A Globalised Visual Culture?: Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art

Introduction

Fabio Guidetti and Katharina Meinecke

Late antique artefacts, and the images they carry, attest to a highly interconnected visual culture dominating the Afro-Eurasian world from ca. 300 to 800. On the one hand, the same iconographies and decorative patterns are found across various genres of visual and material culture, irrespective of social and economic differences among their users: in mosaics, architectural decoration and luxury arts (silver plate, textiles, ivories), as well as in everyday objects such as tableware, lamps and pilgrim vessels. On the other hand, these very motifs are also found in geographically distant regions: decorative patterns of Graeco-Roman origin appear, closely intermingled with local elements, far beyond the traditional borders of the classical world – in Germanic Europe, Himyarite South Arabia, Sasanian Iran and later in the Umayyad Empire. At the same time, foreign motifs, especially of Germanic and Sasanian origin, are attested in Roman territories. This combination of iconographies pertaining to different traditions and practiced in various cultural contexts created a veritable koiné of images which was characteristic of the late Roman and post-Roman world. But why were certain images attractive to patrons of such diverse geographical and cultural origins, and how were they transferred from one area to another? In a period characterised by increasing political fragmentation, acculturation to a dominating Roman culture and enhanced connectivity cannot be the only explanations for the spreading of this shared visual language.

This volume aims at investigating the reasons behind this (seemingly) globalised visual culture spread across the late antique world, both within the borders of the (former) Roman Empire and beyond. It includes papers from a session held at the 27th Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (University of Durham, 28–31 March 2017) along with articles expressly requested from specialists in various fields of late antique studies, bringing together diverse approaches characteristic of different national and disciplinary traditions. It is important to stress from the very beginning that our aim has not been to develop an overall interpretation of this phenomenon: too many aspects of it are still insufficiently investigated, and the results of various methodological approaches have not yet been combined into a convincing picture. Nor did we seek to produce a comprehensive overview of all the many facets of late antique visual culture: the essays collected here cover only certain aspects of this enormously diverse field, and several important areas of study (for example Sasanian art or Gothic visual culture in Italy and Spain) are entirely left out or touched upon only briefly. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this volume aims to provide a sufficiently wide range of case studies, chosen from various geographical, chronological and cultural contexts, in order to exemplify the vast scale of the phenomenon, and to demonstrate the benefit of addressing this period through a combination of different theoretical and methodological approaches. We envisage this volume as a first step towards a more integrated study of late antique visual culture, capable of representing its complexity by systematically analysing the interactions between different geographical areas and between the social, cultural, religious and ethnic groups active within and across them.

Late Antiquity, its limits and interpretation

Our use of the term ‘Late Antiquity’ as a chronological and cultural category calls for a clear definition of its meaning and boundaries. As is well known, the debate on the periodisation of Late Antiquity is still quite intense among ancient historians and archaeologists – much less so among early medievalists who are generally not so keen to dismiss the distinctive ‘medieval’ character of the Merovingian and Lombard kingdoms, just as Byzantinists do not refrain from interpreting the period from Constantine to Heraclius as part of their own share of world history. The exceptional flourishing of scholarly work on Late Antiquity in the past decades (focusing especially on cultural, religious and spiritual history) was the consequence of a more general reconsideration of the main interpretive paradigm of the period, begun in the early 1970s with Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971), which replaced the traditional Gibbonian narrative of ‘decline and fall’ with a new emphasis on continuity and transformation. In fact, the turn of the millennium saw the beginning of a reaction to that scholarly tendency. The debate was re-opened in English-speaking scholarship by some historians and archaeologists who, in the very titles of their books, paid a provocative homage to Gibbon’s inheritance (see e.g. Liebeschuetz 2003; Heather 2005; Ward-Perkins 2005), advocating for a reconsideration which was soon described by their opponents as a reactionary attempt at counter-reformation. The main points of the debate are usefully summarised by James O’Donnell (2005) in his review of Peter Heather’s and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ books: ‘The main lines of difference between the New and the New-Old are straightforward. The Reformers speak more often of the eastern empire than of the western, show more interest in religious and cultural history than other streams, speak of rises rather than falls, and are at home in dialogue with similar strains of interpretation in other humanistic disciplines. The Counters focus their attention on the western empire, prefer military and political history to religious, have an Eeyore-like preoccupation with declines and falls, and are in the main untouched by theory and other broader academic projects.’ Leaving aside the (to be honest, quite unfair) accusations of theoretical and interdisciplinary unawareness, the contestants’ main polarisations are clearly stated, and they largely remain the same fifteen years later: the focus on cultural and religious studies vs. political and economic history, and the decision to devote more attention to either the east or the west of the Roman Empire.

