Images of Children in Byzantium

Cecily Hennessy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351928878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book covers a subject that has never previously been addressed, and yet it is both a fascinating and a provocative one: the representation of children in Byzantium. The visual material is extensive, intriguing and striking, and the historical context is crucially important to our understanding of Byzantine culture, social history and artistic output. The imagery explored is drawn from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries and encompasses media from manuscripts to mosaics and enamel. Part of the allure of this subject is that people do not associate childhood with Byzantium. Ernst Gombrich commented, 'who could find it easy, after a visit to Ravenna and its solemn mosaics, to think of noisy children in Byzantium?'. However, in Byzantium, patrons of art were often young, such as emperors who acceded to the throne as teenagers, and makers of art, sculptors, mosaicists, painters often began their training at an early age. How did this affect the creation, promotion and production of art? The study questions the definitions and perceptions of childhood, focusing on topics such as the family, saintly children and those associated with imperial power. Cecily Hennessy demonstrates that children are featured often in visual imagery and in key locations, indicating that they played a central role in Byzantine life, something which has previously been overlooked or ignored. In tackling this new subject she reveals important aspects of childhood, youth, and by extension adulthood in Byzantine society and raises issues that are also applicable to the present and to other historical contexts.

Chapter 1

Setting

Byzantium, established as the eastern capital by Constantine in the early fourth century, inherited the laws, the societal habits, and the imagery of Rome and included the nascent elements of Christianity. In Constantinople on the shores of the Bosphoros and, at certain points during the 1,200 years of Byzantine culture, as far afield as Egypt and Syria, Sicily and Russia, a complex and fluctuating culture developed which in turn, throughout its history, contributed significantly to the practices and visual ideologies of western society. If not only for its intrinsic value, for its crucial influence on western visual material Byzantium is increasingly seen as a vital region of interest.

Intriguingly, the presence of representations of children in Byzantine art has not attracted much attention. Yet children and childhood are widespread subjects in Byzantine imagery: playful girls pick flowers on mosaic floors, athletic boys perform tricks on manuscript borders and naked infants cavort on ivory boxes. Youthful martyrs stand gracefully on painted icons, devoted children revere saints on church walls and solemn princes hold insignia in illuminated portraits. Children are rarely associated with Byzantine art or history and studies have largely viewed Byzantium as an adult world. Contrary to expectations, children were depicted frequently and sometimes in consequential contexts or locations. That children played a significant role in visual representation suggests that they had a central part in Byzantine life. Why do we not associate them with Byzantium? Ernst Gombrich, writing about the hold of visual records on the imagination and their ability to mythologize the past, commented, ‘Who could find it easy, after a visit to Ravenna and its solemn mosaics, to think of noisy children in Byzantium?’¹ Robin Cormack, responding to this, makes the point that art does not necessarily reflect society and that the Ravenna mosaics ‘have the apparent “seriousness” of “official” art made for adults’.² But, he also counters with the idea that the recognition of the solemnity of Byzantine art is ‘our perception not the Byzantine one’.³ Similarly, I would suggest that the accepted view that art was made for adults is only our perception and that children’s interest in and appreciation of visual material is probably very much at the centre of imagery. Serious art is suitable for adults, but also, as we shall see, for children: both religious and political or official art can be created for children and portrays them in it. Our perception of pre-modern societies is tainted by our own increasingly geriatric culture. In contrast, Byzantium was typical of pre-modern societies in that at least half the population were aged under 20. To what extent does this affect the production and reception of art?

The present book draws on representations from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, from various parts of the Byzantine empire, and in a wide range of media. The intention is not to provide a chronological survey of the development of art about children, nor to focus on a synchronic selection, nor to take a consciously diachronic view. The aim is to investigate particular images of children, the manner in which they are depicted, with whom they appear, and the contexts in which they are found, with the purpose of determining the place and significance of children in visual representations and, by extension, in Byzantine society at various points in the past. The questions of change over time or of the development of concepts about childhood will not be addressed, since a comprehensive survey of such notions requires extensive work by historians, social historians and literary analysts which remains largely untouched. This does not temper the validity of an art-historical investigation of the ways in which children are portrayed and their place in society at certain moments in time and in key visual sites.

The themes explored arise from the material, with areas of focus and natural groupings in which the images hold related contexts, meanings, or associations. The images themselves are the primary evidence. Each is viewed principally for what it suggests about how children were handled pictorially and how the other figures and settings with or in which the children appear were depicted. The intention is to come to an understanding of three areas of study: the role of art, of children in art and of children themselves in society. Historical, literary and religious texts provide supplementary material and often contribute to these three strands of exploration, adding to an interpretation of an image. Texts can be useful in amplifying perceptions and knowledge of given situations, suggesting layers of meaning to the way an image is portrayed or to the effect it may have had, or to its historical and functional, secular or spiritual context. However, texts do not reveal the actions and beliefs of society any more directly than do pictorial representations; if not applied sensitively, they may distort rather than elucidate the meaning of what is seen.

