Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN Studi sul Patrimonio Culturale – Cultural Heritage Studies Ciclo XXX Settore Concorsuale: 11/A6 - SCIENZE STORICO-RELIGIOSE Scientifico Disciplinare: Settore M-STO/07 - Storia del Cristianesimo e delle Chiese Gathering the Shepherds Uses and Meanings of Pastoral Imagery and Shepherding Metaphors between 3rd and 6th Centuries Presentata da: Giulia Marchioni Coordinatore Dottorato Supervisore Salvatore Cosentino Luigi Canetti Esame finale anno 2018 CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Reality, Imagery and Metaphor 1-10 2. VISUAL 2.1 Pastoral & Bucolic Representations – a structural analysis 11-12 2.1.1 Bucolic representations in mythological images, genre scenes and sacral-idyllic landscape 13-34 2.1.2 Isolated shepherd and shepherd types 35-54 2.1.3 Animals, crooks and clothing: from features to attributes 55-67 2.1.4 Poimēn: a database of anthropomorphic pastoral images 68-74 2.2 Pastoral metaphors and Imagery – interpretations 75 2.2.1 Antonomasia 75-81 2.2.2 Hybrid Identities 82-99 2.2.3 The Good Shepherd and its misinterpretation 100-106 2.2.4 Christian representations of shepherds 107-123 3. VERBAL 3.1 Pastoral Vocabulary and Language 124 3.1.1 Shepherd & animals 125-132 3.2 Pastoral imagery in literature 133 3.2.1 Oriental Shepherd-Kings: Ancient Near East and pre-Hellenic cultures 133-141 3.2.2 Greek Shepherds: Homer and Pastoral genre 142-151 3.2.3 Shepherd characters in the Bible 152-161 3.2.4 Early Christian Literature 162-182 4. CONCLUSIONS 4. 1 Metaphors and Pastoral Imagery 183-191 List of illustrations 192-196 Bibliography and Webography 197-211 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Reality, Imagery and Metaphors This work wants to be an essay on visual and literary transmission of pastoral imagery. The word “imagery” moves the field of study from anthropology and social studies of shepherding activities in Late Antiquity to a metaphorical plan: the actual shepherding activities, the figure of shepherds and the practices connected to cattle and flocks shall be analyzed as metaphors, as figures of speech used to convey determined messages. It is not surprising that the main activities of sustain such as shepherding gave birth to a set of mental images connected to that activity: for example, the actual use of shepherds to carry a sheep on the shoulders, holding its legs across the chest, gave birth to the popular image of the kriophoros, the ram-bearer shepherd: a famous example is the 6th century B.C. statue of a moskophoros, an calf-bearer found in Athens in the so-called Persian rubble (Figure 1). The kriophoros knew a great diffusion in Christian ages, both in sculpture, painting and even literature. The fortune of Pastoral imagery endures Figure 1 throughout modern ages, since the church vocabulary related to bishops is shaped on shepherding metaphors: the church leader is called pastor and in modern English, the verb “to shepherd” means “to lead; to guide”. Moreover, in Italian “pastorale” is the shepherd’s crosier. Pastoral imagery conveyed also an enduring idyllic overtone, as it is clear in the music genre of “Pastoral”, a genre of composition which main topic is the idyllic life of the countryside. These contemporary examples show that the images and the metaphors inspired by the bucolic realm of shepherds was polysemous and polymorphic. This essays aims at outlining the development of such polymorphic imagery, focusing on the three centuries of late antiquity, especially on visual representation and metaphors of early Christianity. 1 Even if visual imagery is the main issue of this work, the literary imagery is taken into account as well. A multi-disciplinary approach to the topic is necessary for a typologic essay as this works aims at being: besides material culture and archaeologic evidences, anthropology, theology, history of exegesis and semiotics are considered as significative approaches for the history of pastoral imagery. It is fundamental, for example, to pay close attention to the recipient of this imagery: for example, Christian Fathers shall be considered as both sources and recipients of a tradition that they re-interpreted for the sake of communication; with this approach, and only paying attention to the role of viewers and addressees, it is possible to understand shepherding metaphors as part of a strategy, an useful tool of vivid speech, rhetorically employed to convey more effectively a given set of messages. As consignee of a message, the viewer is considered as a proactive viewer1. For this reason, a semiotic approach to images shall allow to consider these latter as figures of speech, arranged in a rhetoric way and used as metaphors as much as words. From a structural point of view, a metaphor is a comparison of two elements, based on a common quality. Lamb’s humbleness, shepherd’s devotedness, flock’s unity and other qualities and characteristics of bucolic realm come from an observation of the real