Introduction 3

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-51388-4 — Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium Edited by Brooke Shilling , Paul Stephenson Excerpt More Information

I n t r o d u c t i o n

Brooke Shilling and Paul Stephenson

Th e papers in this volume were all delivered at a conference held 28 June to 1 July 2012 at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and the Netherlands Institute in Turkey. Th e event was conceived and planned by Paul Stephenson and Ingela Nilsson, and sponsored very generously by the Swedish National Bank’s Tercentenary Fund. Th e volume begins, as did the fi rst day of the conference, with Julian Richard’s paper on the discovery and recording of nymphaea across the Eastern Mediterranean world, and the limitations of scholarship to date. Richard off ers an extended refl ection on the nature and shortcomings of the study of Roman fountains , beginning in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with etchings, expeditions and grand excavation campaigns in Greece and Asia Minor, notably at Olympia , Corinth and Miletos . It is shown that a distinction was drawn early and has persisted between aqueducts, water pipelines and baths , which have been subjected more frequently to technical studies by archaeologists and engineers, and fountains, which have been considered the preserve of art and architectural historians. As Richard notes, into the 1980s, ‘the traditional trilogy – architecture, sculpture, inscriptions – struc- tured the majority of publications’, with eff orts directed at description and classifi cation, rather than the explanation and contextualisation of individual structures. In short, fountains were imagined elements in establishing an architectural typology, each imagined at the moment of its construction and denied any historical existence. Richard highlights, and decries, the fact that too frequently fountains have been treated simply as objects of display, rather than as the end point of the delivery system for water. To that extent, the study of ornate nymphaea has been determined by one aspect of their history, and the fame of certain monumental public fountains that became singular landmarks or symbols has exacerbated this tendency. Th e chapter by Paul Stephenson and Ragnar Hedlund indulges in this tendency, introducing two famous monumental fountains of Rome as comparanda for those established in the city of Constantine , the Septizodium and the Meta Sudans. Although Constantine is known to have restored the Meta Sudans, almost nothing is known for certain about the building or restoration of monumental 1

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2 Brooke Shilling and Paul Stephenson

waterworks in early fourth- century Constantinople . Fortunately, a clearer picture emerges from archaeology and texts beginning in the middle of the fourth century. Stephenson and Hedlund consider a variety of monumental waterworks, including aqueducts , baths , nymphaea , reservoirs , cisterns and fountains. We learn of their maintenance and lack of maintenance by city offi cials, designated water guards ( hydrophylakes) in late antiquity, and by their imperial successors, the counts and chamberlains of the middle Byzantine period. Stephenson and Hedlund conclude with a look at surviving fountains, for the most part ancient victory monuments and columns converted into fountains, including the Th eodosian Obelisk , the Serpent Column and the Masonry Obelisk in the hippodrome . Before these monuments were erected here, the so- called Baths of Zeuxippos occupied an adjacent site. Stephenson and Hedlund challenge the traditional Severan dating of the bath complex, placing it instead in the later third century. As Gerda de Kleijn notes in her chapter, despite a recent substantial and substantive monograph on the water supply system of Constantinople, we still know very little about many of its key elements. It seems clear that the system followed that of eastern parts of the empire, employing principally terracotta pipes to distribute water, and that these would have been connected to lead pipes only when a bronze stopcock or turncock was to be installed, to allow the fl ow of water to be stopped, to change its direction or to create small spouts at a fountain. Lead pipes would be stamped to indi- cate the grantee and by whose authority the water was granted. However, only a single stamped lead fi stula has been discovered in Istanbul, and its inscription, as de Kleijn shows, does not conform to stamps on lead fi s- tulae known from Rome. Given the dearth of direct evidence, de Kleijn off ers important comparative material and informed conjecture based on the administration of the water supply system in Rome, before turning to the preserved legislation of Constantinople itself. Clearly, as in Rome, in the late fourth and fi ft h centuries, the grant of water to a private individual was an imperial prerogative. Th e size of a grant of water to a private individual was in accordance with his status, the size of his property and the presence of baths. Th e grant was calculated and recorded as the specifi c diameter of a water conduit to be connected to the private residence or baths. Again, as in Rome, this relied on the employment of a permanent and dedicated staff of water inspectors, whose hands were branded with the mark of their authority and responsibility. But this was not a suffi cient guarantee against fraud when something as precious and prestigious as a private water con- nection was concerned.

