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How are markets in antiquity to be characterized? As comparable to modern free markets, with differences in scale not quality? As controlled and dominated by the State? Or as a third way, in completely different terms, as free but regulated? In Trade and Markets in Byzantium seventeen scholars address these and related issues by reexamining and reinterpreting the material and textual record from Byzantium and its hinterland for local, regional, and interregional trade. Special emphasis is placed on local trade, which has been understudied. To comprehend the recovery of long-distance trade from its eighth-century nadir to the economic prosperity enjoyed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the authors analyze the variety and complexity of the exchange networks, the role of money as a measure of exchange, and the character of local markets. This collection of groundbreaking research will prove to be indispensable for anyone interested in economic history in antiquity and the medieval period.]]>
For over a thousand years the Byzantine Emperor sat in his palace, ruling over the empire as God's regent on earth. His was the ultimate authority. The emperor was the font of all law, granter of titles and offices, distributor of largess, master of the Church, commander of the army, head of the bureaucracy, and supreme judge. The decisions of the individual who sat on the throne had repercussions throughout the Byzantine world and far beyond. Decrees, letters, judgments, and commands left Constantinople every day signed by the emperor in red ink and secured with the imperial seal. These seals not only protected and authenticated imperial documents, they also spread the emperor's image and served as imperial propaganda. It is no accident that while one emperor chose to be depicted as a soldier, another chose to be shown as a civilian. Although Christ accompanies one emperor, another might choose St. Constantine, or the Mother of God, or perhaps simply the cross. Was his title Greek, basileus, or Latin, augustus? Did he want to emphasise his family as an imperial asset or assert his position as autokrator, the sole ruler of God's empire on earth? The designs of the imperial seals are interesting for more than their artistic value, they provide an insight into the minds and policies of the rulers whose image they bore; they tell us not only how they wished to be viewed by the recipients of their letters, but also how they viewed themselves. Imperial seals, with their titles, images, and projection of divinely sanctioned authority, show the blend of Roman, Hellenistic, and Judaeo-Christian ingredients that went into the Byzantine imperial recipe.
We hope that after visiting this online exhibition you will be inspired to explore the online catalogue of Byzantine seals in the Dumbarton Oaks collection. This project was begun in 2010, and is continually updated as more seals from our collection of 17,000 are catalogued.]]>
RN: Right. I was a Robert Woods Bliss Fellow for two years. I don't remember the dates exactly, but maybe 1971-'72 and '72-'73.
AS: That seems right to me.
RN: OK. And I had just applied for the fellowship. My professor told me that I had no chance of getting it, because I wasn't a Harvard student and in his experience it always went to a Harvard student. It never went to a graduate student at another university. But I guess, for whatever reason – Harvard didn't have a student that year or they were desperate and so they selected me. And it saved my life. It was an extraordinary fellowship. It paid a very nice stipend and it paid my tuition and it paid my tuition at any university I wanted to go to. And I was studying in New York – my Ph.D. is from New York University – but it meant I could go take courses at Columbia at will. I could go to Princeton if I wanted to take a course at Princeton. I mean, they paid the tuition wherever I went, whereas any NYU fellowship would only have been for NYU. And also I went to Hunter College, the City University of New York, with it, so it was really a great fellowship. And after one year, my professor suggested I should apply to have it renewed. I didn't even know such a thing was possible. So, I contacted Dumbarton Oaks and the Director of Studies, William Loerke, communicated with me somehow. This is in the days before