Echoes of Antiquity in Middle Byzantine miniatures: a Matter of Style

In this essay I explore to what degree echo of ancient art resonates in medieval Greek art. I focus on an emblematic case which is dear to the critical tradition: the Paris Psalter (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, gr. 139). Through the stylistic analysis of four selected miniatures, I elaborate the critical issues, retracing the discussion in a 25-hour course entitled: “The Heritage of Ancient art in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts: Techniques, Style and Iconography”, held at Brno University with the support of funds from Erasmus Teaching Staff Mobility (2013-2014). I begin by examining the critical fortune of the decorative repertory of the Paris Psalter and providing a critical survey of the main interpretative hypotheses proposed in the 1800s and 1900s. I focus in particular, on the discussion among art historians who tried to explain the miniatures as the recreation of a lost pre-iconoclastic model or, alternatively, as a result of the 10th-century in-depth study of ancient art. The second part of this essay is dedicated to the analysis of four particularly illuminations out of the fourteen single-page miniatures that illustrate the Psalms and Odes. These four miniatures seem to participate in three different pictorial traditions that correspond to three different interpretations of the ancient art in Middle-Byzantine illuminations: 1) the pastoral idyll tradition, 2) the heroic epic tradition and 3) the religious image, pertinent to a devotional and hagiographic tradition. The presentation aims to understand the degree of awareness in the use of ancient models.