S y m p o s i u m : F u z z y S t ud ie s, Pa r t 3

BYZANTINE ART IN
POST-BYZANTINE SOUTH ITALY?
Notes on A Fuzzy Concept

Linda Safran

Two decades ago I wrote a scholarly monograph on a church at the tip of the heel
of the Italian boot, the region known as the Salento or the Terra dOtranto. San
Pietro at Otranto: Byzantine Art in South Italy took for granted the applicability of
the adjective Byzantine, which had been used in all previous publications about
the church.1 It was built during the period of Byzantine hegemony in southern
Italy (c. 8801071), and I dated its first stratum of fresco decoration to c. 1000. Yet
the succeeding fresco layers, which are the best preserved in the church and which
required much longer explication in the monograph, were all post-Byzantine, if
still mostly medieval in date. Should these later frescoes still be called Byzantine? If political affiliation is not necessary for cultural identification, does the
answer depend on how Byzantine they look, and if so, in what aspect(s) of the
paintings does Byzantine inhere? Is it a question of iconography, style, composition, or technique, or does it have to do with Greek-language inscriptions or
with Orthodox liturgical usage? A consideration of a single monument heretofore
1. Published bilingually as San Pietro ad Otranto: Arte
bizantina in Italia meridionale / San Pietro at Otranto: Byzantine Art in South Italy (Rome: Edizioni Rari Nantes,
1992). Earlier publications include Luigi Maroccia, La

edicola bizantina di S. Pietro in Otranto (Bari, 1925); Grazio

Gianfreda, Basilica bizantina di S. Pietro in Otranto: Storia
e arte (Galatina: Ed. Salentina, 1973).

Common Knowledge 18:3

DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1630415
2012 by Duke University Press

487

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labeled Byzantine leads to a review of the historiography of this designation in

the Salento and beyond, followed by an attempt to understand what is at stake in
potentially mislabeling not only historical monuments but also cultures, periods,
and geographies. Insights gleaned from fuzzy studies and theories of vagueness
help shed light on these questions and suggest possible new approaches.

Santa Maria di Cerrate

Instead of returning to San Pietro at Otranto, whose patrons and users are
entirely undocumented, we will look instead at the nearby monastery church of
Santa Maria di Cerrate, located some 15 kilometers northeast of Lecce. Cerrate
was founded as an Orthodox monastery before 1096, probably by one of the
regions Norman rulers, and it remained an Orthodox foundation throughout the
Middle Ages.2 Its original form is unknown, as the current church building must
date to the twelfth century (fig. 1). It is a large, triple-apsed limestone basilica
with relief sculpture over the main entrance and a columned loggia added to
the north side. Inside, the altar was a reused Roman funerary stele, now moved
elsewhere in the church. Its stone ciborium, still in situ, bears a Greek dodecasyllabic inscription that dates the altar canopy to 1269 (fig. 2). Paleographic analysis
suggests that the texts engraver had only a rudimentary knowledge of Greek.3
European-style basilicas with monumental facade sculpture are unknown
in twelfth-century Byzantium, although they are found in later Orthodox contexts outside the Empire, notably in Serbia. Instead, the Greekness that scholars uniformly identify at Cerrate has to do with its wall paintings. There are
standing saints (plus one equestrian) on the side, back, and sanctuary walls; more
saints and busts of Old Testament figures in the arcade soffits; and a few narrative
scenes: an Ascension of Christ in the apse conch (fig. 3), traces of an Annunciation flanking the apse, a Koimesis (Dormition of the Virgin) on the west wall,
and a second Koimesis superimposed on several of the north-wall saints and now
removed to the adjacent Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari (figs. 45) along with

2. The founders name is uncertain; arguments have

been made for Tancred, Accardus, and Bohemund, but
only the last fits the chronological parameters established
by the sites oldest dated funerary inscription, reinstalled
on the church facade. See Andr Jacob, La fondation
du monastre de Cerrate la lumire dune inscription
indite, Atti dellAccademia nazionale dei Lincei: Rendiconti,
Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 9.7 (1996): 21123,
esp. 223. Numerous papal letters attest to the presence of
Orthodox monks at Cerrate until at least the first quarter of the fifteenth century: Cosimo Damiano Poso, Il
Salento Normanno: Territorio, istituzioni, societ (Galatina:
Congedo, 1988), 1026.

3. Andr Jacob, Le ciborium du prtre Taphouros

Sainte-Marie de Cerrate et sa ddicace, in Cavalieri alla
conquista del Sud: Studi sullItalia normanna in memoria di
Lon-Robert Mnager, ed. Lon-Robert Mnager, Errico
Cuozzo, and Jean-Marie Martin (Rome: Laterza, 1998),
11733.