Another consequence of Peter Brown’s revolutionary approach was the expansion of the chronological frame of the period, creating the idea of a ‘long Late Antiquity’ whose limits he defined as approximately AD 200–800 (Brown 1971, 7, 197–200). The 1999 handbook Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, which he edited together with Glen W. Bowersock and Oleg Grabar, takes a similar stance, covering a time period from AD 250–800 (Bowersock et al. 1999, ix). While this periodisation has been widely accepted especially in English-speaking studies,¹ its chronological boundaries have long been subject of debate among scholars coming from other traditions.² Already in 1999 the Italian historian Andrea Giardina, in a thought-provoking paper, called for a pause for reflection from what he termed the ‘explosion of Late Antiquity’, a phrase referring at the same time to both the huge amount of studies published on this historical period and the enormous stretching of its chronological limits. Such an uncontrolled expansion, Giardina warned, ultimately risked losing sight of the specificities of Late Antiquity with respect to the periods which preceded and followed it: this could have a detrimental effect on the very definition of Late Antiquity as an object of research in its own right and to the correct understanding of historical processes in the longue durée. In fact, as opposed to their Anglo-Saxon colleagues, scholars from continental Europe generally continued to fix the beginning of Late Antiquity at the end of the 3rd century AD, the moment when the regional division of power began to decentralise the Roman Empire. The end of the period has always been a more controversial issue. Traditionally, the rise of Islam has been seen as the epilogue of Classical antiquity. Probably the most famous spokesperson of this view was the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, who in 1922 described the Islamic expansion as a ‘cataclysme cosmique’ that abruptly ended Classical tradition and Roman civilisation.³ The scholars who accept the ‘long Late Antiquity’ periodisation, on the other hand, are more inclined to integrate early Islam, or at least the Umayyad period, in their historical narratives. Nevertheless, more recently a reaction in this field can be detected too: for example Mischa Meier (2012), without referring to Pirenne, discussed the Islamic conquests in the second half of the 7th and the first years of the 8th century as the final phase of a gradual transition from antiquity to the Byzantine Middle Ages in the eastern Mediterranean.

In 2008, the first issue of the new Journal of Late Antiquity framed the current state of the discussion by beginning with three introductory papers (Marcone 2008; James 2008; Ando 2008) dealing respectively with the problems of periodisation, the history of the concept of ‘Late Antiquity’ and the dialectical relation between transformation and decline inherent to every approach to this period. Arnaldo Marcone, in particular, from his point of view as a social and economic historian, drew attention to the dangers of ‘a very broad periodization of Late Antiquity, which did not leave any room for political or economic events as such’ (Marcone 2008, 5): by contrast, he stated very explicitly that the old-fashioned ‘decline and fall’ paradigm could still be useful to interpret not only late antique political history, but also many of the economic changes which took place in that period. This confirmed, once more, that the two debates on the limits of Late Antiquity and its general interpretation are closely intertwined: the different periodisation choices ultimately depend on the diversity of approaches to the late antique period chosen by individual authors and their scholarly traditions. Referring back to the two camps effectively outlined in the previous quotation from O’Donnell’s (2005) review, we may observe that those scholars who focus on the eastern Mediterranean and show more interest in religious and cultural history are more likely to adhere to the ‘long Late Antiquity’ model to prove the reliability of their narratives of continuity; by contrast, those focusing on the western provinces of the Roman Empire and on political history prefer to stick to the traditional narrative of ‘decline and fall’ and tend to identify this final collapse with one of the (more or less) traumatic events taking place in the Mediterranean world between the 5th and the 7th century.

In order not to remain stuck in this dichotomy, we believe that some useful suggestions may come from a comparative geography-based approach, such as has been recently advocated in the field of social and economic history. In fact, in recent years it has become more and more evident that every attempt to interpret the history of Late Antiquity needs to adopt a geographically differentiated perspective, which goes beyond the major contrast between east and west towards a more detailed analysis of the individual regions. The substantial benefits of this approach have been brilliantly shown by Chris Wickham in his The Inheritance of Rome (2009), which accompanies the reader on a fascinating journey through all the provinces of the (former) Roman Empire from the 5th to the 10th century, examining the political, economic and cultural history of each of them from within their own individual perspective. We believe that this kind of approach, which aims at a better understanding of the larger historical framework through the analysis and comparison of the different regional developments, can be successfully applied to the study of visual culture and has indeed enormous potential for our appreciation of a period as complex and fragmented as Late Antiquity. It is precisely the focus on geographical peculiarities, and on visual culture, which determined also the chronological boundaries of our period of interest. On the one hand, the proliferation of competing cultural and artistic centres in the decentralised late Roman Empire of the late 3rd century provides an effective starting point for our volume (although, of course, the earlier diffusion of motifs and styles is also taken into account when necessary for a better understanding of cultural phenomena). On the other hand, regarding its endpoint, the manifest and long recognised continuities, especially in visual and material evidence, between the late Roman⁴ and the early Islamic period in the Near East encouraged us to include at least the Umayyad century in our discussion of the visual koiné of Late Antiquity.

A geographical approach to visual culture

This geography-based approach looks not wholly innovative if we move away from the broader historical narratives towards the more specific field of visual culture, or rather what used to be traditionally called ‘history of art’. As is well known, the autonomy of Late Antiquity as a period of human culture with its own unique characteristics was first recognised around 1900 in the realm of art history, by the Viennese school of Franz Wickhoff and especially Alois Riegl. The cultural vibe of the Austro-Hungarian capital, and the appreciation of the anticlassical tendencies in the art of the avantgarde, inspired Riegl to give a fresh consideration to the positive ‘artistic intention’ (Kunstwollen) of late Roman artists, defining the aesthetic qualities of what he first described as a distinctive period in the history of western art, worthy of study in its own right (Riegl 1901; Noever et al. 2010; Rampley 2013; Reynolds Cordileone 2014).⁵ Art historians tended to be more cutting-edge also with regard to the geographical approach to these phenomena. The Italian archaeologist Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli divided his comprehensive survey of Roman art (published, at the same time in Italy and France, in 1969–1970) into two volumes, characterised by a very different internal organisation. The first one, L’arte romana nel centro del potere (‘Roman art in the centre of power’), provided a rather traditional chronological overview of the art produced in and for the city of Rome, from the archaic period until the end of the 2nd century AD (Bianchi Bandinelli 1969). By contrast, the second volume, entitled La fine dell’arte antica (‘The end of ancient art’), covered in remarkable depth the art of the 3rd and 4th century AD and was organised according to a geographical principle, with each chapter dealing with the visual culture of one or more provinces of the late Roman Empire (Bianchi Bandinelli 1970). This was, in many respects, a revolutionary choice: in that period, academic discourses among archaeologists and ancient historians were still dominated by a rather narrow concept of Romanisation, which judged the various provincial cultures simply by their degree of assimilation to the centre. Bianchi Bandinelli himself had taken for granted this paradigm in his first volume, where virtually no example of provincial art was discussed: everything which mattered happened in the centre and was then more or less carefully imitated in the provinces. But the geographical organisation of the second volume was something completely new. With it, Bianchi Bandinelli opened a whole new field for classical archaeologists: namely, the geography of ancient art.

