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Icon: Studies in the history of an idea
790
Book Reviews
Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea, Moshe Barasch (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 296 pp., US%4O. Barasch attempts nothing less in under 300 pages than a codification of the appeal and operation of holy effigies from late antiquity, which birthed Christianity, to the justification of images by St John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion. One period follows another in narrative form. Meditations on likeness in relaxed pagan worship yield to Christianity’s ostensible and eventually fervid, iconoclasm. Knowledge and period details are extensive, supporting scholarship plentiful throughout. Despite, or possibly because of, the challenge to organise the rich source materials, for what seems an interminable time the debate’s pattern eludes the author. Naturally, a grounding in pre-Christian theories of imagery is crucial to the ‘story’s’ but no supporting foundation smoothly unfolds from that successive sections, introductory structure. After several well-meaning but meandering chapters concerning the pagan philosophy of images we arrive at a discussion of Tertullian, at which point dawns the book’s clear aim: ‘to analyze the reusing the different Christian authors give for their attitudes toward images’ (p. 110). Only at this late reprise does the author really warm to his ambitious and attractive subject. And this section appears just a few chapters before ‘the concluding stage of the story this book was undertaken to tell’ (p. 185). The value of Barasch’s breathtaking survey exceeds application to, or information about, this one, largish, era, and raises general questions about culture and human intellectual evolution. The curious indecision culture exhibits toward the usefulness and quiescently lurking perniciousness of images reminds us of society’s fluctuations of pleasure and revulsion regarding over-dependence on any utensil. Drugs, religion, automobiles, television, alcohol-were all invented for the betterment of humanity, but their intemperate use creates an abhorrence only partially deserved. Yet, how can one over-use imagery and by exploiting representationalism deplete the evident virtue of that mode? This question-inextricable to the fact of early religion’s co-nascence with representationalism (symbolism)-lies at the heart of Barasch’s inquiry. Naturally, as in all such matters, point-of-view alters the verdict. As a student of modernity I confess to having witnessed, during the century we are about to exit, what no one studying modernity can fail to be struck by: the growing (then waning) prohibition on images which became in some quarters, every bit as intemperate as the iconophobia of early Christianity or Islam. Thus, this reviewer occupies an interesting vantage-the pinnacle of contemporaneity (shared with all present readers) and a professional awareness of certain keen parallels that would otherwise disqualify a modernist from jurying such a book. (Were the book not a treatment of images it might even disqualify an art historian to review a work ofintellectual history, but, to paraphrase Barnett Newman, here is a chance for the birds to comment on ornithology.) Grateful for Barasch’s attempts at a graceful language to carry us comfortably through some indispensable but daunting material, his deficiency in finding an agreeable sematic pitch is excusable given the usual alternative: deadly formulaic academic prose. Lacking real zest, the writing attains momentum at the discussion of Origen. From then on the author writes with a pleasure and assurance that identify his main interest. Otherwise, weighted by endless contrition (for necessarily truncating important arguments by reason of space limits, for abbreviating references to whole libraries of commentary, for citing but one of myriad authors who have also ruminated on some point) nearly every page carries some qualification or apology which a helpful editor might have excised. The pace would have picked up, the book shortened by pages, and the argument’s direction somewhat straightened without all this contrition; some paragraphs are three-quarters regret.
