NMETH Andrs Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Fragmenting and merging actions in the Budapest Apollonius pictus My paper seeks to explore the dynamic system of dialogues between text and depictions in the fragmentary Apollonius pictus, an Ottonian copy of a Late Antique illustrated romance (Budapest, National Szchnyi Library, Cod. Lat. 4). The cycle of depictions here shows a carefully devised articulating function. In the Late Antiquity, a creative mind relied on the readers notion of early narrative illustration cycles of such canonized literary texts as comedy and epic poems. This unknown illustrator managed to reinforce the delicate narrative strategy of the romance. My main interest is to identify the Late Antique minds strategy to depict the careful interplay of the romances external and internal narrators by adopting or rejecting the articulating function of the illustration cycles as seen in other canonical texts. To this end, I will focus on the conflated scenes and the repetitive depictions of a single scene in the Apollonius pictus. Giulia OROFINO Universit di Cassino e del Lazio meridionale La storia nei margini. I disegni dellOrosio Vat. lat. 3340 tra eredit tardoantica e creazione medievale. History in the Margins. Orosius Illustrated, Vat. lat. 3340, between Late Antique Legacy and Medieval Creativity. The Historiae adversus paganos composed by Paulus Orosius in the second decade of the 5th century AD constitute the foundation upon which the Middle Ages constructed the knowledge and understanding of the Ancient World.

The 249 manuscripts surveyed up to the present day dating from the pre-Carolingian age to the 15th century bear witness to the wide distribution and authority the work enjoyed. The Historiae adversus paganos was one of the most widely read and studied works of the Middle Ages; it was also one of the least illustrated. Although it was not a scholastic text, but instead a fully fledged History, illustrated editions of the Historiae are very few in number. According to David Ross (1953), the Historie adversus paganos does not have a tradition that includes a consolidated and uninterrupted sequence of images dating from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages; nor is it possible to establish the existence of stemmata or iconographical recensions. Therefore, when reconstructing the processes of reception, transformation and transmission of illustrated texts on the way from Antiquity to the Romanesque period, the case of Orosius' Historiae serves as an ideal example upon which to test out the methods and validities of "old philology" and "new philology", the former aimed at retrospectively restoring the ancient archetype lost through the sequential production of more or less faithful medieval copies, the latter focused instead on the manuscript not chiefly, or not solely, as a reflection of a hypothetical model, but as a unique and significant object in itself. Vat. lat. 3340 is the most ancient example of an Orosius pictus known. It was copied in the Beneventan script and illustrated with 77 marginal drawings accompanied by explanatory annotations. The illustrations occupy the lower and outer margins of the codex's leaves. Sometimes a single composition fills out an entire border; alternatively only the space under one of the columns of script is filled. If the bas de page does not provide sufficient space, the illustration wraps around to the margin, so as to fully develop a single scene or present a series of different episodes. The viewer is therefore obliged to rotate the codex in order to allow the sequence of images to flow, thereby allowing the action or episodes in the story to unfold. Upon this dynamic "stage" the multifarious catastrophes, horrors and disasters of ancient times play out. Orosius' aim was to convince heathens that the world was not a better place when the gods of Olympus reigned supreme: wars, natural disasters, crime, executions and inauspicious omens abounded. The stories are presented against empty backgrounds and contained within minimal frames of either natural or architectural inspiration. There is neither ground line beneath the human figures' feet, nor sea under the ships' hulls: everything appears to float in a void. Nature manifests itself only in the form of ominous atmospheric conditions, and the neutral surface of the parchment is occupied here and there by depictions of conventional buildings and settlements, e.g. walled cities, encampments, temples, etc. The manuscript poses a series of as yet unanswered questions. Were the illustrations already planned at the time of the codex's creation, or were they added later? When and where were they executed? Is one dealing with copies or original works? To these questions answers are being sought through a reading of the drawings' iconography and style, the study of their mise en page, and an analysis of their relationship to the text. The rather muddled mise en page and frequently feeble links between text and image, which makes reading a challenging task, seem to suggest a misalignment between the manuscript and its accompanying illustrations.