world of shepherds; and become paradigms and archetypical elements employed in a metaphoric discourse. Therefore, the quiet and harmless lamb turns from a mere term of comparison into a kind of symbol of Jesus’ sacrifice, leading to the creation of the symbol of the Lamb of God. Moreover, as we shall see, the shepherd figure becomes an antonomasia of philosophical and bucolic otium and is represented in some floor mosaics of domus in Aquileia, as an emblem of house’s bliss, guaranteed by the household. It is necessary to go beyond the analysis of images and focus on the idea of a wider imagery, in order to to grasp the cultural value of bucolic imagery: overcoming the idea that images have an inner meaning and sense, unchangeable and not influenced by contextual factors means to overcome the narrow boundaries of an art-history approach. A definition of imagery, according to Jean Jacques Wunenburger, is a system of images whose meaning is different from the meaning of the single images, a system intrinsecally polysemic, that thus opens up to a variety of possible interpretations. Imagery is, in other words, a system of images and texts that have a practical efficacy and that is part of the 1 Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, L’immaginario, Opuscula 167 (Genova: Il nuovo Melangolo, 2008). 2 proactive imaginative activity2. According to Gilles Fauconnier, «polysemy derives from the power of meaning potential»3 and this potential is determined, in my opinion, by its historical tradition: shepherding imagery dates back to the ancient near eastern cultures, from Babylonia and Assyria to Greece, through ancient Egypt to Roman Empire. All these cultures developed their own tradition of pastoral and shepherd imagery, each tradition with its own characteristic. From this variety of tradition, it comes the polysemy that characterizes pastoral imagery. This essay aims at analyzing the development of pastoral imagery from late empire and rising of Christian culture, to the establishment of this latter, until 6th century. In this study, pastoral imagery, theological discussions, poetry rhetoric and topics and lexical analysis will be taken into account in order to draw the cultural imagery of shepherds’ world. Early christianity inherited this imagery from the above mentioned tradition, enriching it by using that imagery for the communication of new meanings. In this panorama the polisemy and, in a sense, the ambiguity that characterize christian shepherding metaphors is not surprising. Despite the semantic pluraltity, it is not impossible to outline the evolution and development of such imagery in early chrisianity; as we shall see, the attribution of meaning to some images is not based on any kind of structural and iconograohical analysis, it is rather a product of an a priori idea of blissfulness and positiveness of the shepherd figure. It is necessary, in my opinion, to focus on the structure of those images, in order to start a coherent and meaningful argument for the attribution of meaning of such images. 2 See note 1. 3 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Polysemy and Conceptual Blending,” in Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language, Trends in Linguistics (Berlin & New York: Brigitte Nerlich, Vimala Herman, Zazie Todd, and David Clarke, n.d.), 2. 3 Nowadays many historic studies, both artistic and literary, consider pastoralism as a theme rather than as a cultural phenomenon: a study on bucolic imagery tout-court still doesn’t exist, nevertheless bucolic realm appear as a literary theme and a visual subject- matter. In order to have a wide and thorough comprehension of pastoralism as a cultural phenomenon, it is necessary to collect literary studies on one hand and artistic on the other. Pastoral literary genre has been studied thoroughly during the ages and it is worth remembering the main essays that contributed to the present study: Paul Alpers in his book entitled What is pastoral?4 focuses on the aspects on which pastoral literary genre is based. Charles Segal focused on Poetry and myth in ancient pastoral, deepening the study of the masters of the literary genre, Theocritus and Virgil5. On the other hand, art history studies gave account of bucolic imagery as a mere representation of a literary genre or, in general, those studies conceived pastoral imagery only as an iconographic theme. When represented within other decorations, such as on mythological sarcophagi or accounts of historic events, bucolic vignettes are interpreted as genre scenes whose purpose is to create the set the scene in a countryside landscape, often idyllic6: as we shall see many sarcophagi representing the myth of Selene and Endymion were often decorated with pastoral vignettes and shepherd characters. Bucolic scenes are often narrative images or genre depictions, inspired by a story or an event; these images are rarely divided into categories of narrative and non-narrative representations by studies.