The late 1960s were the right time for such an innovation. Only three years earlier, the literary critic Carlo Dionisotti had published a study entitled Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (‘Geography and the history of Italian literature’). In this book, which revolutionised the field of Italian studies, Dionisotti challenged the traditional way of describing the historical development of Italian literature: this had been interpreted within the framework of a coherent and teleologically nationalistic narrative which saw the cultural harmonisation of the country as the necessary first step towards its political unification in the 19th century. On the contrary, Dionisotti argued that Italian literary culture was characterised by many different lines of development in a huge number of different intellectual centres and that a unified narrative could not suffice to a proper understanding of regional and local peculiarities (Dionisotti 1967). Dionisotti’s book established a new theoretical model which Bianchi Bandinelli usefully employed for his analysis of Roman provincial art based on a geographical perspective. However, Bianchi Bandinelli’s main interest was not primarily geographical or even aesthetic, but rather social. Seeing the historical development of the Roman Empire from a Marxist perspective, he interpreted the so-called ‘crisis of the 3rd century’ as a revolutionary phenomenon which contributed to the subversion of traditional power relations, providing the opportunity for the rise of new social elements. He pointed out how, in those turbulent years of political instability, individuals coming from subordinate groups, particularly of provincial and military background, rapidly ascended the social ladder replacing the old senatorial elite in many of the decision-making processes: the military emperors of the 3rd century were seen by him as the most important examples of this social rise. Therefore, in Bianchi Bandinelli’s view, provincial art could be seen as the privileged form of expression of the new leading forces of Roman civilisation. In his reconstruction, the rise of this new class brought about the end of the Hellenising taste of the elite (seen, in Marxist terms, as a ‘superstructure’), replacing it with more ‘authentic’ art forms deeply rooted in popular culture: from the perspective of style, the sophistications of Hellenistic naturalism gave way to the more direct and efficient language of late antique expressionism. In this way, and despite the prominent role played by regional contexts in his work, Bianchi Bandinelli focused his discussion primarily on social phenomena, while the actual dynamics of cultural interaction between Rome and its provinces remained largely in the background.

The same can be said about the debate which started in the 1990s on the effectiveness of the concept of Romanisation. The justified criticism of the traditional top-down approach, and the adoption of alternative theoretical models taken from the field of post-colonial studies, were mainly concerned with the reappraisal of the expressions of identity produced by certain social groups, rather than with drawing a clearer picture of cultural relations between centre and peripheries in an empire-wide perspective. For this reason, this approach too has in turn become subject to review in more recent years. Several authors (e.g. Terrenato 2005; Sommer 2012; Versluys 2014) have argued that much of the discourse against the traditional Romanisation paradigm, especially in English-speaking scholarship, was not authentically post-colonial, but rather anti-colonial, with an emphasis on anti-imperialistic narratives celebrating the resistance to the spreading of a common Roman identity in the early imperial period, as well as the (re-)emergence of local identities in Late Antiquity. This scholarly effort, we may add, based on contemporary anti-colonial reflex, produced an effect quite similar to that which Bianchi Bandinelli had derived from his own philosophical and political views: the (largely artificial) anti-colonial polarisation between Romans and ‘Natives’ prevented a full appreciation of such complex, culturally fluid societies, probably to an even larger extent than the old Marxist divide between oppressive elite and oppressed masses had done. While the anti-colonial reaction was undoubtedly necessary thirty years ago, more recent research has started moving forward from it towards a closer study of the primary sources, especially concerning visual and material culture, in order to better understand the dynamics of economic, cultural and social exchange between different centres and peripheries in the integrated system of the Roman and late antique Mediterranean.

Of course, even if not often explicitly told, this new approach too derives, no less than the previous ones, from our contemporary preoccupations with our own societies. The Roman Empire was at the same time a very well-organised machinery of government, an expansionist and oppressive military power and an economically thriving multi-cultural world: the relative weight we attribute to these aspects ultimately depends on our own priorities. The most recent years have tended to study the imperial and late antique Mediterranean as an integrated system, shaped by centre-periphery relations as well as by local dynamics and interprovincial cultural exchanges: a world ‘beyond boundaries’ (to borrow the title of the recent book on Roman provincial cultures by Susan E. Alcock, Mariana Egri and James F.D. Frakes (2016)) in the sense of ‘beyond the very concept of boundary’, whose unity-in-diversity (or through-diversity) can be, more or less explicitly, compared to our own multi-cultural societies and offer a mirror for our opportunities and difficulties. This approach has fostered a new appreciation of the vitality and autonomy of provincial contexts: these are no longer seen as mere recipients of the stimuli coming from one ‘centre of power’, reacting to them with either acceptance or resistance; on the contrary, they have started to be studied in their own agency. The complex ties linking centres and peripheries can now be interpreted as degrees on a scale going from assimilation, cooperation, reception of cultural innovations, to identitarian reactions, cultural protectionism or intentional disregard of external inputs. On the other hand, it is now clear that all these centre-periphery exchanges worked both ways: the regional elements could contribute in various degrees to the development of a shared culture, not necessarily in a subordinate position to the centres.