Introduction 3

Th e so- called Silahtarağa fountain was located in the vicinity of Constantinople . Hitherto it has been considered a construction of the Antonine age (ad 138– 93), but Brenda Longfellow demonstrates that it is far more likely to have been a product of the later fourth century, develop- ing a suggestion made by Bente Kiilerich and Hjalmar Torp. Longfellow commends an analysis by Marianne Bergmann, which posited a workshop active in Constantinople that was responsible also for the carved bases of the Th eodosian Obelisk . She develops the hypothesis with numerous telling comparanda and posits a blended workshop, comprising artists from Constantinople and Aphrodisias . Th e Silahtarağa statues include snaky- legged giants, and Longfellow places these within the fuller context of Constantinople’s serpentine imagery, notably in the Forum of Constantine and the Hippodrome, exploring a renascence of interest in such composi- tions in the later fourth and fi ft h centuries. Longfellow also fi nds no fi rm evidence that the Silahtarağa group adorned a fountain, although she does not rule out that possibility, and certainly water displays, like serpents, were popular in the Th eodosian period. A bronze goose, whose origins are obscure, is believed to have come from the hippodrome of Constantinople when it was donated to the British Museum in 1859. If its location on the euripos cannot be proven, Rowena Loverance, in a fascinating study informed by new analysis at the British Museum, shows that it is well worth considering the tableau in which such a piece would have been displayed. She suggests that the bronze goose may have been a companion to Artemis, or may have been shown with compan- ions pulling a chariot, or it may have taken a starring role within a depiction of the Rape of the Sabine Women. Th e last possibility receives supplemen- tary support from an association with a tale that emerged in Byzantion, later established among the foundation myths of Constantinople by Hesychios of Miletos , and from an intriguing possibility, that the goose once emitted not water but sound. However, this would remove another fountain from the few we have identifi ed for medieval Constantinople , just as analysis conducted by the British Museum shows no material evidence that a pipe, recorded in the nineteenth century, still exists in the goose, nor that one was ever attached. If Loverance shows there is little evidence to support a claim oft en made for the goose , that it once served as a fountain, then Stephenson proves that the Serpent Column did once, and probably for centuries, expel water. Th e column stands on a marble base with a large hole drilled through it. A lead pipe was directed through this hole, directing water from a conduit beneath the column into the bronze. Water certainly emerged from the base of the

4 Brooke Shilling and Paul Stephenson

column, where a hole was cut into the bronze and a channel was carved into the marble base onto which the column is fi xed by a lead footing. Th ere is, however, no fi rm evidence that pipes carried this water up to the mouths of the serpents, more than six metres high. Still, as early as the fourteenth century, a legend had emerged that the fountain once expelled diff erent liquids from each serpent’s mouth, most commonly reported as water, wine and milk. Th ese liquids had scriptural signifi cance, but the stories may have inspired, or in turn may have been inspired by, the construction of a ‘magic fountain’ at the court of the Mongol ruler, Möngke Khan (1209– 59), from which fl owed water, wine, mares’ milk and mead. Stephenson shows that serpentine fountains were frequently portrayed in manuscript illuminations produced in Constantinople in the twelft h century as a fi nial formed from entwined snakes expelling water. Snake fountains were depicted in scenes of the Annunciations both to Anne and to Mary, where they allude to the serpentine tempter of Genesis, by whom mankind was led astray. Paradise lost would be regained through the waters that fl ow from the fountain, in four streams, as they did in Eden. Th e serpentine fountains evoked the Fall as they bore witness to the announcement by Gabriel that God would redeem mankind through the birth of Christ. In conclusion, Stephenson ponders whether the ability to expel various liquids was transferred to the Serpent Column , when in 1204 it survived the sack of Constantinople by the forces of the Fourth Crusade, but also leaves open the intriguing possibility, suggested in a Byzantinising psalter produced in Canterbury between 1180 and 1200, that such a fountain did exist immedi- ately prior to the sack. Stephenson off ers no fi rm date for the plumbing of the Serpent Column. In contrast, we have approximate dates for several other well-known fountains that occupied secular spaces in medieval Constantinople, notably within the Great Palace grounds, including in courtyards provided for the circus factions to perform ritualised dances and acclamations for the emperors. Th eophanes records that in ad 693/4 Justinian II required the destruction and relocation of a church to accommodate the fountain of the Blues, an action that would be reversed two centuries later. 1 Th e tenth- century De cerimoniis allows us to determine that the fountain of the Blues was built at the foot of the terrace of the Pharos chapel, and also to identify the fountain of the Greens, which adjoined the triclinium of Justinian, built by the same emperor. Th e Vita Basilii , preserved in the collection known as Th eophanes Continuatus, informs us that many decades before the De cerimoniis was compiled, the fountains had been moved. Benefi ting from the established water supply, Basil I ‘built that very beautiful, large, and well

