ARMENIA’S ARTISTIC BRIDGE FROM EAST TO WEST
By Souren Melikian
International Herald Tribune, France
April 27 2007
PARIS: It is not easy to display the art of a major culture left in
tatters by organized physical destruction over centuries that reduced
its territory to a tiny fraction of its historical dimension. What
mostly survives is the art of religion, the hard-core to which the
persecuted cling and carry away if portable. Otherwise it is fragments
collected from ruins. Hence the title of the Armenian art show on
view at the Louvre until May 21 – "Armenia Sacra."
The exhibition book is as much about history as about art, a necessity
when introducing a culture known to few other than specialists.
It might have been worth mentioning that Armenia had a very long past
when King Tiridate made it the first country where Christianity was
declared the state religion around 313, when Byzantium only made its
worship permissible.
The origins of Armenia are steeped in mystery. How the Armenians,
whose language is Indo-European, substituted themselves for the
non-Indo-European inhabitants of the preceding kingdom of Urartu
around the 7th century B.C. is unexplained. If there was a fusion of
two groups, history says nothing about it.
Armenia was included in the empire founded by the Persian Achaemenid
dynasty in the mid-6th century B.C. and from the beginning had close
links to Iranian culture while maintaining an utterly different
identity. Some magnificent silver wine horns in Achaemenid style,
excavated in Armenia after World War II, are usually described as
Iranian and yet they can be seen at a glance to be aesthetically
different from the vessels excavated in Iran. This Iranian connection
persisted through time. Linguists say that well over a third of words
in the Armenian vocabulary today are of Iranian origin, ranging from
Parthian Pahlavi of the late 2nd or 1st century B.C. to present-day
Persian.
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The other part of the world to which Armenia had ties was the Roman
Empire – the land was split again and again between Iran and Rome,
later replaced in the East by the Byzantine Empire.
This twin connection with East and West remained perceptible throughout
Armenian history.
It was the case with the first art spawned by the advent of
Christianity of which the earliest surviving fragments do not predate
the 5th century A.D. However disparate these look stylistically, they
mostly share a monumental quality and an austere gravity maintained
even when startling irony creeps in. Figural art, sometimes rough,
invariably explodes with vigor. On one capital of starkly geometrical
shape from Dvin, a Virgin and Child carved in low relief stare
hypnotically at the viewer. It has a Romanesque feel to it but is
not later than the 5th or 6th century A.D.
The stem of a stone cross also from Dvin is topped by the head of
Jesus in a style strangely reminiscent of the human masks found in
early 1st millennium B.C. bronzes from Luristan, in western Iran.
This aesthetic diversity was maintained into the 7th century A.D. if
the datings suggested by art historians are right. Sacred art and
irony continued to be paradoxically associated. In a roundel carved
in sunken relief, Jesus ascends into heaven, standing in a mandorla
held up by two angels while worshippers below raise their hands in
prayer. All have incongruous goggle eyes – again these call to mind the
art of Luristan with its funny human heads topping bronze ensigns. No
archaeological context throws light on this intriguing sculpture.
But even a documented context does not necessarily resolve enigmas.
On a huge stone capital nearly two meters, or six and a half feet,
long recovered from the church at Zvartnots, an eagle spreads its
wings horizontally. This is a distant offshoot of Roman iconography,
with some input from Sasanian Iran. Its meaning in a church remains
open to speculation.
Iranian reminiscences kept surfacing in early Armenian art as they
do in two 6th or 7th century folios inside a 10th century Gospel from
Echmiadzin. Syria, inspired the triangular tops flanking the rounded
arch of a niche, but the outfits of the Magi are borrowed from late
Sasanian conventions, as the art historian Andre Grabar noted long ago.
Riddles continue to stake out the evolution of Armenian art well into
the 9th century. Wooden capitals from a church at Sevan, which were
published long ago, induced one of the contributors to the exhibition
book, Yvetta Mkrichian, to characterize their shape as "singular."
They actually relate to models found later in the domestic
architecture of Iranian Central Asia. The carved pattern draws
its motifs from the repertoire of contemporary Iran and transforms
them aesthetically. Again one wonders what meaning these had in the
context of an Armenian church. One of them, hitherto unrecognized,
reproduces the eagle wings of the Sasanian royal headdress as seen
by artists from Islamic Iran. The key to such riddles surely lies in
Armenian and Persian literature.
One of the great masterpieces in the exhibition, the A.D. 1134 wooden
doors and their frame removed from the Monastery at Mush (pronounced
"moosh") shows that the link with Iranian art kept being renewed
at intervals. The commentator in the exhibition book appears to be
unaware that the figural scenes featuring two jousting horsemen and two
other mounted heroes on the lintel deal with Iranian literary themes,
as do the two rounds of animals carved on each side. The geometrical
patterns in the main areas could again be seen as part of an Iranian
rather than Arab influence.
Aesthetically, the transformation is as obvious as the consummate
mastery. This is a masterpiece in isolation that bears witness to an
otherwise vanished school of architectural woodwork.
The confidence with which Armenian artists, from stone or wood
carvers to painters and goldsmiths, borrowed from the outside world
and recast the loans on their own terms is a feature shared by all
powerful cultures from Iran to India to China. What makes Armenia
astonishing is its eclecticism and its aptitude at welding together
seemingly incompatible components.
A striking case is offered by the incorporation of formal Islamic
patterns into Christian art. The early 13th-century cornice of one
of those tall stelae with crosses carved in sunken relief known as
"khachkar" is carved in the center with the figure of Jesus enthroned
under a polylobed arch. On the book that Jesus holds open on his
lap, the verse from John: 8.12 reads in its Armenian version:
"I am the Light of the World." On either side, dazzling patterns
of swirling scrolls have a rhythm and a complexity that makes them
utterly different from those of Iran to the east or of the Arab areas
of Iraq to the south.
This aptitude at creating afresh, however hybrid the mix, comes
out most astonishingly in the manuscripts copied and illuminated in
Cilicia along the Mediterranean shore of present-day Turkey.
A Franco-Armenian kingdom came into existence in the area following the
wedding in the late 11th century of a French nobleman and an Armenian
princess. By the 12th century it had a large population of Armenians
driven away from their homeland by incessant warfare. For a century
and a half or so, Cilicia became a second Armenia, leaving astonishing
castles and ramparts that still stand at Yilankale or Anavarza and
giving birth to an art of the book that blends Byzantine iconography,
the color scheme of French medieval manuscripts and formal ornament
from Islamic Iran.
A lectionary copied in 1286, perhaps in the town of Sis, offers a
remarkable example of this blending of artistic syncretism.
Cilicia thus became the first true meeting ground of East and West,
relatively immune from the violent antagonism that characterized it
in Sicily and Spain. The Cilician experience probably paved the way
to the easy transition that some Armenians made to the West, creating
an even more hybrid art of the book in places such as Perugia in Italy.
Cilician art also traveled back East. It left its imprint on the
Gospel illuminated in 1323 at Glajor in the Siunik Province to the
northwest of Iran. But the painter, Toros of Taron, owes to Syrian
book painting from the time the baroque rockery and plants – which
the exhibition book does not say.
Internationalism began centuries ago and few practiced it with greater
alacrity in art than the Armenians.
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