Current perspectives on Roman provincial cultures are now far more sophisticated than in the recent past: beyond the two traditional categories of ‘acceptance’ and ‘resistance’ to centralised influences, a more complex theoretical model can be offered, which acknowledges the importance of local (regional, provincial, civic) dynamics for the shaping of peripheral cultures. The visual and material cultures of the Roman provinces can be interpreted as the result of at least three complementary factors: (1) on the one hand, they were more or less strongly influenced by the centres – both by Rome itself and by other prestigious cultural centres, especially in the eastern Mediterranean; (2) on the other hand, their modes of expression were primarily intended for local audiences and therefore responded primarily to local exigencies and dynamics; (3) in addition, independent interactions between two or more provinces must be taken into account, proceeding from one ‘periphery’ to another without necessarily involving any centre. Thanks to its increased flexibility, this model certainly represents a more efficient tool to describe the varieties of cultural interactions taking place on an empire-wide scale. Still, the more the system grows in complexity, the more difficult it is to distinguish clearly between centres and peripheries: if the main prerogative of a centre is that of exerting some cultural influence on other areas, then every peripheral context can potentially be regarded as a centre in relation to the areas it may influence. Therefore when addressing highly interconnected systems such as the Roman Empire or (even more so) the larger late antique Afro-Eurasian world which is the object of the present volume, it may be useful to speak simply of different geographical contexts, each of them reacting in different ways to external influences (thus behaving as a periphery) and at the same time exercising some influences on other areas (thus behaving as a centre). In other words, it may be useful to replace the centre-periphery perspective with an alternative model, based on a network of interacting contexts which may act as centres and peripheries at the same time, according to continuously varying dynamics.

It is important to note that this network of cultural relations, especially in the realm of visual culture, does not require that the different regions involved are all under the same political control. Instead, similar dynamics have been observed for several other periods and contexts characterised by high political fragmentation. The first phenomenon of this kind to be identified in the field of art history was the so-called ‘International Gothic’. The term, coined at the end of the 19th century by the French art historian Louis Courajod (1901), specifically highlights the wide-ranging geographical extent of this artistic language which dominated the aesthetics of western and central Europe between the late 14th and the early 16th century. Its spread was possible mainly thanks to the frequent travels of both artists and (portable) artworks, leading to the development of a shared visual culture not only in the various European courts, but also among the smaller nobility, the Church and the emerging merchant class. The spreading of this common style did not entail the complete assimilation of local differences, but contributed to creating a visual koiné which was meaningful to viewers of different geographical origins. The International Gothic, of course, postdates the Roman Empire and the late antique world by several centuries. More recent research, however, has revealed that the phenomenon of a visual koiné can already be observed in periods preceding the one studied in this volume. Marian Feldman (1996), for instance, identified what she called an ‘international style’, the ‘cross-cultural mingling of artistic forms’, in the Late Bronze Age Near East (1400–1200 BC). Luxury artefacts decorated with a selection of iconographic motifs associated with different cultures, but mingled in such a way that it became impossible to identify their individual origins, seem to have been used in supraregional exchanges between the rulers of different states. Their intercultural imagery can thus be read as a ‘general and generalized statement of kingship’ deliberately defying references to any specific regional tradition (Feldman 1996, 13). Objects and images were used as a common language, a ‘shared vocabulary’, by an ‘extended international family of rulers that sustained itself through charged symbolic bonds’: this way, they became ‘active agents in the construction of intercultural relations’ (Feldman 1996, 15, 17, 61).

The Hellenistic world, too, was already a polycentric system – or better, a network of several cities and geographical areas politically, economically and culturally interacting with one another – well before the Roman conquest brought most of these territories under one rule; after their political unification, they retained a very influential economic and cultural position within the expanded network of the Roman Mediterranean. This is particularly true for the creation and commercialisation of artistic products: one may just think of mythological sculptures produced by artists trained in the illustrious traditions of Greece and Asia Minor and commercialised all over the eastern and central Mediterranean. To name just one example: the famous Laocoon group was produced in the 1st century BC, out of Greek marble from the island of Paros, by some sculptors originally coming from Rhodes, but working in Italy for Roman customers, using a visual language characteristic of the Asian, specifically Pergamene tradition (Settis 1999). In terms of traditional centre-periphery interaction, this might be explained as an influence of the periphery (Rhodes, Pergamon) on the centre, achieved through the immigration of artists from the provinces to the capital. But, in our opinion, the phenomenon can be better interpreted in a network perspective, as the result of a polycentric interaction between different geographical and cultural areas, each one providing some of the necessary elements in the process of artistic production: the artists came from Rhodes, the visual language and models from Pergamon, the material from Paros, the patrons from Italy. In this case, it was the artists who moved towards their customers, transferring their workshop from Rhodes to Italy, without doubt in search for better economic opportunities. In other instances, it was the customers who moved towards the artists: the well-known case of Cicero asking his friend Atticus to buy statues for him in Athens and ship them to Rome (Letters to Atticus 1.7–11, dated to 67 BC) was probably not an isolated instance among the late Republican Roman elite. In fact, the provinces of Achaea and Asia remained the most important centres for the production of mythological sculptures during the Roman imperial period, due to the availability of good-quality materials, the local transmission of technical skills from one generation to another and most of all the prestige of their ancient cultural and artistic traditions, which acted as a sort of trademark and quality assurance for the customers.