Introduction 5

illuminated bath of the palace which is above the so-called Phiale – a name left over from the stone fountain of the Blue faction that formerly stood there’. Additionally, ‘the fountain of the other faction, I mean the Greens, used to stand in the eastern court of the palace, but was moved when the holy church that is there was built’.2 Guilland has suggested that these are the same fountains that have just been described in the Vita Basilii adorn- ing the atrium to the west of Basil’s new church, the Nea , still within the palace grounds, being the very church for which the fountain of the Greens was moved (see map 2 ). 3 Th e Vita Basilii here describes a basin ‘made of Egyptian stone, which we are wont to call Roman [porphyry], and is encircled by serpents excellently carved’. Th is is probably the same fountain that Andronikos Komnenos moved to his mausoleum from the small garden of the imperial palace in the 1180s. According to Niketas Choniates, this was a ‘great porphyry basin, which has coiled together around its rim two entwined dragons, a wonder to behold’.4 Laskarina Bouras identifi ed this object as the basin that stands today in the outer narthex of Hagia Sophia, which has holes in a circular recess where a fi nial may once have been mounted (see plate 1). However, this identifi cation must be questioned, because this basin is fashioned from breccia not porphyry. 5 A fuller picture of the water culture of medieval Constantinople is provided by Paul Magdalino, whose chapter begins by sketching the state of the city’s water supply system between the thirteenth and fi ft eenth centuries, so far as it is revealed by rhetoricians. Th is is contrasted with the situation between the later ninth century and the sack of Constantinople in 1204. Magdalino suggests that ‘the eighth-century restoration of the long- distance water supply [w]as the foundation of the building projects of the Byzantine “renaissance” of the ninth and tenth centuries’, and that ‘all the new important foundations of th[at] period incorporated facilities for the large- scale, conspicuous consumption of water’. Off ering commentary on all the main fountains known from texts of the period, including the Mystic Fountain of the Triconch and the phialai of the factions, Magdalino suggests that an imperial initiative of the later ninth century saw notable or notorious fountains and basins moved from secular, profane locations into sacred spaces. Magdalino also introduces the ritual bath (louma ) in the courtyard of the Arsenal of the Neorion, established by the patrician Antonios for his ‘brothers in Christ’ and refurbished for the use of Romanos I and his co- emperors. Although this is the only extant account of the establishment of a louma , as it is recorded in the Synaxarion , Magdalino ponders whether

