These I have shored against my ruins

 

This is one of the five bookcases in my workroom, one of at least twenty-five or so in the house, but it is difficult to be definitive because a couple of rooms have them on three or four walls and under the windows. These are our warmth against the chill of an increasingly vulgarized culture, our tools, and our companions.

The bookcase closest to my desk hold books most used for current work -- several by friends, and the 15th-century historians: Sphrantzes, Doukas, Kritobulos, Chalkokondyles.  And of course, other things have fetched up there, like a stack of dissertations on top. The middle bookcase is books on Nauplion, Athens, Mistra, and Crete, plus 3 shelves of dictionaries, and one of other peoples' offprints. And other things.

 Some Athens, and a reminder of my roots.

The one nearest the door, the one pictured at the top, is art and architecture, while behind me and bumped when we open the door is Pierre's enormous collection of Greek texts.  The fifth is small and has more library books, books that should be shelved somewhere else, files and books for the next shared writing project.  Inter-library loan books unstack themselves on the floor among seven file boxes. There is also a bed, usually blanketed in books, so it hardly counts as a bed, though I managed to get it usable for visits from Nick Nicholas and Michael Pettinger, my authorities for medieval Greek and Latin.

My reminder from Theocritus: "It is not easy to find."
The "emeralds" are a 32-year family joke.

The floor has a very nice Persian-style carpet, though the degree of niceness is irrelevant as it is mostly covered by the boxes of files I am using for the Kladas book* which is processing slowly but surely.  Slowly, because I have been surprised by time.  Slowly, because I have written several long articles in the past year, most on material that I use in the book, and four speeches.  Slowly, because the fifteenth-century Morea was such a spirit-sucking culture that I find myself frequently drained. The accepted level of peacetime violence, the frequency of plague, the exploitations by the archon class, the corruption of a church organization that possessed one-third of the land and thus removed it from the tax base, the cultural misogyny, the evident despair of the Palaiologoi and their withdrawal from responsibility (always with the exception of Constantine), the dreariness of the Mistra intellectuals who could do little more than harp on the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the Ottoman threat always present like a bad smell in the drains --these devour psychic energy and must have done so in the fifteenth century.

 Yeats wrote:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

.

 John, the Merbaka Virgin, the Palaiologoi,
a horseshoe from the barn my great-grandfather built in Alabama,

and my dear Ephraim Boms,** in a coma in Athens since September.

Nevertheless, I now know the Palaiologoi  at least as well as my own family.  Kladas I know no better than I did when I first wrote about him in my dissertation 13 years ago.  I have found previously unused information, and I have evolved ideas I have seen nowhere else, but the man himself resolutely remains a stranger to me.  I have gained no access to him through his peers though I have become admiring of Petro Bua. I have a sense of Demetrios Asan and Manuel Rallis, despite their repugnant personal activities; I have a certain sympathy, though dislike, for Demetrios Palaiologos, and a deep affection for Demetrios Pepagomenos. The great Bessarion, Cyriaco of Ancona (after all I have written about Cyriaco, I have no sense of him, either), and Giovanni Dario, have become my private Trinity.***  But there is a shell surrounding Kladas -- perhaps in compensation.

* The Knight and Death: The Kladas Affair and the Fifteenth-Century Morea.

** Ephraim Boms, after nearly a year in a coma, died on August 7, 2011. A Reader at St. Paul's Anglican Church in Athens, he had been preparing to study for ordination as a minister.  He leaves a wife, and daughter and son in Nigeria.

*** I notice that these are all people for whom I have contemporary portraits, though Cyriaco looks nothing like I had pictured him.  I wonder how much that matters?

PS, Part Four: About Distinctions

Large Spotted Cats

In working on the entries for the Leopard Wranglers, I read five different books on Gozzoli and the frescos in the Medici Chapel. Not one of the authors in those books -- all art historians and so presumably trained to look at details -- managed to make the distinction between leopards and cheetahs that Gozzoli did in the frescos, although one did use a shotgun-technique of referring arbitrarily to "leopards," "cheetahs," and "hunting leopards." [Late note: Joan Lloyd in African Animals in Renaissance Literature and Art makes the distinction.] Gozzoli paints both cats together here.

 The cheetah -- the hunting leopard -- is on the horse.  The leopard is on the ground.  Cheetah spots are single, like thumb-prints.  Leopard spots come in clusters, as if printed by your fingertips bunched together.   Gozzoli makes the animals different colors, though they are actually about the same, and shows clusters of four spots for the leopard: it is much more likely to be five. The spot distinction is really all one needs for the cheetah-leopard issue.  If you bring in other species of spotted cats, which we will not do here, you may need more help.  If you are concerned with hunting any of them them, you have no business here at all. The medievals did not help the distinction by calling cheetahs "hunting leopards," except that it indicated that they were well-aware that there was a distinction. For them, the essential difference was that cheetahs are easily trained to hunt with humans.  They are magnificent fast animals, perfectly designed for Art Deco imagery, with exaggeratedly small heads and large haunches. A leopard of the same body length as a cheetah is, but with a larger, proportionately broader skull.  They are over all heavier, bulkier, and highly resistant to training. They are killers, tracking and pouncing over comparatively short distances, but they are not good over long distances.  Leopards were collected for their beauty and exotic qualities, along with lions, ostriches, and cheetahs -- and that is why two of them are shown in the Medici frescos -- but serious hunters wanted the cheetahs. The painters, frankly, did not pay much attention to the head and skeletal distinctions between the animals, but they were very clear about the spots. In the entry (link above) I wrote about Nick Nicholas' exhaustive article on the topic of nomenclature.  Knowing the differences between the names and animals is not a major life skill necessary for most people: knowing that there are differences and how to look for them is. [Late note: that may not be a leopard.  Please read the comments at the end of this.]         

