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Part I
Sacred spaces: their traces and representations
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1 Sacred spaces versus holy sites
On the limits and advantages of a hierotopic approach
Michele Bacci
It should be acknowledged that the hierotopy notion, first proposed by Alexei Lidov in 2001 and later developed in an international congress held in Moscow in 2004 as well as in a number of later publications, has the merit of having elicited a number of questions that became a matter of scholarly debate at an international level in the last decade. In keeping with a wave of new studies on architecture as a strategy for the monumentalization and materialization of the “sacred”, with a shift from the interpretation of forms as self-referential symbols to their analysis in terms of sensorial and material experience,1 efforts were made to transcend the conceptual limits of architectural analysis to assess a notion of “sacred space” viewed as a basically relational, dynamic context for the ritual and performative evocation of the supernatural dimension: in Lidov’s approach, sacred space is described as resulting from the intermingling of multi-sensorial – that is visual, auditory, olfactive, gustatory, and tactile – effects.2 Some emphasis has been laid on the Russian scholar’s reluctance to provide a wider and more grounded theoretical frame to his approach, which, I assume, should be basically interpreted as an intentional choice and a way to manifest distinctiveness vis-à-vis the often artificial scholarly trends that became so modish in the last years.3 Instead of launching a new label – why not a “hierotopic turn” after so many analogous turns (iconic, spatial, liturgical, material, etc.)? – he preferred to make use of a neologism that may draw the attention of art historians and invite them to shift their focus to a hitherto neglected field of interest – namely that of the ways in which Christian sacred spaces happened to be shaped by the interaction of different elements, not all of which belong to the traditional categories of art history, such as liturgical rites, music, lighting effects, and fragrances. This indication proved to be fruitful, given that many subsequent studies have dealt with the performative aspects and multisensory devices associated with the Byzantine and Medieval buildings.
I assume that Lidov’s primary concern was with showing an alternative way, a direction that was worth following after the first years of the enthusiastic rediscovery of long underestimated fields of research that came after the publication of such ground-breaking books as David Freedberg’s The Power of Images, Hans Belting’s Bild und Kult, and later on Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency.4 In many respects, all of these works can be now at least partly understood as monumental attempts at making sense of the digital globalization of images in its very beginnings and the enormous change in cognitive praxis and communication processes they engendered. Religious, and more specifically cultic and miraculous images, were redeemed from their well-rooted perception as artworks intended for the illiterate and came to be used as key- arguments for the principle that images, far from being mere outcomes of historical and cultural processes, also play an active role in the shaping of human groups, their self-awareness, and their approach to both the social and the supernatural dimensions.
For many readers of these three books, anyway, their innovative character lay in their legitimization of the art historian’s right to show interest in images previously seen as devoid of sufficient aesthetic qualities: icons, wax statues, exvotos, advertisements, and political monuments came to the fore as the primary, or most fruitful, focus of art-historical research. Increased emphasis on the cultic dimension of images elicited a number of new studies, which gradually shifted their interest to other material objects being involved in the cultic phenomena: these included both the foci of worship – tombs, bodily and contact relics, holy mementos, loca sancta, and miraculous icons – and the various performative manifestations associated with them such as rituals, liturgical and extra-liturgical ceremonies, processions, forms of private and collective veneration, votive offerings, meditation practices, and so on. The liturgy itself, viewed as a shared technique to produce a sense of collective belonging and to mediate a group’s relationship to God, became a privileged topic. In this connection, the sacred space started being investigated as something distinct from its architectural frame and came to be regarded as a context of interactions between multiple factors, including officiating priests, attending laypeople, images inhabiting the decorated walls of a church, the multifarious ephemeral and permanent furnishings, and the divinity itself, which is made present by both the performative power of rites and different strategies of monumental “mise-en-scène”. This shift from a static to a dynamic view of Christian, and especially Byzantine, sacred spaces paved the way to a much-increased interest for the latter’s most ephemeral aspects, namely elements of church decorum, veils and textiles, carpets, lamps and lighting devices, light effects, fire and water, sounds, and scents.