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Figure 1. Sta. Maria di Cerrate. Exterior, view from the southwest. Photo: author

Figure 2. Sta. Maria di Cerrate. Interior, view toward the east. Photo: author

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Figure 3. Sta. Maria di Cerrate. Apse conch with Ascension above standing bishops
on apse wall. Photo: author

Figure 4. Sta. Maria di Cerrate, Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari. Second Koimesis
scene with Assumption of the Virgin above. Photo: author

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Saf ran
Figure 5. Sta. Maria di Cerrate, Museo delle Tradizioni Popolari. Second Koimesis
scene, detail. Photo: author

some fifteenth-century figural scenes on the south wall.4 The chronological

relationship among these saints and scenes is disputed. The earliest paintings,
including the Ascension, likely date to the twelfth century. The second Koimesis
obviously is later, probably from the first half of the fourteenth century.
Valentino Pace called Cerrate the key monument of the regions grecit,
and Marina Falla Castelfranchi also singled it out: Among the most noted [pictorial] cycles, [Cerrate] without a doubt occupies a prominent place in the context
of Byzantine painting in Apulia for the quality of its frescoes.5 The deacons
in the sanctuary (fig. 6), the equestrian saint with his pointed shield, and the
now-dismembered military saints on the southern puzzle wall are thoroughly
Byzantine in iconography, style, and technique (the green underpainting, or proplasmos, is especially evident).6 Even the south-wall bishop wearing a Catholic
pointed miter and carrying a curved pastoral staff is otherwise Byzantine in his
4. On the fifteenth-century scenes, see Valentino Pace,
SantEustachio a Santa Maria di Cerrate, in Tempi e
forme: Miscellanea di Studi offerti a Pina Belli dElia, ed.
Luisa Derosa and Clara Gelao (Foggia: Claudio Grenzi,
2011), 17784; Antonio Cassiano, Un presunto ritratto
tardo medievale di Tancredi, in Tancredi conte di Lecce, re
di Sicilia, ed. Hubert Houben and Benedetto Vetere (Galatina: Congedo, 2004), 36975.
5. Valentino Pace, La chiesa di Santa Maria delle Cerrate
e i suoi affreschi, in Obraz Vizantii: Sbornik statei v cest O.
S. Popovoi (Limmagine di Bisanzio: Raccolta di studi in onore
di O. S. Popova), ed. Anna Vladimirova Zakharova (Mos-

cow: Severnyi Palomnik, 2008), 379; Marina Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina in Puglia (Milan:
Electa, 1991), 123.
6. The puzzle wall has now been reconstructed, virtually: Francesco Gabellone, Virtual Cerrate: A DVRbased Knowledge Platform for an Archaeological Complex of the Byzantine Age (paper presented at CAA
[Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in
Archaeology], Budapest, 2008). I thank Professor Gabellone for sending me an electronic copy of his paper.

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Figure 6. Sta. Maria

di Cerrate. Deacon
flanking the apse,
detail. Photo: author

liturgical garments and in his pose and facial modeling (fig. 7). Yet despite Falla
Castelfranchis assertion, the Ascension (fig. 3) is not done according to the most
pure Byzantine iconographic canons.7 The figure of Christ is too twisted and
unbalanced, and the colors of his garments (red-orange over blue) are the opposite of the norm for the scene within the Byzantine world, strictly defined. Even
allowing for loss of color, the mandorla of light that encloses Christ is also an
odd green hue. In addition, the half figure of the Virgin above the apse window
is unacceptably truncated for a Christological scene here she is an icon, not a
presence. While a half-length Virgin is indeed represented in metropolitan Byzantine monuments, this is never done in a narrative context.8 An Ascension in
the apse conch is archaizing, although it occurs elsewhere in southern Italy, and
similarly old-fashioned are the standing bishops (rather than inclined celebrants)
on the apse wall.
7. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina, 123.
8. Pace, La chiesa di Santa Maria delle Cerrate, 38485,
notes that the half figure of the Virgin is a necessary
adjustment for a scene not designed to fit into an apse

conch. However, in the roughly contemporary apse

Ascension at San Pietro Imperiale near Taranto, the Virgin is displaced to the side of the window so that her full
figure can be included.

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Figure 7. Sta. Maria

di Cerrate. Bishop on
south wall. Photo:
author

The disposition of saints on the walls appears to be random, with military

figures, bishops, angels, and female saints all juxtaposed. In Byzantine churches
within the imperial borders, the saints tend to be grouped by type from the
twelfth century onward; in the Salento, this is rarely the case. In addition, the
large number of standing saints and corresponding paucity of figural scenes is
very marked in the region.
The fourteenth-century Koimesis below a less well-preserved Assumption
of the Virgin seems, at first glance, to be Byzantine, because the sleep of the
Virgin was an exclusively Orthodox feast day and an artistic subject since the
tenth century (figs. 45). However, the image was soon imitated by European
artists, who used it in conjunction with the Virgins bodily Assumption to heaven,
which was never part of Byzantine iconography.9 Falla Castelfranchi called the
9. Elizabeth Walsh, Images of Hope: Representations of
the Death of the Virgin, East and West, Religion and the
Arts 11 (2007): 29; Rainer Kahsnitz, Koimesis-dormitioassumptio: Byzantinisches und Antikes in den Miniaturen
der Liuthargruppe, in Florilegium in Honorem Carl Nordenfalk Octogenarii Contextum, ed. Per Bjurstrm, Nils

Gran Hkby, and Florentine Mtherich (Stockholm:

Nationalmuseum, 1987), 91122. See also Stephen J.
Shoemaker, The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Marys
Dormition and Assumption (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002). The Koimesis and Assumption were celebrated in both churches on August 15.

