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REPRESENTATION c. 800: ARAB, BYZANTINE, CAROLINGIAN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2009

Leslie Brubaker
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Abstract

What could or should be visually represented was a contested issue across the medieval Christian and Islamic world around the year 800. This article examines how Islamic, Byzantine, Carolingian and Palestinian Christian attitudes toward representation were expressed, and differed, across the seventh and eighth centuries. Islamic prohibitions against representing human figures were not universally recognised, but were particularly – if sometimes erratically – focused on mosque decoration. Byzantine ‘iconoclasm’ – more properly called iconomachy – was far less destructive than its later offshoots in France and England, and resulted in a highly nuanced re-definition of what representation meant in the Orthodox church. Carolingian attitudes toward images were on the whole far less passionate than either Islamic or Orthodox views, but certain members of the elite had strong views, which resulted in particular visual expressions. Palestinian Christians, living under Islamic rule, modulated their attitudes toward images to conform with local social beliefs. Particularly in areas under Orthodox or Islamic control, then, representation mattered greatly around the year 800, and this article examines how and why this impacted on local production.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 19 , December 2009 , pp. 37 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2009

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References

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17 Reinink, ‘Ps.-Methodius’, 181. It now appears unlikely that this conversion was substantial till the ninth century, but the fears were nonetheless real.

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20 Council in Trullo, ed. Nedungatt and Featherstone, 180–1; an extended version of this argument appeared in Brubaker, ‘Art and Orthodoxy’.

21 See, e.g., L. Brubaker, Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium. Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 6 (Cambridge, 1999), 19–58.

22 For discussion of this phenomenon, see Brubaker, ‘Art and Orthodoxy’.

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24 Ibid., 132.

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26 Similarly, the focus of much popular theological literature was about the nature of divine authority, the relationship between right belief and human experience, and the extent to which divine intervention in human affairs could be demonstrated. See further Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, esp. 144–5.

27 Ed. Bieler, Itineraria, 231–2; trans. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims, 114–15.

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