It is exactly in this time, the late Hellenistic 1st century BC, that Miguel John Versluys (2017) observes a peculiar phenomenon of hybridisation, which he labels ‘innovative eclecticism’. Using the example of king Antiochos I of Commagene, located in between the Graeco-Roman and the Iranian world, he shows how competing rulers deliberately drew upon a standard iconographic repertoire containing motifs of both Greek and Persian origin in their royal representation. What made their images unique, therefore, was not the iconographic repertoire they used, but the way the different elements were put together in their relevant regional contexts (Versluys 2017, 136, 233). Through their deliberate selection of appropriated standard iconographic motifs, the rulers could represent both their partaking in a global network and the uniqueness of their rule. Finally it is important to note that in this period such dynamics of geographical interaction were not restricted to rulers, members of the elite and the most expensive works of art, but extended also to a lower economic level. This is shown, for example, by the category of pottery known as terra sigillata, whose main production from the 1st century BC was originally centred in Arezzo in central Italy, then moved to southern Gaul and finally North Africa. From each of these areas huge quantities of objects were exported all over the empire, including Italy and Rome itself, in what can be interpreted as a veritable globalisation of material culture whose centre-periphery dynamics did not necessarily coincide with the major political or artistic ones.

The geographical scope of the visual koiné of Late Antiquity is much vaster than that of the periods studied by Courajod, Feldman or Versluys. As the present volume will show, late antique visual culture spread both within and far beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire, thus making it unique in regard to earlier periods and unmatched for many centuries to come. Accordingly, the already mentioned Guide to the Postclassical World treats the whole area covered by the Roman and Sasanian empires as a ‘single whole’, while seeing the wider perspective of entanglements: ‘And even this extensive space must be seen as no more than a vivid cluster of settlements set in yet a wider world. For, in this period, societies as far apart as Scandinavia and the Hadramawt, Saharan Africa and western China were touched by events along the great arc of imperially governed societies and interacted decisively, at crucial moments, with those societies’ (Bowersock et al. 1999, x). The 2012 Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity also covers the vast geographical space from the Atlantic Ocean to Central Asia (Inglebert 2012, 4), and in his recent studies on cross-cultural interaction in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Matthew P. Canepa (2010) expanded the picture of Rome and Persia by including China, which is also touched upon in this volume. Therefore, in accordance with these recent studies, we too have consciously decided, although the Roman Empire remains a large focus, to look beyond its borders in this book in order to get a glimpse of different empires and peoples involved in this global network.

Theoretical approaches to cross-cultural connectivity

In the previous pages, we have introduced several concepts such as networks and globalisation, which have been applied in recent years to the study of cross-cultural connectivity in the ancient world. Their applicability also to late antique visual cultures shall be reviewed here.

We begin with ‘cultural transfer’ (Kulturtransfer/transferts culturels), a term coined in the mid-1980s by the historians Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, analysing historical relations between France and Germany, to define the unilateral, deliberate movement of cultural properties, both material (for instance objects, produce, commodities) and immaterial (such as ideas, information, media, discourse or practices), from a culture of origin to a target culture (Espagne and Werner 1985; Schmale 2012, §8; Rossini and Toggweiler 2014, 6–7; on the definition of cultural transfer see, for example, Eisenberg 2003, 399; Siegrist 2003, 316; Gerogiorgakis et al. 2011, 391, 394; Rossini and Toggweiler 2014, 7, 9). Cultural transfer studies which follow this theoretical model focus on two central questions: on the one hand, the actual transfer process, i.e. how the transmission from the culture of origin is carried out; on the other hand, the effect and legacy of this transfer process in the target culture, i.e. ‘the conditions and dynamics of selection, translation, adaption or mutation’ (Rossini and Toggweiler 2014, 5; compare also Eisenberg 2003, 399–400; Siegrist 2003, 316–317; Gerogiorgakis et al. 2011, 393–394). Although this model addresses important issues of cross-cultural interaction, several factors make it difficult to apply in the analysis of visual culture. Primarily, cultural transfer is based on the premise of highly asymmetrical power relations between an active origin and a passive target (Rossini and Toggweiler 2014, 5). As transfer is understood only as a deliberate, meaningful process, it is assumed that only such cultural elements were transferred for which there was an intentional demand in the target culture or whose significance was transculturally symbolic, ideological or systemic. The passive, receiving target is thus viewed as culturally inferior to the active, sending origin, and exchange processes such as commerce, flow of goods or looting during military campaigns, which are often very significant for the transmission of iconographies, are automatically excluded (Gerogiorgakis et al. 2011, 395–396, 412). Another highly problematic factor is that this narrow definition of transfer heavily relies on the idea that cultures are identifiable as distinct groups of people that ‘have certain traits (beliefs, customs, achievements, and so on) which distinguish them from other groups’ (Young 2010, 10). Yet, as will become apparent from the spreading of artefacts and iconographies studied in this volume, cultures can be fluent and are seldom isolated from each other: instead, they constantly interact, communicate and evolve (Siegrist 2003, 306; Young 2010, 12–13; Gerogiorgakis et al. 2011, 390).⁶ Such continuous communication, as this volume shows, has an especially significant impact on material and visual evidence. Therefore cross-cultural interaction cannot be limited to the unilateral, hierarchical movement assumed by cultural transfer studies. For the question of the visual koiné of Late Antiquity in particular it is not always easy (and perhaps also not so crucial) to decide whether the appropriation of an iconographic motif was the original intention of an interaction or only its by-product.