email or anything like that and so I suppose it was by mail or phone call or something – no cell phones, a very weird time. And he said, "Well, why don't you just come down and visit, so we can get to know you a little better?" And so, I took the train from New York down to Washington, and it was wonderful. And they were going to put me up for a day or two in the Fellows Building. I thought this was just the grandest vacation ever, and it was so kind that they wanted to meet me and that they were going to show me around Dumbarton Oaks. I thought it was just wonderfully gracious, and I walked into the Director of Studies' office and he said, "Professor Mango will see you first and so then I walk in, then he takes me to Professor Mango's office and then begins either a thirty minute or hour-long, intense interview, which I had no inkling of – which maybe is the best preparation for an intense interview – I don't know, you know. But, I was – whoa! And then he – who knows how long it was; my mind was just racing – and then he finishes and says, "Well, let me take you to Professor Ševčenko's office, which was next-door. And so he ushers me into Ihor Ševčenko's office, and again this elaborate interview about my work and my studies and what I wanted to do, et cetera. And then he told me about his work and that was very memorable. He told me about an article he was writing that later came out that was really one of his best articles, and he said, "Well, I just have something up here on the shelf," and he pointed up there and alluded to some of the findings of this article. And later on, several years later, I read it and was just overwhelmed and so impressed that I knew of the article before it was published. And then I went back to Professor Loerke for the third interview. And after that I think I had lunch, and I was just completely exhausted and maybe took the train back that night, I don't know. The rest is a blur in my memory, but those three interviews were quite significant, and I got to chat with Professor Mango about how he viewed studying Byzantium and how he thought about it. I was going about it somewhat differently, but then I wanted to study Byzantium and Islam, which I did for a while but I've sort of moved away from that path. And he said, well, he'd taken that path – he'd taken Byzantium and the Slavs, but he could see how it would be very useful to study Byzantium and Islam. And it was a very heavy experience, and I mean, it was a very positive one, because they renewed me. It was a great day! So, I got more money for the next year. I was even happier. So, that was a decisive moment, I think, in my education – that Dumbarton Oaks fellowship.
AS: It must have made graduate studies a little less stressful.
RN: Yes, it was very much so, in that – what I didn't say is that before I got the Dumbarton Oaks fellowship, I didn't have any fellowship at all, so I had no stipend and I was working part-time and I was married and my wife was working. We were eking out a very meager existence. And New York City is a very expensive place, and to be a starving graduate student is very hard there. I mean, it's hard to be a graduate student at any place, but I think New York City has its particular difficulties versus, say, being a student at Cambridge or here at Yale, or someplace else, where you're kind of in a sort of cocoon of a university. New York University didn't offer that sort of cocoon, so that's why the Dumbarton Oaks fellowship was great.
AS: And then did you return to D.O. before your fellowship or was your next visit for the fellowship?
RN: I believe the next visit was for the fellowship, yeah.
AS: And that was '75?
RN: '75-'77, yeah. I was a Junior Fellow.
AS: OK. Finishing up your dissertation?
RN: Right. I spent a year in Europe, going to libraries. I had a dissertation on manuscript illumination, Byzantine manuscript illumination, and so, I visited libraries, starting in Istanbul and then to Greece for several months. And then from there to Rome for about six months and working at other Italian libraries and either before or after that I was in Paris and London. And those were the major places for Greek manuscript holdings. So, I had a long year of work and then I got to Dumbarton Oaks and another year of research and a year of writing. So, it was great.
AS: What was the intellectual life like at D.O. at that time?