791
Book Reviews
Perhaps Barasch’s emminence (as the author of Theories of Art: from Plato to Winckelmann, and its successor, Modern Theories ofArt:from Wincklemann to Baudelaire) inhibited the kind of editing that would have made Icon: Studies in the History of An Idea more coherent reading. For example, we learn, that the influence of Dionysius Areopagita ‘far exceeded the mentions of his name. Dionysius was considered an authority second only to the Bible.. .’ (p. 158). While a bit later we are told that ‘with the exception of the Bible and liturgical books, no work in Eastern Christendom has been as studied, copied, translated and read aloud more often than [John of Damascus’s] The Ladder of Divine Ascent’ (p. 221). The author’s enthusiasm is understandable; the obfuscation created by numerous such dissonances (even of praise) make for unnecessarily difficult going. Where it occasionally gleams through, the author’s implicit responsibility and voice are welcome. (At times Barasch’s work glitters, as in his sotto vote criticisms of early Christianity’s reliance on classical models, much as Oleg Grabar enumerated Islam’s architectural debt to the classical grammar of forms. But this, the book’s ostensible core is barely explicit, while Grabar everywhere asserts the fundamental continuities.) We are all indebted to Barasch for his orchestration of innumerable sources and narrative arrangement: for the uplifting and sprightly book this might have been we shall have to wait, sympathetically but with anticipation, for another’s coming. Harry Rand
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobe1 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 276 +vii pp., $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. The centrality of the imperial ethos to an understanding of the politics of the West is a theme increasingly acknowledged by historians. In this important volume, Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobe1 bring together an impressive group of feminist scholars whose provocative views of the roles played by, and forced upon, Western women in the imperial context will enhance and enrich our understanding of this equation. Their reading of imperialism as a fundamentally gendered phenomenon remaps the established contours of imperial history substantively, methodologically and definitionally. In contexts including British India, southern Africa and Rhodesia, West Africa, Algeria and Egypt, these essays spell out the complexity of women’s roles in the creation and maintenance of Empire, and the ambiguities of the feminine in the supremely masculinist imperial adventure. These ambivalences and complexities reveal the continual reconfiguring of identity constantly reconstructed by race, by gender and by class. In these essays we encounter an extraordinarily diverse array of women: alongside the travellers and adventurers who have long fascinated the reading public, there are feminists, journalists, missionaries, workers and wives in these pages. Together and separately, their histories reveal the diverse ways in which women shaped empire and in which empire affected women. In moving beyond what Julia Clancy-Smith styles the familiar ‘sub-genre of heroic white women’ (p. 62), this collection seldom offers simple unproblematised binaries as ‘solutions’ to the difficult questions it poses. Certainly, these apparently heroic women are
Book Reviews
Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea, Moshe Barasch (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 296 pp., US%4O. Barasch attempts nothing less in under 300 pages than a codification of the appeal and operation of holy effigies from late antiquity, which birthed Christianity, to the justification of images by St John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion. One period follows another in narrative form. Meditations on likeness in relaxed pagan worship yield to Christianity’s ostensible and eventually fervid, iconoclasm. Knowledge and period details are extensive, supporting scholarship plentiful throughout. Despite, or possibly because of, the challenge to organise the rich source materials, for what seems an interminable time the debate’s pattern eludes the author. Naturally, a grounding in pre-Christian theories of imagery is crucial to the ‘story’s’ but no supporting foundation smoothly unfolds from that successive sections, introductory structure. After several well-meaning but meandering chapters concerning the pagan philosophy of images we arrive at a discussion of Tertullian, at which point dawns the book’s clear aim: ‘to analyze the reusing the different Christian authors give for their attitudes toward images’ (p. 110). Only at this late reprise does the author really warm to his ambitious and attractive subject. And this section appears just a few chapters before ‘the concluding stage of the story this book was undertaken to tell’ (p. 185). The value of Barasch’s breathtaking survey exceeds application to, or information about, this one, largish, era, and raises general questions about culture and human intellectual evolution. The curious indecision culture exhibits toward the usefulness and quiescently lurking perniciousness of images reminds us of society’s fluctuations of pleasure and revulsion regarding over-dependence on any utensil. Drugs, religion, automobiles, television, alcohol-were all invented for the betterment of humanity, but their intemperate use creates an abhorrence