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second Cerrate Koimesis one of the last attestations of Byzantine painting in the
Salento, but the addition of a full-size, kneeling supplicant, even one distanced
from the scene under his own aedicula, is extremely rare in Byzantine art.10 So,
too, are the Gothic architectural background and St. Dionysius the Areopagite
displaying an open book that contains a prayer of intercession to the Virgin
rather than one of his own texts.11 These features, and especially the Assumption
above the Koimesis, distance the image significantly from Byzantine norms.12
It is worth noting that the Cerrate Assumption is rarely illustrated.13 Its artificial
excision from the Koimesis, as in figure 5, certainly makes the truncated composition look more Byzantine.

Salentine Art Historiography

For over a century, since the publication of Charles Diehls Lart byzantin dans
lItalie mridionale (1894), European art historians who have ventured this far
south and east have considered the Salento an oriental or Byzantine artistic
province.14 Despite his title, Diehl did acknowledge the existence of an ItaloLatin school of painting, independent of the Greek school and local to Apulia,
particularly the county of Lecce. His later Manuel dart byzantin found that
regardless of whether they are tenth century or fourteenth century, one
can note in these frescoes some differences of technique and of style, but
one cannot note any difference in inspiration. Even when Latin inscriptions accompany the figures, they remain purely Byzantine [elles demeurent purement byzantines], executed in Greek land, for Greek populations,
by artists profoundly impenetrated by traditions of Byzantine art.15
10. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina, 222.
11. Manuela De Giorgi, La Dormizione della Vergine
nella pittura medievale di Puglia e Basilicata, in Puglia tra
grotte e borghi: Insediamenti rupestri e insediamenti urbani:
persistenze e differenze, Atti del II Convegno internazionale
sulla Civilt Rupestre, Savelletri di Fasano (BR), November 2426, 2005, ed. Enrico Menest (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sullalto Medioevo, 2007),
19697.
12. The of (Mother of God) is
visible to the (viewers) right of the ascending figure in
the white mandorla; moreover, the figure wears the dark
red maphorion of the Virgin and lacks a cross nimbus. It
cannot, therefore, be a figure of Christ, as seen hovering
among the apostles above the Koimesis scene at Sopoani,
c. 126370 (www.srpskoblago.org/Archives/Sopocani/
exhibits/digital/western-pn,dormition-ww/index.html).
13. De Giorgi, La Dormizione della Vergine, shows
only part of it in fig. 1. She discusses the Assumption

briefly on 2012 but concentrates on the miraculous

arrival of the apostles on clouds and the textual sources
for that event. In the sole monograph on Cerrate, Teodoro
Pellegrinos Terra mia, Enciclopedia illustrata della Terra
dOtranto antica e moderna, vol. 1 (Galatina: Ed. Salentina,
1970), there are three details of the Koimesis (111, 114,
115) but none shows the complete width of the scene or its
vertical extension to the Assumption. mile Bertaux, Lart
dans lItalie mridionale, vol. 1, De la fin de lEmpire Romain
la Conqute de Charles dAnjou (Paris: Albert Fontemoing,
1904), 148, illustrated part of the Koimesis with the caption Fresque byzantine du XIVe sicle. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina, 220, does illustrate the
complete double scene but does not explore who is ascending to heaven (221: un Assunzione?).
14. Charles Diehl, Lart byzantin dans lItalie mridionale
(1894; Rome: LErma di Bretschneider, 1967), 1719.
15. Charles Diehl, Manuel dart byzantin (1910; Paris:
Librairie Auguste Picard, 1925), 582.

16. Book 2 in Bertaux, Lart dans lItalie mridionale, is

titled Lart monastique: Basiliens et Bndictins. La
peinture dans lItalie mridionale du Xe au XIIIe sicle.
Basilian was an etic (Norman) label for the regions varied Orthodox monks, monasteries, and practices, but many
of the so-called monastic churches were actually family or
village churches and their art was not monastic. In the
updating of Bertaux, the Aggiornamento dellOpera di mile
Bertaux sotto la direzione di Adriano Prandi (Rome: cole
franaise du Rome, 1978), bk. 4, 293, Moines basiliens
is placed in quotation marks.
17. Adriano Prandi, Il Salento provincia dellarte bizantina, in Atti del Convegno internazionale sul tema LOriente
cristiano nella storia della civilt (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1964), 681.

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The other great French scholar of South Italian art did not use the term Byzantine but rather a perceived equivalent, basilien, referring to the (nonexistent)
Order of St. Basil as an Orthodox equivalent of the Benedictine order.16 Half a
century later, Adriano Prandis Il Salento provincia dellarte bizantina also left
no room for alternatives, finding a passive but unwavering Byzantine tradition
even in fifteenth-century monuments.17 More recent interest in the region was
spurred by the glossy, seven-hundred-page I Bizantini in Italia, which contained
an essay by Valentino Pace titled Pittura bizantina in Italia meridionale (secoli
XIXIV),18 although two years earlier, the same authors contribution to La
Puglia fra Bisanzio e lOccidente had avoided the adjective Byzantine.19 The latter
book title, which situated Apulia between Byzantium and the West (presumably
in cultural as well as spatial terms) was echoed by another, Ad Ovest di Bisanzio: Il
Salento Medioevale, that located the Salento to the west of Byzantium. In the latter
case, however, both of the art historical contributions La pittura bizantina in
Salento (secoli XXIV), by Marina Falla Castelfranchi, and Arte bizantina nel
Salento. Architettura e scultura (secc. IXXIII), by Gioia Bertelli embraced
Byzantine as the descriptor for art produced well after the Byzantines departure.20 Falla Castelfranchis major book on wall painting in the region, Pittura
monumentale bizantina in Puglia, further solidified its Byzantine associations.21
My own book, the first scholarly monograph on a Salentine church, also used
Byzantine in the title. Finally, a new series of which only the first volume,
on a late-fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century church, has appearedis titled Terra
dOtranto bizantina.22
Unlike the art historians, archaeologists have been less inclined to apply the
adjective Byzantine to the time period after the end of Byzantine rule. Hence
Paul Arthur, at the University of the Salento, has edited Apigliano: Un villaggio
bizantino e medioevale in Terra dOtranto, distinguishing the sites phases chrono-