Hats

I have read too many comments this year identifying the imperial Palaiologan hat as a skiadion, a shade-hat. Interestingly, it is almost impossible to find a contemporary Greek representation.  The only one I know, I have used here before, but it has nice detail. 

Pseudo-Kodinos, who told us about the Leopard-Wranglers, has a lot of entries on the skiadion. "The skiadion of the despot is entirely covered with pearls, on his aer (see the tails on Manuel's hat below) is his name in gold embroidery. . . . If [the despot is a young boy] he is on horseback, he wears the skiadion. When he becomes an adolescent, he wears the skiadion in the palace. . . the skiadia of the relatives of the emperor, who are despots, are red and gold, embroidered with gold thread, and have a cross embroidered with pearls. . . The skiadion of the sebastokrator is red and gold, embroidered with gold thread.  His aer is like that of the despot."   Headgear is not enough to distinguish rank at the Palaiologan court.  You need the full description of robes and colors, embroidery on robes, and colors of shoes to have any sense of security, but it does let you know that however poor the empire had become, there was full employment for the gold-embroiderers. The skiadion has been repurposed in the witch hat.

Update: one of my most faithful readers sent me another late 15th C image of skiadia, from the Istituto Ellenico in Venice. Emperors might have worn the skiadion in private, but in public performance -- at least in the West because that is where the images come from -- they wore the kamelaukion.  I don't know if the name refers to a camel's hump.  It is rounded and sectioned, rather like a melon, and is sometimes called a melon hat.  John's had jewels on top that could be changed.  To my knowledge, there is no Byzantine image of an Emperor in a kamelaukion, but the Westerners loved it and made images of Manuel II, John VIII, and Thomas Palaiologos.  This is Manuel, more or less -- his beard was white -- from the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc du Berry.

John's hats are more familiar, and he was more concerned about his personal style.

It is difficult to get good photographs of images of Thomas, but he is shown here from the tomb of Pius II who made a feeble effort to make him Emperor:

Western artists, when not painting visiting Palaiologoi, used the kamelaukion to represent "exotic person from Eastern country where they have better hats than us." 

There is only one Byzantine representation of a kamelaukion that I have been able to find, and I have given it an entry of its own, the portrait of Manuel Laskaris Chatzikis at Mistra.  There are, I think, exceptional reasons for this portrait, but you will have to read about them there.

Further update: the same reader found a miniature image of kamelaukia in the 14th-C manuscript of the Tale of Alexander in the Istituto Ellenico of Venice.  Here, even though by a Greek artist, they are used to identify exotic foreigners.  So it may not indicate Palaiologan use.

Greek Elephants

Nick Nicholas was visiting and we were discussing the 15th-century elephant in the manuscript he and George Baloglou had published, An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds. The text under the elephant reads:

Just like a tower, safe and fortified,/
a fort impregnable, firm to the end,/
thus, too, stand I, robust beyond compare.

It is, frankly, not convincing if you consider this rather bewildered quadruped.

But it reminded me of my small collection of images of Greek elephants, and as this week is given to celebrating a daughter's wedding, I offer a celebration of elephants instead of more of the 15th century.
This next, tiny image, is cribbed from John Chapman's dense site on Mani, from an 18th-C fresco of the redemption of all the earthly creation at the Last Judgement, in the church of Ag. Chrysostomos at Skoutari.

This elephant is in a fresco at Metora of Adam naming the animals. I bought an unlabeled postcard 32 years ago, and now have no idea which monastery is so privileged, nor of the date, though I will risk a guess for the 16th-C. The animals are fascinating as a group, each taken from a different manuscript illustration, from different cultures and periods, and Adam is gender-neutral, possibly influenced by Balkan gnosticism.




Not actually Greek, but bought by a Greek, and brought to Greece -- it now resides in the Benaki Islamic Museum in Athens -- this ink drawing is Coptic, from the 8th century. A second elephant from the Benaki Islamic is this splendidly-colored tile:



The Museum of Byzantine and Christian Art in Athens has this very scrubbed 3rd?-C elephant alongside a soft giraffe, part of a sculpture of Orpheus playing his harp for the animals.




And the loveliest of them all, this tender elephant from a procession of elephants from the late 4th-century Arch of Theodosios in Thessaloniki.