If we accept the authoritative opinion of the palaeographer Francis Newton (1999) that Vat. lat. 3340 was produced at Montecassino before 1075, the drawings must date to (at least) the first thirty years of the 12th century. The drawings do not bear any resemblance to miniatures produced at Montecassino at the time the manuscript was produced. The only possible comparisons which can be drawn are with the carved ivory plaques produced in the same period on Campania's Tyrrhenian coast between Salerno and Amalfi. In any event, wherever the creator of the illustrations worked, clearly he was not an amateur, as David Ross (1953) contended. It is obvious that the artist closely read the manuscript's text, sometimes even interpreting and embellishing it. His drawings cannot exclusively be explained as being ad hoc creations, invented entirely from scratch by a mere "amateur". It is impossible to prove that the drawings were copied in totality from an earlier version of the Historiae; neither can it be shown that entire blocks of images "migrated" from other illustration traditions. However, there are some hints that suggest an adaptation of Late Antique models in Orosian drawings, particularly in the rendering of individual iconographic schemes and the narrative strategies employed. A taste for Antiquity does not limit the miniaturist's pictorial language, whose imagery is in fact thoroughly modern. Like "mnemonic waves" (mnemische Wellen), the pictorial quotes arrive from the past but model the present. One is dealing with a present deeply marked (in the context in which Vat. lat. 3340 was produced) by the impact that the arrival of the Normans had on southern Italian culture an influx which led to a profound renewal of repertories, the introduction of novel perspectives, the possibility of depicting contemporary history, the discovery of chivalric romance, and the rediscovery of the Classics, finally free of stereotypical imagery. What really counts is not so much the prehistory of Orsian images, but instead their future. The strong desire to bring things up to date (which has the heroes of the ancient world kitted out with the armour of the day), the stress placed on Alexander the Great's epic history, the overwhelming interest shown in battles (theatres of valour for sure, but also gruesome bloodbaths littered with cadavers), establishes Vat. lat. 3340 as a forerunner of historical and chivalric medieval illustration. Anna SOMFAI Central European University, Budapest Visual thinking and diagrammatic reasoning in the transmission of knowledge in medieval philosophical, scientific and encyclopedic manuscripts Diagrams and other images produced and reproduced by medieval authors and readers of philosophical, scientific and encyclopedic works formed a crucial part of the creation and transmission of knowledge throughout the Middle Ages. Each medieval manuscript was handmade, many with its layout designed anew in the process of copying. This characteristic offers an exceptional opportunity for the study of how layouts and images were re-designed by the creative mind to suit new audiences or new purposes. They show us what was, at a given time, considered to be the visually most helpful way of transmitting or explaining a body of knowledge and how visual rhetoric has changed. The images eased the mind and eye of the writer, reader, teacher and student by inserting a break in the textual monotony. They helped the

comprehension of concepts by introducing a visual clue. Images could provide an alternative visual interpretation. Sometimes in the absence of a textual explication, diagrams and diagram variants remain our only indication of the way in which a concept was received, shaped and transmitted. Most crucially, diagrams and diagrammatic images reflect the visual thinking of the individual behind their design. The paper explores the role of visual thinking and the function of diagrams by examining image variants generated by various individuals throughout the transmission of a group of Late Ancient and medieval philosophical, scientific and encyclopedic texts. SZAKCS Bla Zsolt Pzmny Pter Catholic University, Piliscsaba Archaism, imitation, provincialism? Notes on the murals of Kosztolny / Kosto!any pod Tribe"om The murals of the small village church of Gmeskosztolny/Kosto!any pod Tribe"om (Slovakia) have been interpreted surprisingly differently since their discovery and restoration in the 1960s. In early publications one can find the date of the 13th century, which has been modified gradually towards more and more earlier dates. The chronology of the building itself is also subject of debates, being dated to the 11th, more recently to the 10th century. In the light of this tendency, the dating of the frescos to the middle of the 11th century seems to be a conservative opinion nowadays, taking into account that they constitute the first layer on the walls. However, one can ask whether it is really the early dating which can solve the problems of these enigmatic murals? The speciality of the frescos lies in the cycle of the Infancy of Christ. Here we can find such scenes as the Magi pointing to the stars, wearing Early Christian type headgears, moreover, there are additional figures in the scenes of the Annunciation and the Visitation. These archaic elements can be explained neither with extreme early dating, nor with the provincial topographic situation of the place. Instead, we should consider the possibilities of intentional archaism, the imitation of earlier prototypes, survival of Late Antique models, maybe in the form of manuscripts kept in the Benedictine monastery of Zobor in the neighbourhood. The input of codices is even more probable if we compare the lengthy image cycle of the Adoration of the Magi and the liturgical play of Tractus stellae the use of which in 11th-century Hungary is attested by contemporaneous manuscripts.