Therefore instead of the cultural transfer model, the less hierarchical and less one-sided concept of appropriation – ‘the taking – from a culture that is not one’s own – of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge’ (Ziff and Rao 1997, 1; compare Young 2010, 5 and Canepa 2010, 134) – seems more fitting to describe the movement of iconographies. According to the idea of appropriation, the individual doing something with the transferred material or visual evidence – be it simply keeping an object of foreign origin without further using or ideologically charging it, or adopting into a new context the iconographic motifs with which this object was adorned – is automatically assigned an active part in the process. The appropriation model does not omit altogether certain ways of transmission from the analysis nor qualifies the interacting cultures hierarchically as an active sending origin and a passive target. Instead, as Matthew P. Canepa (2010, 134) has demonstrated, it is precisely the creative and innovative potential of the appropriation process which becomes the focus of analysis: this change of perspective, we believe, is particularly useful for the study of ancient visual cultures.

Through this multilateral perspective, the exchange and transfer processes in late antique visual culture can best be described as parts of a network consisting of different contexts. In recent years network-based approaches have become popular in archaeology to study many-sided, complex relationships. A network can basically be defined as ‘a set of relationships’ (Lemercier 2012) consisting of nodes – they may be places, individuals, objects, iconographic motifs or other – and the relational ties that connect them (Collar et al. 2015, 2). Network-based approaches assume that ‘relationships are everywhere, they influence people’s decisions, and through them information and objects spread and evolve’ (Brughmans 2013, 625). Network analysis serves to visualise connections and study the patterns that emerge from them (Lemercier 2012; Brughmans 2013). Therefore it is often used, for instance, to study transportation routes between locations (e.g. Isaksen 2007 and 2008 on transport system in Roman southern Spain or Seland 2016 on trade and navigation in the Indian Ocean in the Roman period; see also Preiser-Kapeller in this volume; for further examples compare Brughmans 2013, 636–637) for which there is sufficient evidence in historical sources and which may have important implications for the dissemination of artefacts and iconographic motifs studied in this volume. In the case of visual culture, the nodes may be (relatively) easily defined as the attestations of certain iconographic motifs in different locations, but the links between them are mostly unknown. The visualised networks, therefore, can be only hypothetical and have to be interpreted with caution, comparing them with what is known about other networks of interaction, e.g. transportation systems or connections among individuals traced through letters, legal documents and other historical sources (Lemercier 2012; Brughmans 2013). Network analysis has revealed a mix of local small worlds and long-distance connections which may explain why certain kinds of artefacts or images are attested in localities which did not know of each other and had no direct contact (Brughmans 2013, 643–644, 646).

Taking a different approach to networks, the so-called actor-network theory developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law in the 1980s (compare Latour 2005, 10–11) focuses on human-object interactions, considering everything in the social and natural worlds to exist within constantly shifting networks of relationships. According to Bruno Latour (2005, 71), ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor – or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant’. According to this definition, objects are actants too with an agency of their own that ‘shake’ and ‘wake up’ human actors (Latour 2005, 63–86). Objects and human actors are connected in collective actions (Latour 2005, 74–75) whose complexities establish relations between things which extend well beyond the latter’s existence as (supposedly) stable entities located in a given space (Hodder 2012, 92–93). An example may be the TV remote control or the speed bump, which makes the individual using or encountering it act differently than if it was not there (Latour 2005, 77; for further examples see Hodder 2012, 91–94). Following Latour’s definition, images too could be seen as actants. Like objects, they trigger certain behaviours, reactions or interpretations (especially when they travel) by the individuals they encounter. However, objects – and images – are not independent entities: rather, they are intermediaries (Latour 2005, 74–75, 79–83). On the one hand, artefacts and images normally cannot travel without the aid of a human agent. On the other hand, the way people react to or interact with objects and iconographies always depends on the complex system of social, cultural, religious, personal and other contexts they move in and are familiar with. This proves, once again, the benefits of the concept of appropriation for the understanding of human-image interactions.

Globalisation and late antique visual culture

Taking the network perspective one step further, Miguel John Versluys (2015, 150–152) and others have introduced the concept of globalisation as a feasible alternative to transfer studies in analysing material and visual cultures in antiquity. The term ‘globalisation’ is often used to refer to the developments of our own modern times, recalling worldwide, especially economic connections, increasing long-distance interactions and widespread social changes that are related to the establishment of dense, world-wide networks resulting from this complex connectivity (compare the definitions collected by Jennings 2011, 1–2). As Justin Jennings (2011; 2017) and others have demonstrated in recent years, globalisation as a phenomenon is not limited to our modern world (where it is mostly understood as economically driven), but can already be observed in ancient cultures. Jennings (2011, 3) treats networks as an element of ancient globalisations, whose development, in his opinion, was strongly connected to the sudden growth of early cities like Sumerian Uruk or pre-Columbian Teotihuacán: ‘exchange networks created by these cities led to the long-distance flows of ideas, people, and goods. People outside of these cities reacted to these flows by creating their own networks, and a chain reaction of interactions ensued that transformed broad regions. Although these networks did not span the globe, they radically changed the known world of these people’. According to Jennings (2011, 21, 34), ancient periods of globalisation are basically characterised by two features: (1) an increase in long-distance connections and (2) social changes associated with the creation of a ‘global’ culture. As Tamar Hodos (2017, 4) points out in the 2017 Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization, globalisation is not just complex connectivity. An integral part in the step from networks to globalisation is a certain perception of the larger world extending beyond an individual’s local small world. Thus Hodos (2017, 4) defines globalisation as ‘processes of increasing connectivities that unfold and manifest as social awareness of those connectivities’. This ‘feeling of one-placeness’ was achieved mostly by shared practices (Hodos 2017, 4). If we apply this concept to the field of visual culture, these shared practices may be identified as the appropriation and use of the same iconographic motifs in different geographical regions with different cultural backgrounds and visual traditions – a phenomenon which can be observed in Afro-Eurasia throughout the ‘long Late Antiquity’ from AD 300 to 800.