6 Brooke Shilling and Paul Stephenson

other private baths of late antiquity became miraculous, healing ritual baths. In closing he returns to a bath about which he has written much in the past, now with new insights into the construction of the Bath of Leo the Wise and its evocation in a rich poem by Leo Choirosphaktes , who later wrote an ekphrasis on the thermal springs at Pythia in Bithynia, ‘a bath- house built by God’. Magdalino reminds us that all baths incorporated fountains, and that in middle Byzantium water was sanctifi ed by the presence of a church. Jesper Blid Kullberg focuses on an example of this process, whereby a late antique bath complex, perhaps one of the balneae privatae listed in the Notitia , was transformed in the fi ft h to sixth century into a church complex fea- turing a notable atrium fountain . Moreover, the North Church was con- structed parallel to the Aqueduct of Valens , using two of its arches as vaults for its nave. Blid Kullberg compares this reuse of hydraulic infrastructure within Constantinople to three examples elsewhere, at St Demetrios in Th essalonike , the sanctuary at Labraunda and the Kaplıcalar Basilica at Phrygian Hierapolis . Only the last example is ostentatious. Blid Kullberg advances the thesis that, far from eradicating Roman bathing, the adapta- tion of baths to churches refl ected a Christianisation of established attitudes towards water and health; a notion that is clearly echoed in Magdalino’s refl ections on ritual bathing . Philipp Niewöhner off ers a catalogue of Byzantine zoomorphic rainwater spouts beginning with seven spouts used in the construction of the early sixth- century church of St Polyeuktos in Constantinople. Unlike basilicas with pitched roofs, domed churches required spouts to channel water away from the walls. To the group discovered in Saraçhane he adds an eighth spout, incorporated aft er the Fourth Crusade into a fountain at a Venetian monastery in Cyprus. Th e more varied, naturalistic and Sasanian- inspired motifs of the early Byzantine period are succeeded by the more stylised and geometric spouts of the middle Byzantine period, almost invariably carved with lion heads. Just as the marble channels protected the masonry of the buildings they adorned, their fi erce form as lions bar- ing teeth served an apotropaic function. Aft er considering the distinctive lion- headed sima spouts of the Th eotokos church at Hosios Loukas and its Athenian derivatives, Niewöhner identifi es as Byzantine three spouts at the Palazzo di San Giorgio in Genoa, perhaps taken from the Venetian palace in Constantinople. One of the spouts, however, probably originated as a fountain head. In contrast to rainwater spouts , lion-head spouts from fountains are typically smaller and more delicately carved with benevolent expressions. Th ey also, of course, lack long channels.

Introduction 7

Eunice Dauterman Maguire reminds us that fountains gave water shape and sound, and perhaps even smell, engaging a range of senses. Taking pleasure in diff erent kinds of water noise was a Byzantine inheritance from both Greece and Rome, and fi nial forms incorporated and emulated ancient models: a pine-cone spread water like its own seeds with a sprinkling sound, a bird shaped a jet as if in fl ight, while a serpent hissed and a lion’s mouth roared out a cascade. Using utterances from Gregory of Nazianzus to frame her observations, Dauterman Maguire fi rst considers changing perspec- tives on water containers and basins , spouts and outlets, that gave water shape, and the crossovers between secular and sacred, artifi cial and natural settings. Second, she and Gregory consider the sounds of water , fi nding its roar competitive to worship or its gentle fall a prelude to worship, the sound of a sprinkling that cleansed and refreshed at an atrium fountain of a church. A range of water sounds are surveyed and compared to musical instruments and the tunes they produce, or to the human voice, chanting or singing a lullaby, or when rhetorically engaged, and even to ‘pink noise’. Gregory of Nazianzus is depicted in a famous manuscript frontispiece writ- ing his homilies as two fountains, which Dauterman Maguire now suggests masked less pleasant noises and aided his concentration. Turning to spouts, fi nials and basins , Dauterman Maguire observes suc- cinctly ‘Generally speaking, lion- head spouts release downward- fl owing water, while pinecone fi nials spray upward and outward from the top of a vertically rising pipe’. Th e directionality of water was also a concern for Gregory, who compared it to the passage of time and his own mortality: ‘I fl ow downwards … yet I am borne upwards’, towards God. Referring to the very few traces or parts of fountains known from the empire, and suggesting more may be known but not identifi ed – sculpted relief panels with fountain-related motifs – Dauterman Maguire relies more on texts and visual representations, including mosaics. She returns frequently and with profi t to the Annunciation mosaic at Daphni, where the water spouted became an extension of a fountain of many parts, and alights only once but with piercing insight at the fountain in the Th eodora mosaic at Ravenna . A less famous sixth-century mosaic , at Kiti in Cyprus, is the wellhead for Brooke Shilling’s chapter, an investigation of the fountain of paradise , also called the fountain of life, in early Byzantine art, homilies and hymns. Traversing the fl oor mosaics of the fi ft h- and sixth- century Balkans, those of Cyprus and Jordan from the fourth to seventh centuries, and lands in between and beyond, numerous examples of the fountain are identifi ed while others are questioned, including a sixth-century marble relief brought from Ankara to Istanbul that teems with aquatic life and was drilled to