18. Valentino Pace, Pittura bizantina in Italia meridionale (secoli XIXIV), in I Bizantini in Italia, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo et al. (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1982), 317400.
19. Valentino Pace, La pittura dalle origini in Puglia.
Secoli IXXIV, in La Puglia fra Bisanzio e lOccidente
(Milan: Electa, 1980).
20. Benedetto Vetere, ed., Ad Ovest di Bisanzio: Il Salento
Medioevale (Galatina: Congedo, 1990).
21. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina. It
contains the subheadings La pittura bizantina in epoca
romanica (XII secolo) and La pittura bizantina nellet
sveva e angioina, the latter divided into the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries.
22. Michel Berger and Andr Jacob, La Chiesa di S. Stefano
a Soleto (Lecce: Argo, 2007).

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logically.23 Similarly, historians generally limit their use of the term Byzantine
to the strictly historical and chronological sense.24 Among the important art historical contributions, only Hans Belting used Byzantine for the most part in a
chronologically restricted sense.25
In the Salento, every church that contains Greek inscriptions or a row of
standing saints is identified as Byzantine. It seems that both the local population and the art historians accord the era of Byzantine rule a particular cachet.
Why should this be so? Although almost no one outside of Italy can identify
the Salento, most people have heard of Byzantium. The empire still connotes
antiquity, grandeur, powerall desirable associations, especially in a region that
has known dire poverty in more recent centuries and is still the butt of northern
Italian jokes, not to mention the object of some separatist desires.26 Its Byzantine history distinguishes the Salento from most other regions of Italy in a way
that has strong positive associations. The result is a tendency both to retrodate
images and to associate them with Byzantine imperial figures. An example is the
identification of a well-dressed, kneeling supplicant at Sta. Marina (the medieval
San Nicola) at Miggiano as the Byzantine Empress Zoe on the grounds that Zoe,
with her consort Constantine IX Monomachos (r. 104255), patronized a different church of St. Nicholas, the one at Myra where Nicholas had been bishop in
the fourth century. This identification was confirmed by dating the kneeling
Salento Zoe to the eleventh century which cannot be the case, given the
row of buttons on her tight sleeves and her low-cut bodiceand by interpreting
her elaborate coiffure as a Byzantine imperial crown, despite a manifest lack of
comparisons for its form.27
If the Italians have resolutely considered the Salento to be a Byzantine artistic province, they have largely been ignored by other Byzantine art historians.
Not a single Byzantine-art textbook of the past half century includes a mention
of the regions wall paintings, although Annabel Whartons study of art on the
Byzantine periphery did include a chapter on all of southern Italy.28 There were
no references to the Salento in the 1993 Dumbarton Oaks symposium Byzan-

23. Excavations since 1997 revealed two phases of occupation at Apigliano: Early and Middle Byzantine (eighth
to tenth centuries) and Angevin (thirteenth to fourteenth
centuries).
24. E.g., Vera von Falkenhausen (her publications to 2010
are listed at www.studibizantini.it/docs/AISBCV_FALK
ENHAUSEN.pdf ).
25. Hans Belting, Byzantine Art Among Greeks and
Latins in Southern Italy, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 28
(1974): 129.
26. See, e.g., the antiSouth Italian (but not specifically Salentine) jokes collected at: www.bunnezone.com/

Barzellette/NordSud.htm; www.risatefacili.it/barzellette/
elenco.asp?tag=nord%20e%20sud (accessed February 28,
2012).
27. Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina,
1016; cf. Linda Safran, Scoperte salentine, Arte medievale 8.2 (2010): 7172, 75.
28. Annabel Jane Wharton, Art of Empire: Painting and
Architecture of the Byzantine Periphery: A Comparative Study
of Four Provinces (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1988). Viktor Lazarevs dated Storia
della pittura bizantina (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1967) dismissed
Byzantine painting in South Italy in two pages and one
footnote.