To determine whether a culture can be understood as genuinely global, Justin Jennings (2011, 29–30, 121–142; 2017, 14–16) proposed eight trends or hallmarks, broadly recognised by scholars as indicative of contemporary globalisation, which may be used to identify ancient globalised cultures as well (see also Versluys 2015, 161). The first trend he points out is closely related to Hodos’ ‘feeling of one-placeness’: (1) ‘time-space compression’ refers to how the acceleration of long-distance economic and social processes shrinks one’s experience of time and space, creating the impression of living in a smaller world (Jennings 2011, 123–125; 2017, 14). As long-distance routes become more reliable and are travelled upon more regularly, this also facilitated the travel of artefacts and iconographies. One got used to seeing not only foreign faces, but also products and images unknown or less common before. For instance, the 6th-century author Cosmas Indicopleustes tells an interesting story taking place on the island of Taprobane, modern Sri Lanka. As he describes in his Christian Topography (11.17–19), not only did Roman and Persian coins circulate there, but their images could also be perceived as carriers of meaning: according to Cosmas (who claims to have heard the story directly from its protagonist), a Roman merchant showed these coins to the local king in order to allow him to judge which of the two rulers was the more radiant and powerful. ‘Just as in today’s world, perceived distance from one place to another would have shrunk in the ancient world when one regularly shared ideas, exchanged goods, and sometimes even married outsiders’ (Jennings 2011, 125).

What is probably most characteristic of globalisation, today and in the past, are Jennings’ third and fifth hallmarks, (3) ‘standardization’ and (5) ‘homogenization’. ‘Standardization’ is necessary to facilitate interaction across large distances by making each group’s actions comprehensible to other groups (Jennings 2011, 127–129; 2017, 14–15). Jennings mentions languages which serve as a lingua franca, such as Latin and Greek in the Roman Empire or Arabic in the Umayyad caliphate, but also the ‘adoption of ideologically charged motifs into local assemblages’ (Jennings 2011, 129; 2017, 15). In Late Antiquity, the spread of monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – may also be seen as a means of standardisation which eventually led to the dissemination of certain objects such as relics or church furnishings as well as common, ideologically charged iconographic motifs. Examples are the mosaic floors adorning Christian churches which incorporate similar iconographic motifs throughout the Roman Empire (for example the motif of two deer drinking from a fountain which is found in Italy, North Africa, the Near East, in the Black Sea region and in the Balkans in the late 4th–6th century; see Meinecke 2016, 127–128). Outside the Roman world, Christian iconographies of Roman (and later Byzantine) origin are represented, for instance, by a South Arabian relief showing a female figure seated with a small child on her lap which may be interpreted as Mary with baby Jesus (see Japp in this volume) or the 6th-century late Sasanian stucco relief figure of a man dressed in tunic and himation which was excavated in the Christian church at Ctesiphon and may represent a saint or donor (Kröger 1982, 47–48, pl. 12,3).

‘Cultural homogenization’ occurs when individuals come to rely on a similar suite of practices and products, as the flow of ideas, objects and people increases (Jennings 2011, 132–134; 2017, 15). In visual culture shared practices, not only those referring to the religious contexts discussed above, may be linked to specific iconographies. This may be why Graeco-Roman Dionysian imagery becomes popular in Sui and Tang China (late 6th–early 10th century) at the same time that grape wine consumption, uncommon in China before, became more widespread (Valenstein et al. 2019, 320). An example for such Dionysian iconography is provided by the mortuary terracotta figurines of camels from 6th–7th century elite tombs in Chang’an whose saddlebags are decorated with an image of inebriated Silenus supported by two women (Valenstein et al. 2019; Plate 0.1).⁷ Although the motif is well known from Roman iconography, for example on sarcophagi, the figures are adapted to local needs by wearing local garments. In this case, ‘homogenization’ is less about ‘the spread of a single way of life’ (Jennings 2011, 132), but rather about how people come into contact with widely shared ideas and products and interpret, adapt and translate them to make them their own. In consequence, a culture is both modified by the appropriated objects, practices, ideas and images and modifies the products and images it receives.