only partially deserved. Yet, how can one over-use imagery and by exploiting representationalism deplete the evident virtue of that mode? This question-inextricable to the fact of early religion’s co-nascence with representationalism (symbolism)-lies at the heart of Barasch’s inquiry. Naturally, as in all such matters, point-of-view alters the verdict. As a student of modernity I confess to having witnessed, during the century we are about to exit, what no one studying modernity can fail to be struck by: the growing (then waning) prohibition on images which became in some quarters, every bit as intemperate as the iconophobia of early Christianity or Islam. Thus, this reviewer occupies an interesting vantage-the pinnacle of contemporaneity (shared with all present readers) and a professional awareness of certain keen parallels that would otherwise disqualify a modernist from jurying such a book. (Were the book not a treatment of images it might even disqualify an art historian to review a work ofintellectual history, but, to paraphrase Barnett Newman, here is a chance for the birds to comment on ornithology.) Grateful for Barasch’s attempts at a graceful language to carry us comfortably through some indispensable but daunting material, his deficiency in finding an agreeable sematic pitch is excusable given the usual alternative: deadly formulaic academic prose. Lacking real zest, the writing attains momentum at the discussion of Origen. From then on the author writes with a pleasure and assurance that identify his main interest. Otherwise, weighted by endless contrition (for necessarily truncating important arguments by reason of space limits, for abbreviating references to whole libraries of commentary, for citing but one of myriad authors who have also ruminated on some point) nearly every page carries some qualification or apology which a helpful editor might have excised. The pace would have picked up, the book shortened by pages, and the argument’s direction somewhat straightened without all this contrition; some paragraphs are three-quarters regret.
791
Book Reviews
Perhaps Barasch’s emminence (as the author of Theories of Art: from Plato to Winckelmann, and its successor, Modern Theories ofArt:from Wincklemann to Baudelaire) inhibited the kind of editing that would have made Icon: Studies in the History of An Idea more coherent reading. For example, we learn, that the influence of Dionysius Areopagita ‘far exceeded the mentions of his name. Dionysius was considered an authority second only to the Bible.. .’ (p. 158). While a bit later we are told that ‘with the exception of the Bible and liturgical books, no work in Eastern Christendom has been as studied, copied, translated and read aloud more often than [John of Damascus’s] The Ladder of Divine Ascent’ (p. 221). The author’s enthusiasm is understandable; the obfuscation created by numerous such dissonances (even of praise) make for unnecessarily difficult going. Where it occasionally gleams through, the author’s implicit responsibility and voice are welcome. (At times Barasch’s work glitters, as in his sotto vote criticisms of early Christianity’s reliance on classical models, much as Oleg Grabar enumerated Islam’s architectural debt to the classical grammar of forms. But this, the book’s ostensible core is barely explicit, while Grabar everywhere asserts the fundamental continuities.) We are all indebted to Barasch for his orchestration of innumerable sources and narrative arrangement: for the uplifting and sprightly book this might have been we shall have to wait, sympathetically but with anticipation, for another’s coming. Harry Rand
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobe1 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 276 +vii pp., $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. The centrality of the imperial ethos to an understanding of the politics of the West is a theme increasingly acknowledged by historians. In this important volume, Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobe1 bring together an impressive group of feminist scholars whose provocative views of the roles played by, and forced upon, Western women in the imperial context will enhance and enrich our understanding of this equation. Their reading of imperialism as a fundamentally gendered phenomenon remaps the established contours of imperial history substantively, methodologically and definitionally. In contexts including British India, southern Africa and Rhodesia, West Africa, Algeria and Egypt, these essays spell out the complexity of women’s roles in the creation and maintenance of Empire, and the ambiguities of the feminine in the supremely masculinist imperial adventure. These ambivalences and complexities reveal the continual reconfiguring of identity constantly reconstructed by race, by gender and by class. In these essays we encounter an extraordinarily diverse array of women: alongside the travellers and adventurers who have long fascinated the reading public, there are feminists, journalists, missionaries, workers and wives in these pages. Together and separately, their histories reveal the diverse ways in which women shaped empire and in which empire affected women. In moving beyond what Julia Clancy-Smith styles the familiar ‘sub-genre of heroic white women’ (p. 62), this collection seldom offers simple unproblematised binaries as ‘solutions’ to the difficult questions it poses. Certainly, these apparently heroic women are