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Defining Byzantine
If the term Byzantine is used as a chronological signifier on the order of medieval, it should be limited to works produced in the period when the Byzantines
were present in the region. This strict definition would produce a restricted list
of paintings in churches decorated or redecorated between about 880 and 1071.30
But this is not the definition, or assumption, currently in use in Italy; on the contrary, wall paintings are labeled Byzantine for centuries after the eviction of the
Byzantines by the Normans. If Byzantine is not a political and/or chronological
label, then what is it? Are its artistic components identifiable, or is it more like the
US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewarts famous 1964 definition of pornography (I know it when I see it)?
No one disputes that art made by craftspeople within the Byzantine empire
is Byzantine art; the definitional problem arises when dealing with products outside the empires confines, whether or not that area was previously within the
empire, like the Salento, or not (for instance, Serbia). A recent handbook of Byzantine studies states that

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tium and the Italians.29 To assess whether Byzantine properly applies to the
post-Byzantine Salento, we need to define the term.

The most popular definition of Byzantine art has been as the art of
Constantinople, but it is the narrowest and may distort our perceptions, since it sets the notion of a norm against which variations may be
seen negatively as provincial or inferior. The current discourse sees the
genesis of Byzantine art as a progressive transformation of GraecoRoman art rather than a rejection of it. But it avoids the question of
whether the category of Byzantine art represents a political state, a religion, or a style.31

This nondefinition refuses to grapple with the questions it raises about the relative roles of style and faith in defining Byzantine artistic borders. That some
Byzantine art is metropolitan and other art is provincial is obvious and not nec29. Byzantium and the Italians, Thirteenth through Fifteenth Centuries. Many of the contributions were published in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995).

2004). For the history of Byzantines in the Salento see

Vera von Falkenhausen, La dominazione bizantina nellItalia
meridionale dal IX allXI secolo (Bari: Ecumenica, 1978).

30. On these historically Byzantine images, see Linda

Safran, Redating Some South Italian Frescoes: The First
Layer at S. Pietro, Otranto, and the Earliest Paintings at
S. Maria della Croce, Casaranello, Byzantion 60 (1990):
30733; Safran, San Pietro at Otranto, chap. 2; Falla Castelfranchi, Pittura monumentale bizantina, 4599; and, most
recently, several essays and entries in Gioia Bertelli, ed.,
Puglia preromanica dal V secolo agli inizi dellXI (Milan: Jaca,

31. Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon, and Robin Cormack,

Byzantine Studies as an Academic Discipline, in Oxford
Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Jeffreys, Haldon, and
Cormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11.

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essarily a problem if provincial is understood as merely different rather than

as necessarily inferior.
Based on analysis of the introductory maps in the catalogs of two recent
Byzantine art exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,32 Antony Eastmond recently posed more detailed definitional questions that are worth repeating in full:
Is Byzantine art coterminous with the frontiers of the empire (assuming we can work out where those are at any one time)? Is it art made by
Byzantine artists, whether at home or abroad? Or does Byzantine art
require a very different definition? Given that the majority of the art
that survives is religious, should we define it in theological terms:
art produced by those states that formed part of the theological communion of the Orthodox world (this then includes the states of the Balkans, Russia, and Georgia, but suggests a more awkward relationship
with the non- Chalcedonian churches of Armenia, Syria, and Coptic
Egypt)? Or is it vaguer still: a more embracing concept that includes all
art produced under the general cultural sway of the empire and its religious world view? Of course, as the definition becomes broader, we have
to wonder what is left of the term Byzantine art that is in any sense
meaningful. As we move away from the heartlands of the empire, and in
particular away from Constantinople, and look towards the frontiers of
the empire, these questions become more pressing: at what point does
Byzantine art stop being Byzantine and become Georgian or Russian or Coptic instead? Does the use of a different script or language
on images with a common iconography mark a clear enough division
to exclude these works of art from Byzantium? Or do the various (and
varying) common iconographic, stylistic, or functional features of the
art produced in all of these regions at different periods tie them in to a
common history with Byzantine art?

While Eastmond argues for as broad a definition of Byzantine art as possible,

he acknowledges that this has a cost in the coherence and utility of the resulting definition.33
Why do Byzantine art historians not limit their inquiry to what goes on
within the imperial borders? The reason is the paucity of remaining works that
are inarguably Byzantine. The great Sicilian mosaics of the twelfth century and

32. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, eds., The

Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine
Era, A.D. 8431261 (New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1997); Helen C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: Faith and
Power (12611557) (New York: Metropolitan Museum of
Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). No
Salento frescoes are mentioned in either work, although
the Sicilian mosaics and even wall paintings from Win-

chester are featured in Glory of Byzantium. An Apulian

icon (cat. 320) and others from northern Italy are included
to raise questions about the movement of artists between
Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.
33. Antony Eastmond, The Limits of Byzantine Art, in
A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 31415.

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Serbian wall paintings of the thirteenth have been appropriated to flesh out
the lacunose picture of Byzantine art. But even if Byzantine artists born and
trained within the empirewere pressed into service by Norman patrons in Sicily and by members of the Serbian royal house, these monuments were responses
and challenges to Byzantium and its culture, not pieces of it. The large stone
basilicas that house these decorative ensembles have little in common with typically small-scale Byzantine brick churches, and in the case of Sicily, the worship
inside the Byzantine-like or byzantinizing decorative envelope had nothing
in common with the original Orthodox functions of the chosen dcor.34 The elision of differences results in a privileging of stylistic similarities over differences
in iconography, composition, function, and meaning. For many art historians,
and for nonspecialists as well, style is what art history is about, so challenging
the definition of Byzantine is nothing less than an effort to reconceptualize the
very basis of the art historical discipline.35
Clearly, the definition of Byzantine is problematic, and different scholars
(and amateurs, too) operate with divergent assumptions and contradictory agendas. The Metropolitan Museums Glory of Byzantium exhibition focused on
geographical areas that were politically autonomous from Byzantium, outside the
borders of the Byzantine empire, even if they exhibited varying degrees of cultural dependency.36 Yet while most of these neighboring countries art historical
scholarship seeks to emphasize the differences between Byzantine and locally
produced art,37 in order to assert an independent and often a nationalist identity,
the tendency in the scholarship on the Salento has been to stress the links with
Byzantium and, indeed, to accept the label of Byzantine for most of the regions
medieval art.38

