Manifestations of Authorship

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_1304
dc.title	Manifestations of Authorship. Artists’ signatures in Byzantium
dc.contributor.author	Lidova Maria
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	it
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/venezia-arti/2017/1/manifestations-of-authorship/
dc.description.abstract	This paper is dedicated to the problem of artists’ signatures in Byzantium and, more specifically, to the question of anonymity, which is often considered to be a basic characteristic of Eastern Christian art. Declaration of authorship is traditionally seen as a sign of sinful vanity, antagonistic to the religious spirit of the Middle Ages. However, work on this material reveals numerous traces of authorship left by Byzantine artists on their work in the form of epigraphical records. Through a selection of the most insightful examples, based primarily on mosaics, murals and icon painting, this paper demonstrates that the tradition of creating inscriptions bearing the names of masters was a phenomenon neither limited to a particular chronological period of Byzantine history nor influenced by specific historical or cultural transformations. On the contrary, it represents a continuous tradition developing from the period of late antiquity right up to the end of the Middle Ages. The range of surviving evidence, the variability of linguistic forms and paleographic aspects, as well as the array of creative approaches taken to the placement of signatures and dedicatory inscriptions, help to reveal a concern for the preservation of memories of individual involvement within the world of the Medieval Christian masters. Whilst not always in line with a contemporary understanding of the role of artists’ signatures, these testimonies nevertheless call for a reevaluation of the question of complete anonymity and the personality of the artist in Byzantine art.
dc.relation.ispartof	Venezia Arti
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 26 \| December 2017
dc.issued	2017-12-20
dc.dateSubmitted	2017-07-13
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2385-2720
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.14277/2385-2720/VA-26-17-6
dc.peer-review	no
dc.subject	Anonymity
dc.subject	Anonymity
dc.subject	Artists’ names
dc.subject	Artists’ names
dc.subject	Authorship
dc.subject	Authorship
dc.subject	Byzantine artist
dc.subject	Byzantine artist
dc.subject	Byzantine epigraphy
dc.subject	Byzantine epigraphy
dc.subject	Signature
dc.subject	Signature

Research Article
open access

Artists’ signatures in Byzantium

Maria Lidova Wolfson College, Oxford; The British Museum, UK

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abstract

This paper is dedicated to the problem of artists’ signatures in Byzantium and, more specifically, to the question of anonymity, which is often considered to be a basic characteristic of Eastern Christian art. Declaration of authorship is traditionally seen as a sign of sinful vanity, antagonistic to the religious spirit of the Middle Ages. However, work on this material reveals numerous traces of authorship left by Byzantine artists on their work in the form of epigraphical records. Through a selection of the most insightful examples, based primarily on mosaics, murals and icon painting, this paper demonstrates that the tradition of creating inscriptions bearing the names of masters was a phenomenon neither limited to a particular chronological period of Byzantine history nor influenced by specific historical or cultural transformations. On the contrary, it represents a continuous tradition developing from the period of late antiquity right up to the end of the Middle Ages. The range of surviving evidence, the variability of linguistic forms and paleographic aspects, as well as the array of creative approaches taken to the placement of signatures and dedicatory inscriptions, help to reveal a concern for the preservation of memories of individual involvement within the world of the Medieval Christian masters. Whilst not always in line with a contemporary understanding of the role of artists’ signatures, these testimonies nevertheless call for a reevaluation of the question of complete anonymity and the personality of the artist in Byzantine art.

Published

Dec. 20, 2017

Submitted

July 13, 2017

Language

Keywords: Byzantine artist • Byzantine epigraphy • Artists’ names • Anonymity • Signature • Authorship

permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2385-2720/VA-26-17-6

Copyright: © 2017 Maria Lidova. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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