The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller
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Название: The Corporeal Imagination

Автор: Patricia Cox Miller

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Религиоведение

Серия: Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion

isbn: 9780812204681

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships.”4 However, by emphasizing repetition, they enable a recognition of, and a certain pleasure in, the structure of the form itself, as when a child finds pleasure in fairy tales precisely because of the expectation that certain situations and formulas will be repeated in new-but-familiar ways. Narrative lines like this are effective, writes Calvino, because they are “series of events that echo each other as rhymes do in a poem.”5

      Dissonant Echoing

      “Dissonant echoing” is the phrase that I am going to use to characterize a certain aesthetic of the narrative line which is found not only in literature but also in the art and ritual practice of the fourth and early fifth centuries of the late ancient era. Originally I was going to name this dissonant character of narrative lines as an “aesthetics of discontinuity” until I discovered that I had been anticipated in this by Michael Roberts’s study of poetics in late antiquity, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity. Briefly, Roberts characterizes the aesthetics of discontinuity as a taste for the densely textured play of repetition and variation.6 There is a preference for effects of visual immediacy, achieved by an emphasis on the part at the expense of elaborations of organic wholes.7 Furthermore, the relationships among such parts operate at an abstract level and must be reconstituted or imagined by the reader or the observer.8 Thus parataxis, juxtaposition, and patterning are among the formal principles that both govern and reveal the disjunctive composition of these “narrative lines.” As Roberts remarks with an appropriately linear metaphor, “the seams not only show, they are positively advertised.”9

      The tendency of this aesthetics toward fragmentation can be seen linguistically in poetry, where words are handled as though they possessed “a physical presence of their own, distinct from any considerations of sense or syntax.”10 In fact, Roberts argues, “in late antiquity … the referential function of language [and] art lost some of its preeminence; signifier asserts itself at the expense of signified.”11 This “liberated” signifier then takes on the brilliance, dazzle, and value suggested by the “jeweled style” of Roberts’s title.12

      A brief look at certain stylistic features of the art of this period will add an important visual component to the aesthetic disposition that is my focus. While it may be an exaggeration to follow Ernst Kitzinger in characterizing developments in the art of the late Roman era as “a great stylistic upheaval,” nonetheless there were striking changes in artistic representation in this era that have enabled historians of art to discern the emergence of a coherent stylistic tendency.13 Although my focus will be on the sculpting of human figures, particularly on sarcophagi, similar stylistic trends have been discerned in the mosaic and painterly arts of the period.14

      One of the basic changes is graphically represented in the contrast between the second-century roundels (literally “liberated” from monuments to Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius) and the early fourth-century frieze of the Arch of Constantine (fig. 1). As Kitzinger observes, the actions and gestures of the figures in the roundels are “restrained but organically generated by the body as a whole,” and the group is held together by a “rhythmic interplay of stances and movements freely adopted by the individual figures,” whereas the figures in the frieze are “so tightly packed within the frame as to lack all freedom of movement” and they cohere as a group by virtue of “an abstract geometric pattern imposed from outside and based on repetition of nearly identical units on either side of a central axis.”15

      A similar change can be seen in sculptures on sarcophagi from the fourth century in comparison to those from the third century; an “insistence on formal properties” replaces “representational integrity,” and “patterns of repetition and variation run counter to scenic coherence.”16 Sarcophagi characterized by presentation of scenes that “form a single sequence with obvious narrative unity”17—as in an early third-century depiction of a Dionysiac procession (fig. 2), and a Christian sarcophagus from the late third century that depicts the story of Jonah (fig. 3)—give way to “frieze sarcophagi” such as the so-called “Dogmatic” sarcophagus (C.E. 320–330) (fig. 4), in which scenic coherence is replaced by juxtaposed groups of two to three figures which depict scenes from the Old and New Testaments as well as from the life of Saint Peter. These groups of figures are not tied together organically; rather they are unified by the theological message to which all of them point: in Kitzinger’s striking formulation, such a frieze is “like a line of writing which required the viewer’s active participation” to discern the unifying narrative that the discrete sculptural groups exemplify again and again.18 At this point I would introduce a modification to Roberts’ argument concerning the disappearance of scenic coherence and representational integrity in this form of art by observing that frieze sarcophagi evince an alternative form of representational integrity that is not linear or narrative in the conventional sense. Such a view preserves precisely the aesthetic integrity of discontinuity insofar as it is rooted in the production of meaning by fragmentation.

      “The predilection of late antique art for row formation” is certainly pronounced in double-frieze sarcophagi like the one shown in Fig. 4. Packed with “shorthand pictographs,”19 its “effect can be bewildering for the observer attempting to sort out the profusion of figures, and as the fourth century progressed further differentiation [was] introduced” by the use of “framing devices—columns or trees—used to separate the individual episodes, thereby creating self-contained compositional units and drawing attention to the episodic quality of the work as a whole.”20

      Column sarcophagi such as that of Junius Bassus, dated to C.E. 359 (fig. 5), not only display the taste for fragmentation and for ornamentation of the part characteristic of this form of late ancient aesthetics; they also suggest that a remarkably paratactic imagination was at work, requiring the viewer to construct narratives of theological meaning that arise from the juxtaposition of images rather than from straightforward linear development. In artworks such as these fourth-century sarcophagi, each individual image is a sensuous presense, a sculpted human body, but taken together they constitute a metaphysical presence, a set of spiritual narratives relating to salvation history. Because of the excess of meanings that the juxtapositions of images on the sarcophagi generate, СКАЧАТЬ