The Problem with Labels

Taxonomy (or, in archaeology, typology), classification, and labeling are all products of the scientific method that has been privileged as a theoretical stance
since the eighteenth century. All real science rests on classification, the philologist and historian of religion Max Mller said in 1873,39 and even the nonsciences
were organized into neat pseudocategories. Byzantine studies was an offshoot of
34. Eastmond, Limits of Byzantine Art, 31718.

37. Eastmond, Limits of Byzantine Art, 318.

35. See the perceptive comments of Sharon Gerstel, The

Aesthetics of Orthodox Faith, review of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art exhibition Byzantium: Faith and Power
(12611557), Art Bulletin 87.2 (2005): 33141.

38. The exceptions are the obviously Roman- rite

churches, often but not exclusively cathedrals, with Latin
inscriptions.

36. Valentino Pace and Vera von Falkenhausen, review of

the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The Glory
of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine
Era, A.D. 8431261, Gesta 37.1 (1998): 103.

39. Cited in Jonathan Z. Smith, A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion, Harvard Theological Review 89.4
(1996): 401.

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COMMON KNOWLEDGE

classical philology, which was particularly notable for its empirical and positivist
emphasis.40 But taxonomy, for all its alleged scientific rigor, is fraught with theoretical and practical difficulties.41 How does the scientist, or the art historian,
choose what things to compare? Often the decision is based on what has been
published, rather than on familiarity with all possible comparanda; coincidence
and subjectivity loom large. In addition, labels run the risk of essentializing,
totalizing, and producing hegemonic discourse42 all things that desensitize us
to the reality that classificatory labels and categories are historical products, not
scientific facts.43
The problems are compounded by the tendency not just to label, but to
label in pairs of ostensible opposites. This, too, is largely a product of the Enlightenment, which enshrined all the old philosophical oppositions between mind
and world, appearance and reality, subject and object.44 The results are such
oft-repeated but seldom-interrogated binaries as Byzantine/Latin and East/West.
In particular, the East/West (or Orient/Occident) binary has become a fundamental component of postcolonial theory. Like many other contrasting pairs, this
one has become so familiar as to seem obvious and natural commonsense
in linguistic terms. It is a kind of cultural code, a conceptual system organized
around key oppositions in which one term is defined against its opposite and each
is aligned with multiple symbolic attributes.45 These kinds of pseudoscientific
antinomies have long structured thought and practice in many fields; they construct social reality . . . they hide as much as they reveal . . . these antinomies are
at once descriptive and evaluative, one side being always considered as the good
one, because their use is ultimately rooted in the opposition between us and
them. 46 And yet, as Rudyard Kipling wrote nearly a century ago, in We and
They, the validity of labels very much depends on who is doing the labeling and
where she is standing when she does so.47
Jonathan Smith agrees that dualistic classifications are to be avoided, but
he argues that if we do not classify we are left with the inconclusive study of

40. Jeffreys, Haldon, and Cormack, Byzantine Studies as

an Academic Discipline, 14.
41. Smith, Matter of Class, 394; Rolf Sattler, Methodological Problems in Taxonomy, Systematic Zoology 13.1
(1964): 1927.
42. Smith, Matter of Class, 4012, citing Kimberly Patton on the use of labels in comparing religious traditions.
43. Pierre Bourdieu, Vive la crise! Theory and Society
17.5 (1988): 779.
44. Richard Rorty, Science as Solidarity, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, vol. 1, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 44. Aristotle
analyzed several enduring oppositions in the Metaphys-

ics and Physics. More recently, linguists have recognized

the importance of oppositional pairs in language, where
dark is meaningless without light.
45. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 36; Daniel Chandler,
Semiotics for Beginners, online at www.aber.ac.uk/
media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html (accessed February 28, 2012).
46. Bourdieu, Vive la crise! 77778; Smith, Matter of
Class, 402.
47. All nice people, like Us, are We / And everyone else is
They: / But if you cross over the sea, / Instead of over the
way, / You may end by (think of it!) / Looking on We / As
only a sort of They!