8 Brooke Shilling and Paul Stephenson

accommodate a pipe. A full exposition of the apse mosaic of the Virgin and Child in the Church of the Panagia Angeloktistos at Kiti yields remarkable, hitherto marginalised insights, for in the border ducks, beribboned parrots and deer drink from separate sets of fountains, representing both Creation and the earthly paradise, evoking metaphors of nature and fertility embed- ded in contemporary homilies and hymns to the Virgin. We hear in turn from the popes of Rome and Constantinople, Leo the Great and Proklos, from Ephrem the Syrian and Hesychios of Jerusalem , Jacob of Serug and Anastasios of Antioch, Andrew of Crete and John of Euboea , whose voices were raised in praise of the Virgin, in Latin and Greek and Syriac, across the Mediterranean through centuries, addressing her as a container of living waters, as the source of the rivers of Genesis and the sealed fountain fore- told in the Song of Songs. Henry Maguire off ers a concise look at the absence and presence of depictions of water and fountains in art and texts aft er Byzantine iconoclasm . He begins, however, before iconoclasm, with the four ‘Rivers of Paradise’, which have been introduced by Shilling. Th ese rivers were associ- ated by early Christian writers with the Evangelists , whose gospels watered the four corners of the earth. Th e rivers were portrayed still in the medieval West, but hardly at all in Byzantine churches aft er iconoclasm, where instead visions of paradise in scenes of judgement lack water. Likewise, the Evangelists are rarely accompanied by water, but frequently by elaborate architecture, manmade structures which allude to the incarnation and locate the scene in the world. Maguire attributes the disappearance of the waters of paradise to eighth- century disputes over the depiction of nature, and in particular the associations suggested with pagan river gods, their cults and personifi cations. As the light of Christ, according to Andrew of Crete , had cleansed the Nile of its idols, so Christian churches aft er iconoclasm were cleansed of their fl uvial images at the appearance of Christ. Images of the Virgin Mary also proliferated aft er iconoclasm, when she was confi rmed as the ultimate intercessor, conveyor of human prayers. Mary too was only rarely portrayed with water, occasionally in depictions of the Annunciation, although fountains appeared more frequently in scenes contrasted with this, being the preliminary Annunciation at the Well, or the Annunciation to St Anne , the Virgin’s mother. Th ese preliminary scenes, like those placing Evangelists in architectural settings, were earth- bound, standing in contrast to the ethereal Annunciation proper. ‘So fountains oft en play[ed] an ambivalent role in association with the Virgin in Byzantine church art aft er iconoclasm. Th ey celebrate[d] the conception of the Virgin by their presence, and they honor[ed] the conception