RN: Very stimulating. You know, everybody – well, not everybody; you're doing the oral history. You're listening to people's memories. I think there's certainly a tendency among people to speak about the past as a golden age and to romanticize and talk about all the positives and to gloss over the negatives. And of course the whole phenomenon of human memory and how it selects certain details – that you could just tell from the account I gave of the fellowship – and omits hundreds of others is very interesting and one that I study. But now I'm being studied, so I should keep going and provide direct evidence. It was a very lively intellectual world, because there were more Fellows and there were eight Junior Fellows in Byzantine and more in Pre-Columbian and Garden Studies – I can't remember the number, versus now. I'm a Senior Fellow, so I know what's going on. You know, there are perhaps three or four Junior Fellows. There were eight Fellows and they had two-year fellowships, versus now, when there are maybe three or four Junior Fellows in Byzantine studies and they have a one-year fellowship. So, there was a larger community and my sense is there was a larger intellectual community at Dumbarton Oaks, because there were more historians and scholars on staff. And so, that made it very lively. One of the features that I remember as being formative and had a big impact on me was this program that William Loerke, the Director of Studies, instituted, to give us a larger, greater intellectual life – the Junior Fellows, that is. He would invite down some famous scholar, who would come for a couple of days. And we would have this intense seminar with that person and that would go on for – I can't remember. That would go on for several hours. Maybe it was morning, afternoon. We talked – it was just us, the Junior Fellows, so not more senior scholars, so it was just basically graduate students, so the senior scholars were, I think, probably more forthcoming about their work and their career than they would have been if they were speaking to a colleague or something like that. So, it was really a student-teacher situation there and therefore very useful. So, I can remember Goitein, Professor Goitein, a very famous historian – economic historian of Islam, Jews in the Mediterranean, a great historian of the Cairo Geniza, this extraordinary find for economic history in Cairo and the Mediterranean from the tenth to twelfth century. He came and told us many, many things about the Geniza and told us about his life and his career. He was then, I believe – he had a longer-term appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study. I don't believe he was a – he was not a permanent member, I think, but he had a kind of longer-term – And he had a, you know – being a Jewish scholar of a certain age – had a complicated life. And this is surely a wonder. And now we have great resources at Princeton and I just remember saying how we should be very thankful that we have all these books and all these resources, when many places in the world don't have this. And then I remember another scholar that came was Jaroslav Pelikan. He made a great impact on me, as well. He was a professor here at Yale and I had nothing to do with Yale at that moment, hadn't even been to New Haven, so knew nothing about it. So, he was a professor here and then engaged in writing this history of Christianity, which I believe was five volumes, four or five volumes that the University of Chicago published. And he talked a lot about that and he talked about his education and his sort of life history and, you know, later on I followed his work and he began as a Lutheran. They spoke very fondly to us and he worked – I believe he wrote a book on Luther and perhaps St. Augustine, before he began this big project. His first volume, I believe, in a series was on eastern Christianity, first or second volume, and perhaps the second volume in a series. And that's what he was really working on then. He talked to us about eastern Christianity and with great fondness. Even though it wasn't his religious tradition, he was very interested in it, you know, and we were interested in it, too. It wasn't our religious tradition, most of us – there were a few Orthodox present, but – And later on I had – a young man came up to my office while I was teaching at the University of Chicago maybe seven or eight years ago. And he was a sophomore undergraduate. [to AS] What year are you?
AS: I just graduated.
RN: OK. You were once a sophomore.
AS: Yes. I was once a sophomore.
RN: So, a sophomore, well, a young man walks in as a sophomore and he says, "I'd like to take your graduate seminar." And I said, "Well, that's probably a reach. You're going to have to really convince me your background is up for this." So, he talked to me and he had a very significant background. And I might have let him in, but I made it very clear that it was a serious, great deal of work. He eventually didn't take the course, but his father was a professor at the Russian Orthodox seminary St. Vladimir's, north of New York City. And he's the one that filled in a little detail for Jaroslav Pelikan's life. Somehow I was telling him I'd been working with Pelikan's books, his history of Orthodox Christianity, and he said, "Oh, I know him. My father is his spiritual advisor." And Professor Pelikan was in the process of converting to Orthodoxy. And by studying with this professor at St. Vladimir's, having religious counseling – He knew a great deal about the subject, but it was a matter of, you know, his spiritual life. Anyway, so that