48. Smith, Matter of Class, 402.

49. Lotfi Zadeh, cited in Jeffrey M. Perl with Natalie
Zemon Davis, Introduction: Abominable Clearness,
Common Knowledge 17.3 (Fall 2011): 445.
50. Rorty, Science as Solidarity, 38.
51. Jeffrey Perl cites more fields of application in Perl with
Davis, Introduction, 444. Articles I have found useful
include L. A. Zadeh, Fuzzy Logic and Approximate Reasoning, Synthese 30.34 (1975): 40728; Petr Hjek, On
Vagueness, Truth Values, and Fuzzy Logics, Studia logica
91.3 (2009): 36782; Christian G. Fermller, Theories
of Vagueness versus Fuzzy Logic: Can Logicians Learn
From Philosophers? Neural Network World 13.5 (2003):
45566; Nike K. Pokorn, In Defence of Fuzziness, in
The Metalanguage of Translation, ed. Yves Gambier and
Luc van Doorslaer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009),

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F u z z y St u d i e s : P a r t 3
s

Insights from Fuzzy Studies

What if the wall paintings at Santa Maria di Cerrate (and elsewhere) were
understood in terms of degree rather than assigned to, or excluded from, existing categories of Byzantine and Western art? Fuzzy studies acknowledges
uncertainty, and despite many Italian scholars conviction that medieval Salentine painting looks or even is Byzantine, I hope to have shown that this is
hardly an incontrovertible fact. Indeed, high precision is incompatible with high
complexity, and surely cultural contact and cultural production are situations of
high complexity.49 Fuzzy logic is a more pragmatic approach, designed to allow
for imprecise criteria of set-membership.50 It has been widely used in statistics,
computing, logic, linguistics, and document classification, and it may have applications in art history as well.51
The adjective Byzantine is a vague predicate not unlike tall or red.52
The degree to which someone is tall or something is red is contingent on, in the
first case, cultural norms of height, and, in the second, on lighting and context.
Tall depends on whether someone is standing among Pygmies or Maasai. Red
can be orangey-red or maroon or burgundy or scarlet, and rarely will two viewers describe it the same way. While small variations in redness do not change the
essential color, accumulated changesthe continuous addition of another color,
for example will eventually make the color no longer red.53 In other words,

Saf ran

individuals and individual phenomena. Taxonomy, he says, is a valuable tool in

achieving that necessary distortion.48 But perhaps we can destabilize the oppositional framework by exploring its ostensible margins. The Salento, which is perceived in book and article titles as occupying a fuzzy space between Byzantium
and the West, provides a good point of entry.

13544; Judith Gelernter, Dong Ca, Raymond Lu, Eugene

Fink, and Jaime G. Carbonell, Creating and Visualizing
Fuzzy Document Classification, Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department, Paper 624 (October 1, 2009): repository.cmu.edu/compsci/624 (accessed
March 5, 2012).
52. Recent studies of vagueness include Richard Dietz
and Sebastiano Moruzzi, eds., Cuts and Clouds: Vagueness,
Its Nature, and Its Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009); Delia Graff and Timothy Williamson, eds., Vagueness (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002); Rosanna Keefe,
Theories of Vagueness (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000); Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith, eds., Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
53. Graff and Williamson, Introduction, in Vagueness,
xvi.

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COMMON KNOWLEDGE

there is a point somewhere on the continuum of redness or tallness at which that

vague (or tolerant) predicate no longer obtains.54 This is the classic sorites paradox:
how many grains does it take to make, or unmake, a heap (Greek soros)?55 Classical logic suggests that adding or subtracting individual tiny grains cannot make
or unmake the hypothetical heap, but at some point there is a recognizable heap
or a nonheap, and somewhere along the art historical continuum there is a point
at which a wall painting is no longer Byzantine but something else. (The usual
terminus is not, however, not Byzantine, but rather Western, an even vaguer
term.) Vague predicates mean that anyones answer to the question of Byzantineness will be neither true nor false.
There is general agreement that a term is vague if it has borderline cases,56
which are those for which some competent speakers would judge that the predicate applies (is true) and some others not (they judge it to be false).57 Such competent scholars as Pace, Falla Castelfranchi, and Berger and Jacob have used
the term Byzantine to describe wall paintings in the Salento that others
adherents of a strict historical chronology, for instance, or those with different
stylistic criteria in mindmight label differently. Byzantine art in the Salento
is a borderline case; it lacks sharp boundaries and its definition eludes specialists.
The reality is a question of degree, not factof being more (or less) like a heap
and more (or less) Byzantine, rather than being a not-heap, or not-Byzantine,
at one moment and then a heap, or Byzantine, at the next. Epistemists would
say that while we do not know where the fuzzy border of Byzantine lies, this
is largely a matter of ignorance; furthermore, supervaluationists consider this a
linguistic phenomenon, a case of semantic indecision. Degree theorists dependent on fuzzy logic would point out that x = Byzantine becomes more and less true
(there are degrees of truth) at different points along the stylistic, iconographic,
compositional, and technical spectrums.58 From any theoretical or philosophical
standpoint, it is impossible to specify precisely which component of Byzantineness is the sine qua non for identifying a painting as Byzantine.
Does the distinctly Gothic architectural background of Santa Maria di
Cerrates second Koimesis render the scene not-Byzantine (fig. 5)? Perhaps not:
the distinction between foreground and background is maintained, and the fore-

54. Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith, Introduction:

Theories of Vagueness, in Keefe and Smith, Vagueness:
A Reader, 4.

Sennet, Ambiguity, plato.stanford.edu/entries/ambiguity/; Keefe and Smith, Introduction: Theories of Vagueness, 23.

55. On the sorites paradox, see Perl with Davis, Introduction: Abominable Clearness, 44546; Dominic Hyde,
Sorites Paradox, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, plato.
stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/; Graff and Williamson, Vagueness, essays in part 6.