The terms child and childhood are necessarily used in a broad sense to refer to those people who have not reached maturity: when this occurs and what conditions identify it are complex issues. Contemporary definitions of childhood and adulthood vary, geographically and in a range of contexts, and similarly definitions of different stages in life in Byzantium appear to have fluctuated and to have various interpretations. Our own distinctions between maturity and immaturity are altered in certain legal and moral contexts, as well as societal ones. Contrasting regulations determine this transition from a state of youth, immaturity and lack of responsibility to one of adulthood, maturity and personal responsibility. We are comfortable with this multifaceted view, though it is often discussed, and we have no necessity to perceive childhood as a defined entity. There is a tendency to think that we should be able to make hard and fast distinctions in historical cultures and yet in them we see the same fluctuating use of terminology, regulations and expectations. For the sake of some definition, I apply the term child to those who are generally below the onset of puberty, which in Byzantium was also the marriageable age, that is 12 for girls and 14 for boys, and I apply the term youth or adolescent to those beyond that age. The terms girl and boy are used to refer to children and youth of the respective genders with no specific reference to age. My intention is to use terms such as child, childhood, youth and immaturity in a commonsense way and not one that is bound by strict regulations.

Unlike modern western society, in legal terms, the ancients and the Byzantines recognized that girls matured earlier than boys. Boys from affluent families appear to have had in certain contexts an extended period of what we would call adolescence, during which they were educated, before they assumed full adult responsibility. Girls married young, and they participated in adult life in terms of bearing children. It seems likely that girls did not experience a period of cultural adolescence, a time of preparation before entering the adult world. The lack of records that attest to the emotional state of adolescence in girls that we recognize today, and which is not so dissimilar from the behaviour of boys, may be in part because ancient and Byzantine writers were less interested in female activity. Hormonal changes are biological and perhaps in Byzantium were not so different from those of today, although they may now occur at an earlier age. Girls were most likely controlled by societal pressure to become wives and mothers. Apparently, while boys had an extended period of what we would justifiably call adolescence, girls did not.⁴

An understanding of the representation of childhood and of children in the past requires an awareness of our own perceptions about children today and how they are depicted. As art of the past reveals then contemporary values, so our view is linked to our own time and to our perception of our culture and ourselves. It is tempting, but deceptive, to retroject modern childhood; yet without some understanding of our own assumptions and expectances it is hard to recognize the measure by which we gauge the past. Understanding Byzantine childhood requires examining differences between contemporary and Byzantine approaches to childhood. The past presents both recognizable and unrecognizable precepts and customs, with similarities that seem disarmingly familiar and variances that suggest an entirely different perception of humanity. The questions discussed and the meanings deciphered may reflect current as well as historical interests and concerns.

Two principal influences, antiquity and Christianity, formed the basis of Byzantine culture. Ancient Greek and Roman culture provided the legal, administrative and social background; Christian doctrine and practice incorporated a new religious framework, fresh concepts and, to some extent, different conduct. Attitudes towards children and childhood derived primarily from the ancient world and were modified and adapted to suit Christianity, which in turn incorporated aspects of Judaism. Studies of Greek, Roman, western medieval, early modern and modern childhood and the family have multiplied in recent years. Less has been written on the visual representation of children throughout western history and very little on Byzantium. Modern studies on childhood usually contain a reference to Philippe Ariès.⁵ His review, written in the early 1960s, of childhood in France since the fifteenth century was pivotal in establishing late twentieth-century histories of childhood. He focused on the issue of what childhood is, when, how and why it came into being and attitudes towards it. Any such theory is likely to be controversial, and this is perhaps why Ariès’s work has been so central: it begs criticism and contradiction but also raises important methodological and historiographical issues. He premised that childhood, as we know it, did not exist until the seventeenth century, although its emergence began in the fifteenth. Children were then respected for the first time, treated affectionately and seen as entertaining. Adults even aspired to become like them. Rather than entering the grown-up world at the age of seven or so, children started to go through an extended education preparing them for adulthood. Ariès maintains that interest in childhood is an expression of the concept of the family, which prior to this time had not been able to develop due to lack of private space.⁶ For him, modern childhood is centred on love within the nuclear family and is a period of psychological and sexual innocence in which the child is educated for life.

Ariès’s theory is flawed, in my opinion, in three main respects. First, the nuclear family did not develop in the last 500 years, but has since medieval times formed the basic domestic structure in England and Northern Europe.⁷ Second, arguing that childhood became distinct from adulthood in the seventeenth century is perhaps an elitist and narrow view. In the nineteenth century children from poor families were incorporated into the adult world: less than two centuries ago children made up nearly half of the work force, and it was commonly accepted that a ten-year-old would work 12 hours a day.⁸ Parents sent their children to work out of necessity rather than choice, yet the practice was sanctioned by society. Only with compulsory schooling for the five to tens, implemented in Britain at the remarkably recent date of 1880, did young children, at least in theory, stop working.⁹ However, this is a complex issue, and it is not to say that childhood did not exist in the lower classes of society or that work pre-empts it. Even though children have worked at various times through history in the western world, and do so today as teenagers, the distinction of childhood has existed at least from early antiquity and probably before. Ariès does imply, nonspecifically, that ancient attitudes towards childhood were similar to our own, but fails to trace its continuation and revivals. Third, Ariès’s evidence is biased. One of his central claims, that because children died so frequently in medieval times, their parents formed lit...