Introduction 9

of Christ by their absence.’ Th at is, until the advent of a new iconographic type, the Virgin as Zoodochos Pege, although now, even in the Palaiologan period, there is a continued reluctance to portray actual water with ‘the life-giving source’. Helena Bodin explores the motif of the Mother of God as a fountain in Byzantine hymnography, reminding us that an understanding, and hence a translation into English, of the Zoodochos Pege must be ambigu- ous and active. Zoodochos Pege conveys both the act of containing (the ‘life-receiving source’) and emitting (the ‘life-giving source’); she is both a basin and a fountain, a laver and a spring. Starting in the headwaters of the Akathistos hymn , Bodin steers us rapidly through the abundant and rich imagery in Greek and Slavonic theotokia , hymns to the Mother of God, to reach a fourteenth-century service by Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos dedicated to the Zoodochos Pege. Th rough grace comes healing from all manner of ‘grievous illness’, including cancer, leprosy, paralysis and infer- tility. Th e life-giving source off ers protection from falling roofs during earthquakes, and may even raise a man from the dead, quickened by drops from the spring. He may rise as others leap for joy when touched by the spring. Th e hymnographer’s poetry draws on ideas familiar from other writ- ings, including several works explored by Ingela Nilsson, where eloquence is off ered in return for gold. Xanthopoulos seeks not wealth for himself but grace for those who perform and attend his service: ‘Now dost thou gush forth grace for me, O Virgin Th eotokos of the Spring, thereby granting me eloquence, that I may praise thy Spring, which pours forth life and grace for the faithful.’ Eloquence is the Th eotokos ’ gift , and even as he employs it Xanthopolous relates that ‘the eloquence of rhetors’, including his own, is ‘put to shame’ before the purity of the Th eotokos, whose grace heals the deaf and dumb. In contrast, Ingela Nilsson introduces the rhetors, poets and letter writers who, in the words of Michael Psellos, the most eminent among them, off er ‘fountains of words’ to patrons who are encouraged to ‘let repayment gush forth in return with an even greater stream’. Nilsson’s subject is friendship, a topic much discussed in recent scholarship, and its relationship to patronage, fl oods of words exchanged for rivers of gold. Th e ubiquitous metaphor of Paktolos, the golden river, employed by Christopher of Mitylene and Constantine Manasses, Manganeios and Th eodore Prodromos, its natural fl ow augmented or superseded by manmade waterworks, aqueducts and fountains, is explored. In Eustathios of Th essalonike’s telling, the emperor’s gold-fl owing Paktolos might remedy Constantinople’s very

10 Brooke Shilling and Paul Stephenson

real lack of water, by spending on the city’s depleted water supply system. Other patrons and patronesses, as pupils, thirst for knowledge, for words that spurt forth from their client rhetors, their teachers, in quenching draft s. As John Tzetzes observed, ‘if anyone should draw water from my fountains, he shall not go thirsty’. Terése Nilsson introduces the Greek novels of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods, and their antecedents of the Second Sophistic, wherein gardens and fountains abound. Water in the antique novels fl ows from natural springs, while one fi nds in the twelft h- century love- stories ‘realis- tic’ fountains with metaphorical functions, and in the fourteenth-century romances fabulous fairy- tale fountains. Th e heroine of a novel is frequently described as sharing the features of a garden, the space where she will meet, kiss and caress her lover. Within those imagined enclosed medieval gardens, where nature is tamed and passion is loosed, fountains are frequently described and in a manner far more elaborate than in antique novels, suggesting a knowledge of contemporary art, waterworks and automata. Nilsson expounds on ekphraseis by Makrembolites and Eugenianos , who both devote half their descriptions of a garden to its fountain. Th e water of Makrembolites’ fountain is bathed in by Eros , who fertilises the garden and irrigates the seeds of love he had planted. Youthful Eros is also the emperor, perhaps a specifi c emperor, the youthful Manuel Komnenos . Th e fountain is also the erotic emperor, its fi nial surmounted by an imperial eagle in gold spraying out the fecund waters. Makrembolites’ heroine, Hysmine, washes her hands in the fountain’s water and from a pitcher fi lled at the eagle’s beak she dilutes the wine she serves to welcome her lover, Hysminias. Later she washes his feet with the same water, a form of ritual cleansing and an erotic act. Isabel Kimmelfi eld’s chapter addresses the origins and development of the Pege shrine , highlighting its interpretations, throughout its history until today, as a place of healing . Kimmelfi eld argues that during the middle Byzantine period the Pege acted also as a spiritual bulwark for the city of Constantinople, paired with the Blachernae, which similarly had a spring and imperial patrons. Imperial patronage for the shrine is highlighted, with attention drawn to the legend of Leo and in the elaboration of the shrine and the building of a new church by Justinian. Later in its history, the church lacked such powerful patrons, but enjoyed a far more powerful patroness, the Th eotokos, who ensured that pilgrims travelling from afar would benefi t from her cold healing waters. Miracles were performed and collected, as Alice- Mary Talbot has demonstrated, informing Kimmelfi eld’s summative refl ections on Xanthopoulos .