This understanding of ‘cultural homogenization’ introduces another aspect of globalisation which Jennings addresses in three of his hallmarks: the relationship between the global and the local. In his second trend, (2) ‘deterritorialization’, he discusses how culture becomes increasingly abstracted from a geographically determined context (Jennings 2011, 125–127; 2017, 14). Influences from outside are incorporated into a specific setting where they become local, as they become integrated into one’s life through daily, often unconscious practices. An example from material culture is imported ceramics or other more perishable commodities such as textiles (Jennings 2011, 126; 2017, 14). In the realm of visual culture a good example of this phenomenon is provided by the iconography of the banqueter reclining on a kline: this motif was originally developed in the Phoenician area in the 8th–7th century BC, then spread to Asia Minor, Greece and Italy from the 6th century BC onwards, until it became a genuinely global iconography attested far beyond the Mediterranean world, as far as Gandhara and Parthia (see, for example, Dentzer 1982; Yaldiz et al. 2000, 21 no. 24; Matthäus 2001). In Palmyra this motif was especially popular between the 1st and the 3rd century. Inspired by Roman funerary sculpture, it evolved into the most prestigious iconography for Palmyrene funerary reliefs and sarcophagus lids, on which the portrayed banqueters were dressed in local, Palmyrene garments (Colledge 1976, 73–79). In 3rd-century Palmyra this global image had become a Palmyrene motif whose Phoenicio-Graeco-Roman origin was most likely forgotten. This phenomenon, the mingling of global and local cultures, has been described in globalisation studies as ‘glocalisation’, best defined as ‘the refraction of globalization through the local’ (Roudometof 2016, 403). This concept recognises that the process of globalisation was not the same everywhere: people living in different places reacted in different ways to interculturally shared ideas, practices, artefacts and iconographic motifs and adapted them to their local needs, habits and beliefs. The result of such adaptions was cultural heterogeneity. According to Roudometof (2016), both the local and the global shape the state of an idea, practice, object or image in a certain context: this again deviates from the unilateral movement described by cultural transfer studies, resulting in various ‘glocal’ formations which are constructed through this refraction (see also Montoya González and Morehouse in this volume).

A different kind of (6) ‘cultural heterogeneity’ is described by Jennings (2011, 134–136; 2017, 15) as his sixth hallmark. Global cultures are shaped not only by the combination of the local and the global, but by ‘a blend of foreign elements from throughout the network that are then indigenized into local settings’ (Jennings 2017, 15). A global culture is thus a ‘mélange of elements’ (Jennings 2011, 134) whose cultural boundaries are blurred through long-distance exchanges. This phenomenon, too, can be observed in late antique visual culture, for example in South Arabia, where traditional local elements are mingled with Graeco-Roman, Sasanian and Axumite motifs, creating a visual language unique to the area, although incorporating many globally common iconographies (see Japp in this volume). The same phenomenon can be found in other regions of the late antique world, such as China (Canepa 2010; see also Guo Yunyan in this volume) or the Germanic West (see Ferrari in this volume), always resulting in a distinct, individual mélange of motifs and styles, designated by local political, economic, social, religious and individual conditions and practices and thus differing from that of other cultures, though based on a common iconographic repertoire.

A third trend Jennings (2011, 136–139; 2017, 15) identifies in regard to global-local interactions is (7) the ‘re-embedding of local culture’. The heightened awareness of the social changes caused by enhanced long-distance connectivity results in a ‘drive to protect local uniqueness’ (Jennings 2011, 136). While this heightened awareness fuels nostalgia and attempts to strengthen local practices, in some cases it might even lead to inventing a past local culture which can then be used as ‘a counterweight to the centripetal tendencies of globalization’ (Jennings 2011, 137). As Jennings (2011, 137–139; 2017, 15) points out, this hallmark is the most difficult to demonstrate in the archaeological record, since it is difficult to detect the reasons behind the lack of certain outside influences in a given location: perhaps a group consciously rejected these foreign elements, perhaps they were not available at this location, or perhaps there is simply a lacuna in the archaeological record. Jennings sees the combination of the appropriation of foreign elements in one context and the lack thereof in another at the same location as an indication for the ‘re-embedding of local culture’. When applying this concept to visual and material evidence, this re-embedding is quite easily detectable in the case of appropriated iconographies, such as the Chinese camel figurines decorated with an inebriated Silenus mentioned above (Plate 0.1); but the same phenomenon can also be observed, on a subtler level, when a local visual culture appropriates some elements of an external stylistic language, integrating them within its own tradition (see Guidetti in this volume).

These different, and partly contradictory, developments of homogenisation and heterogenisation in global cultures result not only in variations in how local and global styles and iconographies are mingled, but also in an (4) ‘unevenness’ in regional power relations: this is Jennings’ (2011, 129–132; 2017, 15) fourth hallmark of globalisation. This ‘power geometry’ (Jennings 2011, 130) inevitably occurs, since not all regions benefit from the increased connectivity to the same extent. In global cultures, certain places emerge as important centres, while others are almost isolated from the global flows. An example for this political and economic unevenness is the foundation of colonies, which automatically reveals the founding cities as more powerful than other places which did not establish colonies (Jennings 2011, 131). In Late Antiquity, some cities, for instance Constantinople, are clearly discernible as centres with a political and cultural impact on regions farther away, even outside the Roman world, which has implications for the dissemination of visual and material culture as well.

All in all, in our opinion the presence of Jennings’ eight hallmarks clearly identifies Late Antiquity and its visual culture as a period of globalisation. In fact, as the different examples and case studies in this volume show, the very existence of a common repertoire of iconographic motifs in the ‘long Late Antiquity’ within and beyond the borders of the Roman world can be seen as evidence of several of the trends identified by Jennings as signifiers of globalisation.

An interconnected visual culture: the factors at play

Already in the Hellenistic and early imperial period, Mediterranean visual culture was characterised by the coexistence of different centres of production, whose artists were specialised in specific genres or trained in a specific tradition. The situation became even more complex in Late Antiquity, when a new