DOI issue:
No. 4
DOI article:Ratkowska, Paulina: An East Christian diptych with the Heortological Cycle
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.17160#0119
18. The relief of the door in Abu Sargeh, 19. The Warsaw diptych, detail of the fig. 1
Old Cairo (after K. Wesscl)
tour sharper and surfaces not so smoothened as on the Warsaw obverses. The analogics in the
composition, in the arrangement of figures, the relations of the figurę style and the drapery
folding, the common iconographic details such as plain haloes, rolls, stony strip representing
the top of Mount Thabor and many technical affinities, as the treatment of hair andincised combs,
invite to explain the relation of these two works in terms of the connection bctween a model
and its copy. In any way, the common origin of both these works in ihe same ariistic milieu, if
not in the same workshop, seems to be unquestionab!e. Howeyer, the stylistical eclecticism
of the Chambery diptych, owed to the classicizing examples, the ,,loqaacity" and the loosening
of its composition and the still more adyanced schematization in design and in execution — all
of them associated with the great skill of the carver — reflect in our opinion a phenomenon
of the breaking down of certain old provincial art, the collapse, accomplished by the influence
of Constantinopolitan production or of its proyincial derivatives. The development of this art
may be easily drawn as an evolution from the style of the Warsaw diptych to that of the Cham-
bery piece. The opposite direction is far less probable. The analogies of our work with the Coro-
nation, so distant from the Chambery diptych, seem to strengthen this assumption.
If we are right in our observations, based as far as the Chambery diptych is concerned un-
fortunately only on photographs, the date of this work, still controversial, will furnish the
terminus ad ąuem for our piece. It is, howeyer, hardly possible to determine finally the character
of the connections between the three works, here disscussed, without studying all of them
in original. An examination of these objects against the broad background of manuscript illu-
minations will explain, we are sure, their strangeness among preseryed Byzantine iyories, which
was already noted but never interpretated.
The character of the iconography of the Warsaw diptych seems to bear out our thesis of the
Eastern, proyincia] origin of the work. Of the fourteen scenes, represented on the obyerses,
nine are, iconographically, a pure example of what was called by Millet „le type oriental" in
105
Old Cairo (after K. Wesscl)
tour sharper and surfaces not so smoothened as on the Warsaw obverses. The analogics in the
composition, in the arrangement of figures, the relations of the figurę style and the drapery
folding, the common iconographic details such as plain haloes, rolls, stony strip representing
the top of Mount Thabor and many technical affinities, as the treatment of hair andincised combs,
invite to explain the relation of these two works in terms of the connection bctween a model
and its copy. In any way, the common origin of both these works in ihe same ariistic milieu, if
not in the same workshop, seems to be unquestionab!e. Howeyer, the stylistical eclecticism
of the Chambery diptych, owed to the classicizing examples, the ,,loqaacity" and the loosening
of its composition and the still more adyanced schematization in design and in execution — all
of them associated with the great skill of the carver — reflect in our opinion a phenomenon
of the breaking down of certain old provincial art, the collapse, accomplished by the influence
of Constantinopolitan production or of its proyincial derivatives. The development of this art
may be easily drawn as an evolution from the style of the Warsaw diptych to that of the Cham-
bery piece. The opposite direction is far less probable. The analogies of our work with the Coro-
nation, so distant from the Chambery diptych, seem to strengthen this assumption.
If we are right in our observations, based as far as the Chambery diptych is concerned un-
fortunately only on photographs, the date of this work, still controversial, will furnish the
terminus ad ąuem for our piece. It is, howeyer, hardly possible to determine finally the character
of the connections between the three works, here disscussed, without studying all of them
in original. An examination of these objects against the broad background of manuscript illu-
minations will explain, we are sure, their strangeness among preseryed Byzantine iyories, which
was already noted but never interpretated.
The character of the iconography of the Warsaw diptych seems to bear out our thesis of the
Eastern, proyincia] origin of the work. Of the fourteen scenes, represented on the obyerses,
nine are, iconographically, a pure example of what was called by Millet „le type oriental" in
105