Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | Oktober/2020 |
Spalte: | 913–915 |
Kategorie: | Altertumswissenschaft |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Arnhold, Marlis, Maier, Harry O., and Jörg Rüpke [Eds.] |
Titel/Untertitel: | Seeing the God. Image, Space, Performance, and Vision in the Religion of the Roman Empire. Proceedings of the Eponymous International Conference which was held on June 3 and 4, 2015 at the University of Bonn. |
Verlag: | Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2018. XIX, 304 S. m. Abb. = Culture, Religion, and Politics in the Greco-Roman World, 2. Lw. EUR 124,00. ISBN 978-3-16-155721-7. |
Rezensent: | Jan N. Bremmer |
The book under review features the proceedings of a conference in Bonn in 2015 and is edited by an archaeologist (Arnhold), a New Testament scholar (Maier) and a historian of religion (Rüpke). As the Introduction states, its aim was to bring together various disciplinary approaches to the religious visual culture of the Roman Empire and to visualise the entanglement of religious imagery with the visual culture of this period. In this respect, the conference is indebted to the ›material turn‹, which has led to a sharper focus on questions regarding the aesthetic, anthropomorphic, gender and spatial aspects of religion in general and the divine in particular. This has led the editors to ask: What knowledge enabled the ancients to identify an image as a representation of a divinity or a space as a sanctuary dedicated to a specific cult?
The essays in this book have been divided into three sections. The first one, which concerns the imagining of divine presences and the referring to divine agents, is begun by S. J. Friesen (3–25) with a brief description of the Ephesian temple assemblage for the Flavian emperors. Following Jaś Elsner, he calls it a ritual-centred context for viewing the divine. A visitor might have occasionally seen the larger than life-size statue of Domitian or, after his murder, Vespasian or Titus, but the latter did not look down to return the gaze. Many people would not have been able to read the in-scriptions on the bases of the statues, but those who did would notice the presence of the provincial elite, which hardly will have been different from their daily life. Friesen contrasts this reality with the imagination of God in John’s Revelation (4–5), which, when read out, would be an imagined visualisation in the Chris-tian assembly of a supreme, indescribable deity, subverting the referential understanding of seen objects in normal life and discourse, the demise of which it announces. However, his sweeping conclusion that sightings of deities are always tied up with prac-tices of subordination and subversion is hardly convincing. In a well-researched and illustrated study, Anna-Katharina Rieger (27–58) analyses the ways the people of Caesarea Philippi imagined their invisible gods, the manner in which they perceived the divine presence and the construction of their sanctuary as a holy place. She focuses on the context via a ›lococentric approach‹, which leads her to note different interpretations of the local Nymphs and Pan depending on where the viewer of the images was: in the sanctuary itself or in the region, whether looking at or standing in front of the local statues, or seeing the local gods on coins.
Kristine Iara (59–84) looks at the ways the gods were seen in the political and topographical centre of Rome. She collects the dis-persed evidence, interestingly comments on the statues of Jupiter and Vesta, and notes that gods were present everywhere, but also observes that the nature of their visibility often remains obscure in our sources. Although Christianity opposed the pagan ›idols‹, they did not replace them with Christian statues and thus the ancient gods long remained visible in the centre of Rome. Jörg Rüpke (85–97) nicely shows that it was much more difficult to become a priest than to be one, but that the public presence of the senatorial sacerdotes was weak, except for a few offices, such as that of the rex sacrorum and the Vestal Virgins. This situation would last till the late third century AD, but religious positions never gained a supreme position in Rome within the political elite.
The second section, which concentrates on image creation and iconographies, is inaugurated by Richard Gordon (101–123) with a well-illustrated study of non-standard images in the curse tablets. He shows that some of these images were newly invented, whereas others expanded on existing models. As time went on, practitioners outside Egypt increasingly created their own performative images. Marlis Arnhold (125–147) studies the iconography of Mithras and interestingly differentiates between recurring motifs, such as the bull-slaying god, perhaps handed down via sketches, drawings or small-scale representations, and local variations, which she convincingly ascribes to local workshops. Yet it is Rome and its environs in the second century, which provided the ideal condition for the creation of similar images within a short period of time. Chris-tian imagery is studied by Robin Jensen (149–175), who focuses on the polymorphous Jesus, showing that originally Jesus was a beardless and androgynous youth, but gradually became a bearded man. She discusses various possibilities without, however, offering a clear explanation. She does note the polymorphous appearance of Jesus in the Apocryphal Acts, but gives no bibliography (but see I. Czachesz, The Grotesque Body in Early Christian Discourse: Hell, Scatology, and Metamorphosis, 2012, 115–129; L. Roig Lanzillotta, ›Jesús de Nazaret y la cuestión del polimorfismo divino. De los apócrifos neotestamentarios a Nag Hammadi‹, in id., and I. Muñoz Gallarte, ed., Liber amicorum en honor del Profesor Jesús Peláez del Rosal, 2013, 65–92). In the end, the early Christians refused to stick to a single portrait, which may have been, as she suggests, a way of preventing idolatry. David Balch (177–205) compares Athena’s command to Theseus to leave Ariadne with Jesus’ command to leave one’s family, even one’s wife, and to follow him, but his idea that Luke imitates and critiques the values of Romulus seems far-fetched. There is no indication that the author of Luke-Acts had visited Rome or that he was influenced by the visual art of Italy. The article is learned but unpersuasive.
The third section concentrates on specific images in people’s minds. Despite dating Ignatius, wrongly in my opinion, to the first decades of the second century, Harry Maier (209–224), lively evokes the martyrdom of Ignatius. He situates Ignatius’ description of his suffering body in ancient practices of ecphrasis. Making use of insights of the visual turn, he convincingly shows that Ignatius, by vividly making his own martyrdom visible, makes visible ›the God who has physically died and has been resurrected‹. In a well-illus-trated contribution, Annette Weissenrieder (225–251) interestingly discusses the architectural terms in Ephesians and shows that mesotoichon (2.14) means the wall that divided the inner temple area from the publicly accessible space, both in Jerusalem and in Graeco-Roman temples. This wall has been destroyed by Christ through his death on the cross, which now enables the believer to see God. Brigitte Kahl (253–279) closely connects the famous Great Altar of Pergamon with the throne of Revelation 2.13, but she produces no convincing evidence to support this connection. Finally, in a contribution that is tangential to the book’s theme and contains rather idiosyncratic terminology, Vernon Robbins (281–299) discusses the Prologue to John.
As often is the case with proceedings, the level of the contribu-tions is mixed. The best, though, have responded well to the idea behind the original conference. They show that concentrating on the problem of seeing the divine can help us to better see the differ-ences between the pagan and Christian ways of seeing the divine (Friesen), but also the various ways in which the ancients not only saw the same divinities (Rieger), but also invented new images (Gordon) or varied existing models (Arnhold). At the same time, attention to visual culture can also enlighten literary texts (Maier, Weissenrieder). Priests need not be as visible as we would expect (Rüpke). The book lacks an index and would have profited from cross-references, but literary, historical and archaeological students will feel stimulated to ask new questions.