Gini Alhadeff
One small display in an exhibition can grab you by the collar. In the
case of “Armenia!” at the Metropolitan Museum, it was the image of a
spherical wide-eyed crab in a ridged armor swallowing Alexander the
Great, along with his ship and retinue, set against a wavy sea that
might have been drawn by a child. It is attributed to Zak‘ariay of
Gnunik and appears in an illuminated manuscript of the Alexander Romance
(1538–1544), the legends surrounding the exploits of Alexander the
Great, much loved by Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Armenians alike.
Dr. Helen Evans, the Met’s curator of Byzantine Art, told me, “That crab
is too good not to be recognized as the type of art we don’t expect
from East Christians.” And it most definitely wasn’t, she added, “the
stiff art of the Byzantines that Vasari disapproved of.” Giorgio Vasari,
the Italian architect, painter, and historian, author of Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550)
Western culture’s first art historian, who coined the use of the term
“Renaissance,” unfairly saw in Byzantine abstractions, coming after
Greek and Roman art, a decline in skills rather than an artistic choice.
The exclamation mark following the word “Armenia” in the exhibition’s
title—Evans’s idea—was meant to convey her surprise that Armenian art
and culture aren’t studied more or better known. A champion of what she
calls “this edge of Byzantium that is Armenian art and culture,” Evans
has been wanting to assemble a show such as this one ever since she
began researching her dissertation on Armenian manuscripts of the
kingdom of Cilicia almost forty years ago. (She has also curated other
Byzantine blockbusters at the Met: “The Glory of Byzantium” (1997),
“Byzantium: Faith and Power” (2004), and “Byzantium and Islam” (2012).)
At the center of the Met’s installation is a cross-like construction
of intersecting walls onto which large color images of the churches of
the Monastery of Sevan (ninth century or later) before a placid,
mist-shrouded lake are projected. Armenian liturgical music plays in the
background. Armenians had only a spoken language until an alphabet was
created in 405 and was used in translations of the Bible and liturgy,
which further reinforced the Christian religion in Armenia. The Armenian
Apostolic Church has been seen as steward of Armenian national
identity, and that explains why religious subjects have prevailed in
Armenian art. Crosses—jewelled, painted, carved—are everywhere in this
exhibition. Evans traveled to the Lori Province in northern Armenia to
retrieve a massive one sculpted into basalt, a khachkar (from
Lori Berd, of the twelfth–thirteenth centuries) that weighs 1,000
pounds. Khachkars—there are three in the show—are memorial cross stones
used as Christian grave markers in medieval times, or to mark historical
sites. At the foot of this one are bas-reliefs of the evangelists—a
face that stands for Saint Matthew; a funny lion, more like a cat for
Saint Mark; an ox head for Saint Luke; and the profile of an eagle for
Saint John. All around the rectangular frame is a delicate wicker-weave
motif of three cords intertwined remiscent of some Islamic
ornamentation.
Sculpted miniature churches, sixteen to fifty inches high, used as
ornaments over doorways and roofs, are among the most striking products
of Armenian architecture on display. The Model of the Cathedral of Holy
Etchmiadzin, the capital of Armenia (Vagharshapat, fifth–seventh
century), looks like a stocky missile made of stone, with a large arrow
carved into its base that points toward the heavens. Much of Armenian
art appears to refer to an elsewhere, having to do with faith rather
than place, that Armenians took refuge in throughout their harrowing
history of forced displacements. Theirs is a story of “mobility and
metamorphosis,” as the show’s introductory wall label reminds us.
The church model (or acroterion, which means “ornament”) at the
Monastery of Bardzrak‘ash (Dsegh, Lori, tenth–thirteenth century), which
is displayed at a slant that makes it look like an axonometric
projection, is attached to a large roof tile and was made to adorn the
top of the Monastery of Bardzrak‘ash. According to Evans, the Early
Christian world had a long tradition of donors holding models of the
churches they funded. Another church model (Siwnik‘, eleventh–thirteenth
century) carved out of tuff, a porous volcanic rock not unlike pumice,
is the most elemental of them all. Its rectangular entrance, opening
onto a dark cave-like interior, is oddly inviting.
Regarding small churches, Dr. Evans told me of a thirteenth-century
text referring to a site that was attacked by Mongols. The Armenians
held out for six weeks, which, given the brutality of Mongol attacks,
according to Evans, counted for something like twenty years. The Mongols
were so impressed that they decreed that anybody who could fit into the
church and its tiny courtyard would be saved. The Mongols were stunned
because, though there seemed to be no room inside the little church,
more and more people kept filing in. Then they saw that the priest
inside the church was transforming people into doves that flew out the
windows of the apse. Birds are everywhere in Armenian iconography and
they symbolize risen souls. “The Armenians believe that birds carry
souls to heaven,” Evans explained.
The first long gallery of illuminated manuscripts, where you’ll find
the crab, displays an open Gospel Book from the Monastery of Manuk Surb
Nshan: two black-hooded figures sit side by side within a finely, if
minimally evoked, architecture—some turrets with green onion-shaped
domes. The black-bearded man, who is a teacher, hands an inkpot and pen
to his red-bearded student,” Two angelic figures right below them,
holding a green and a red vessel, appear to be celebrating the occasion.