57. Petr Hjek, On Vagueness, Truth Values and Fuzzy

Logics, Studia logica 91 (2009), 367.

56. Roy Sorensen, Vagueness, Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy, plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/; Adam

58. Keefe and Smith, Introduction: Theories of Vagueness, 67, 49; Graff and Williamson, Introduction,
xvixxii; Fermller, Theories of Vagueness versus Fuzzy
Logic.

59. Kees van Deemter, Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
60. Andreas H. Jucker, Sara W. Smith, and Tanja Ldge,
Interactive Aspects of Vagueness in Conversation, Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003): 173769.

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F u z z y St u d i e s : P a r t 3
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ground contains the familiar Byzantine cast of characters. One of them displays
a prayer instead of a psalm, probably on behalf of the supplicant kneeling at the
right; but the book is small and does not distract the viewer, and the lay supplicant
is set apart in his architectural frame. The Byzantine iconographic contours have
been retained. More troubling, for a Byzantine viewer, might be the duplication
of the scene and its unexpected accessibility, low down on the aisle wall of a sizable basilica that could have imitated Byzantine (in the narrow sense: within the
empires borders and for Orthodox use) church programs by placing such a scene
high up on the walls of the nave. When I showed the Cerrate Koimesis to Byzantine art historians unfamiliar with Salentine painting, one judged the figural
style not Byzantine and another said it was Byzantine, but with variations.
The same occurred with the Ascension scene.
There is a way out of this puzzle if we admit that the traditional labels are
misleading and if we jettison the allegedly positive implication of precisionin
this case, the category Byzantine and embrace the notion of vagueness. As
Kees van Deemter argued in his engaging Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness, the
world is full of fuzziness and very few things are black or white.59 The ubiquity of
vague expressions has engaged the attention of linguists, philosophers, and game
theorists in recent years. Even though it is commonly assumed that language ideally is precise and that vagueness is a defect to be avoided whenever possible,60 this
turns out not to be the case: Used as a technical term, vague is not pejorative.
Indeed, vagueness is a desirable feature of natural languages. Vague words often
suffice for the purpose in hand, and too much precision can lead to time wasting
and inflexibility.61 Vagueness can be an interactional strategy, compelling the
listener or reader to draw implications rather than allowing her or him to passively
receive an alleged taxonomic fact that is, in reality, an oversimplification.
It is better to describe the Ascension at Cerrate as rather Byzantinelooking, with some unusual coloristic and iconographic features rather than
orotundly as Byzantine. Similarly, to say that the second Koimesis has many
Byzantine iconographic and stylistic features but some notable differences in the
details is both more accurate and more effective. Fuzziness is useful: in the case
of Byzantine art in the Salento, it can help us move beyond monolithic categorization and compel us to think about local and regional variety, taking paintings on their own terms rather than as inferior provincial products or artificially
inflated echoes of Constantinopolitan models.62

61. Timothy Williamson, Vagueness, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. Ron Asher and J. M. Y.
Simpson, 10 vols. (Oxford: Pergamon, 1994), 9:4869,
cited in Jucker, Smith, and Ldge, Interactive Aspects
of Vagueness, 1738.
62. See my forthcoming Art and Identity in the Medieval
Salento.

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COMMON KNOWLEDGE

We need fuzzy language and vague concepts in medieval art (and elsewhere). In my view, we do our colleagues, our students, and the public a disservice
by implying that our material is easily slotted into clear conceptual categories
when the reality is that it occupies a slippery slope. In the case of wall painting
in an erstwhile Byzantine province (Salento) or an Orthodox but nonimperial
environment (Serbia) or when Byzantine craftsmen are pressed into service in
an entirely different cultural context (Sicily), byzantinizing is a better choice
than Byzantine. It too is a fuzzy term, but at least it is obviously vague and does
not try to convey false certainty. I used the term byzantinizing several times
in my Otranto monograph to refer to paintings that are Byzantine in style and
iconography to some degree but probably not by true Byzantine artists. Valentino Pace said that Byzantine is appropriate for what was done within the
political borders of the empire, Byzantinizing what was done outside those borders.63 Elsewhere, byzantinizing has been used as a synonym for Orthodoxlooking.64 I am not suggesting that byzantinizing should in every case replace
Byzantine as a label; rather, I am urging that the terms we use be more openended, more versatile, more fuzzy. The way we talk about and label things affects
the way we think about them. Rather than thinking of art history as a science
that permits definitive labeling and categorization, we should dispense with the
monolithic terms and especially with the easy but inaccurate binary oppositions;
we should demonstrate more humility about what we do not know; and we should
demand more complex thinking about our material. Byzantinists may be hungry
for more monuments, but Salentine art, like Sicilian and Serbian, is not simply
Byzantine. While its frescoes may occupy points on the Byzantine-art continuum, Santa Maria di Cerrate is a complicated monument that is not illuminated
by labeling it Byzantine.

63. Pace and von Falkenhausen, review of The Glory of

Byzantium, 103. See also the recent blog posting by Matthew Milliner on the Byzantinizing of America: www.
millinerd.com/2010/10/byzantinizing-of-america.html.

64. Gerstel, Aesthetics of Orthodox Faith, 331: byzantinizing, that is, Orthodox.