On account of this, I think that Alexei Lidov will agree with a definition of the hierotopical approach as focusing on the different strategies by which the divine, supernatural dimension is spatially, visually, and materially evoked in specific ritual contexts. The evocation of the sacred in material contexts has been rightly understood as a hitherto neglected form of human “creativity” that deserves being investigated from a historical perspective and cannot be underestimated by art historians: it would make no sense to reconstruct the art-historical meaning of single elements of a sacred space – such as lighting devices or frescoed cycles embellishing a church wall – without considering the latter as a whole. In anthropological terms, hierotopic creativity can be described as a set of specific techniques that enable the shaping of religious alterity and their materialization in a number of privileged spaces shared by single human communities. From a psychological viewpoint, it might be said that such techniques basically aim at exciting the beholder – believer’s emotional perception of a material space as imbued with supernatural, otherworldly, and meta-human qualities: in this sense, they seem to be much akin to the techniques of “enchantment” that Alfred Gell attributes to magicians, shamans, priests, and artists.
Such an emphasis on hierotopy as a form of human creativity is perfectly legitimate, provided that its limits and conceptual boundaries are taken into account. One of the basic risks is that of substituting the traditional art-historical fascination for the Renaissance notion of an artist’s invenzione, with a hypostatization of a new category of creators, including promoters and concepteurs. Secondly, one should be aware that the shaping of sacred spaces can be hardly thought of as exactly mirroring a well-structured, systematic project ascribable to the ingenuity of specific individuals: on the contrary, it could consist in a long-standing, sometimes even centuries-long process, involving an uninterrupted compromise between the intentions of the original planners, those of the clergy officiating a church and other agents, and the specific needs of viewers and believers, which lead to frequent alterations and change.
Moreover, if our aim is to understand the dynamics by which divine “otherness” is made present in material contexts, it is important that we work out a specific terminology that may be helpful for a more conscious analysis of the religious, social, and anthropological phenomena we are dealing with. In his 2004 programmatic study, Lidov manifested his indebtedness to Mircea Eliade’s definition of a sacred space based on a reading of the Biblical episode of Jacob’s dream at Bethel (Gen 28, 12–22) as a portion of a natural environment that a community perceives as distinct from that of the ordinary life inasmuch it comes to be invested with “hierophanic” qualities that manifest its belonging to a separate, divine sphere. In this way, Eliade described the sphere of the divine as something thoroughly alternative to what he designed as the “profane continuum”. He basically relied on a dichotomic understanding of the world’s surface as a discontinuous juxtaposition of ordinary and “hierophanic” spaces, or “centers” working as meeting points of the heavenly, earthly, and even underground dimensions: such characteristics could be indistinctly attributed to all sites and spaces associated with worship and ritual.5 To some extent, this view better fitted the principle, underlying the most religious traditions of the ancient world, where the temples and cultic places were to be understood as divine abodes where the physical relationship of a human community with its godly counterparts could be negotiated via the performance of ritual offerings and sacrifices. Yet, this definition proves to be limitative for our understanding of the multifarious religious phenomena, which, in Byzantium and the Middle Ages in general, associated the terrestrial and the divine worlds. In order to better understand our research topic, it proves necessary to overcome the classical distinction between the “sacred” and “profane” and introduce a number of further factors.
Indeed, the religious – historical discourse stands out for its rather indeterminate use of the word “sacred”. This is largely due to the influential work by the German theologian Rudolf Otto, who made use of the German term das Heilige to generically hint at the divine/supernatural dimension, even if he was the first to point out that the latter can assume a great many forms in human experience.6 Most notably, given that the German adjective heilig can be used indistinctly to translate both “sacred” and “holy” or “saint” or “hallowed”, Otto’s work did not take into account the semantic shift between these two expressions, being characteristic of most European languages (cf. Greek ἱερός/ἅγιος, Latin sacer/sanctus, Russian свяшенний/святой). Recent studies reconstructed the etymological developments of such expressions and their use between Roman antiquity and their r...