The Great Shah Abbas I of Persia, of the Safavid dynasty, responsible
for moving his kingdom’s capital from Qazvin to Isfahan summoned
Armenian artists and artisans, as well as merchants, to the new city he
was building. About three thousand families had been deported from the
Armenian town of Julfa in the Ottoman Empire, after the Shah reconquered
it in 1603. There was a second deportation in 1606. Many drowned as
they attempted to cross the Aras river. Julfa was then burned down to
stop the inhabitants from ever wanting to return to it. (Some three
hundred years later, the artist Arshile Gorky’s mother died of
starvation in his arms after just such a death march in 1919 when
Armenians were forced out of Eastern Turkey.) Sixteen large stones from
the first church ever built in the holy city of Etchmiadzin are now kept
in the summer altar of Gevork (St. George) Church in New Julfa, the
city that the exiled Armenians founded as part of Isfahan, one of the
thirteen churches still standing of the more than twenty originally
built in the 1600s.
One of the most magnificent displays is the Tabula Chorographica
Armenica (1691), a map that has hardly ever been exhibited, and which
came accompanied by its own courier (as did most of the rare pieces in
this exhibition) from the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.
Approximately twelve feet by four, this spectacular piece of cartography
is delicately colored and shaped like a cricket bat, narrower at the
base, and has a multitude of inscriptions in green scallop-edged bubbles
interspersed with occasional human figures. It charts the locations of
nearly eight hundred sites, including diagrams of important Armenian
churches in the Ottoman Empire, from Nishapur, in northeastern Iran, to
the religious sites of Crimea. It was drawn by Eremia Ch‘elepi
K‘eomiwrchean for Luigi Federico Marsili, a Bolognese aristocrat in the
retinue of the Venetian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and was, we
are told, a testament to his erudition. By the end of the seventeenth
century Armenian communities were a substantial presence from London to
Myanmar and from Amsterdam to Madras, and this map did not just
illustrate the geographic reach of the Armenian presence, as the
catalogue text points out, “it highlighted the Armenian networks of
control through trade, culture, and religion.”
Another showstopper is the great liturgical curtain of Tokat (1689),
also known as Eudokia, an eleven by eleven feet piece of printed pigment
on cloth, from the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, Armenia. Keith
Haring would have appreciated its repeated outlined shapes and graphic
clarity. Rows and rows of identical figures kneel in devotion. The
background is sand-colored, the figures of men are off-white,
silhouetted in brown-black, dull red, or black-red, the colors of drying
blood. Lines drawn from the base of their throats to their groins, and
along their arms make their entire bodies into crosses. Their mouths are
half-open, set in an “Oh!” Above them, insets of similar figures, only
with robes more ornate, also kneel in rows.
An angel beneath a curlicued halo, and with what looks like a large
beauty mark on one cheek, gazes down on the scene from the upper
left-hand corner. An astonishing number of lanterns, variously decorated
in red and white and repeated amid a proliferation of crosses, fill the
top band of the curtain. On the left, set in an arch, is an image of
the Virgin and Child, and to the right, within another arch, that of
Christ on the cross. Large drops of blood, like rain drops, or magnified
cartoon-like tears, flow down into a small pool by Christ’s nailed
feet. The Virgin at his side appears to wipe away tears and wears a
dress of white stars on a red background. Above the cross sits a
red-faced sun, and on the left, a smirking moon. Flitting birds or souls
flank the cross. And angels are everywhere, hovering more like obliging
insects than transcendent creatures, over church cupolas and altars,
their wings propelling them in all directions, lending a faintly
lighthearted note to the whole. This flight, evoking incorporeality, is
perhaps one of escape, and an angel in a red polka-dot dress makes for a
consoling sight. But red is the color of blood, too, as this dazzling
curtain never allows one to forget. Saints and prelates hold up
chalices, full of wine—or of blood? Martyrdom and celebration, however
you wish to see it. The effect is exuberant, enveloping. Ornament and
repetition keep your eyes anchored, your mind engaged. Could Armenians
have learned this subterfuge from Islamic use of abstract, repetitive
ornament?
A detail of the “Last Judgment” (1703–1708), from the Cathedral of
the Forty Martyrs (Aleppo, Syria), that appears in the exhibition
catalog shows a body of water beneath land that has been
cross-sectioned, as though to reveal its hidden layers in a surrealist
geological diagram. A number of genial-looking fish, all floating
horizontally, have swallowed a few human beings whole. From the mouth of
one, half a naked body protrudes: a bearded red-haired man emerging
from a monstrous black fish holds out his hands to a single hand
outstretched piteously from the top of a red octopus. The beautiful head
of a woman pops out of the mouth of a red fish, and she looks serene in
her captivity. A foot here and a leg there have yet to be swallowed.
Above the lake, at ground level, figures of Christ illustrate different
Gospel episodes by a row of tower-like buildings. Above them, in heaven,
presumably, are groups of three and four, prophets or priests or
saints, encircled by garlands of cottony clouds. The humans being
swallowed by fish, a depiction of hell, reminded me of The Garden of Earthly Delights
by a contemporary and follower of Hieronymus Bosch, which was painted
in circa 1515. “It is no accident that the first Armenian book was
printed in Venice in 1512,” Evans told me, “and that in the same
sixteenth-century Armenian colonies flourished from Amsterdam to Madras,
from the Crimea to Ethiopia.” Armenians have settled pretty much in
every region of the world, and they have done so since antiquity, though
the modern, and most tragic, Armenian diaspora was a result of the 1915
mass deportations and genocide.
Armenia is a country so often moved from one physical location to
another that it has become adept at conjuring up its prophets and angels
more easily than its landmarks. Listen to the legendary Komitas
Vardapet (1869–1935) here
singing Armenian liturgical music. His quivering voice occasionally
goes off into a disquieting, almost rasping sound, as though migrating
to a new land—the immaterial Armenia of faith and memory.
"The New York Review of Books," November 18, 2018
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