allowed me to complete his history. So, Dumbarton Oaks was, I think, a very lively intellectual world. The other thing that Professor Loerke let us do: a group of us decided we wanted to learn Russian. And I think there were about four or five, you know. It's one of these great ideas you have, sitting around at night or something, you know: "Let's study Russian! Let's get together and study Russian." You know. The reality, of course, you know, but there was a staff member, who knew Russian. She was a staff member of the sort that doesn't hopefully exist anymore, called a secretary. So, secretaries were all female and they were great, overqualified women who, because of sexual discrimination then, couldn't get other kinds of jobs. And she sat all day, typing. Dreadful. I hope they're trying to move past that. Mary Lou Masey was in there, a very nice lady, and somehow she knew Russian – I don't know what her background was. And she was interested in basically getting relief from the TV and the typing all day. Who wouldn't? And, you know, there were these - now I could see her as a teacher. You know, we were bright graduate students and motivated, you know, and it was a small class, like three or four people, like this would be an ideal teaching situation. So, the director of studies allowed Ms. Masey to take time off from her typing duties and give us Russian classes. I think we met twice a week, maybe three times a week. We had homework and all these sorts of realities, which – after all, a few people dropped out is what I'm trying to say. I mean, they really thought it would be great to study Russian, but as you know, with any new language you have to do homework and you have to work. And we also had dissertations to write and there was pressure there, but we stuck with it. And I believe it was a year; perhaps it was even two years of Russian that we did. I think it was two years and I can remember some of my classmates. The Magdalinos were there: Paul Magdalino and Ruth Macrides Magdalino were there. Let's see – I believe they were Fellows, perhaps, my first year, or maybe both years. I can't remember now. And they were there and Warren Treadgold, who is a professor at St. Louis University. He was there. And I think James Carder was there in the group.
AS: Yes, he was.
RN: Did he say?
AS: We interviewed him last week, but I'm pretty sure he was '71 or '72. He was somewhere in there.
RN: Yeah, he was a Fellow the same time I was. Oh yeah, I definitely know that. But I think he was in the Russian class. I can't quite remember. Yes, I'm pretty sure he was, because we had this wonderful practice of, after lunch—you know Dumbarton Oaks gives a wonderful lunch, which – once you're a starving graduate student, you're sort of always a starving graduate student. We had enough to live on at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, but we all – lunch was free and we all tended to make that the main meal of the day, because we could save money on supper. And so, we all just packed it in at lunch and went back for seconds. And the result was, after lunch, we were just kind of, ugh. And we'd go walk in the gardens after lunch and that would revive us a little bit, so we could do some work in the afternoon. And we hit upon this strategy that when we walked in the garden we would speak Russian to each other, which we did for twenty or thirty minutes, so I can still remember a bit of the vocabulary about things that you might encounter in the garden, which is not, perhaps, fundamental to the Russian language, you know. And I also remember walking down from 2702 Wisconsin Avenue, where the Fellows stayed, an apartment building up Wisconsin Avenue about, I'd say, a mile from Dumbarton Oaks. I'd often walk down with Ruth and Paul and we would try to speak Russian then, too, while walking down the street, et cetera, so it was fun. It was interesting. I don't think any of us ever became great Russian scholars, but we kind of all could probably still struggle through some Russian. So –
AS: You talked a little bit about visiting scholars and their impact, but you were at Dumbarton Oaks in sort of the last years of the great sort of European scholars who were at D.O. for quite a long time. I wonder: did any of them have a great impact on you?
RN: Well, Nicolas Oikonomides was a great influence, as well. He had an appointment in Montreal and had some kind of association with Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, I was a Junior Fellow so I never was quite sure as to what formal relationships people had and what their employment contract said – it's none of my business. But, he usually would come to spend the summers there and I believe he was working on the seals project. And he would bring his family and I liked his wife very much. She was a scholar of – is; is she still alive? – of what's called beylik, Turkish history, the small Turkish principalities in Asia minor in the period before they coalesced into the great Ottoman Empire. So, she knew some difficult Turkish and also knew Greek, and so was a sort of Turkish Byzantinist. And he was a wonderful polymath, Byzantinist, economic historian, diplomatic historian, and above all could read, from my point of view, very difficult inscriptions. So, you could show him something in manuscripts that none of us could figure out what in the world – we just couldn't figure out what the letters were, much less read the Greek, you know. And he would just read it straight away. It was most impressive, most impressive. It was extremely useful to have someone like that around. And he would come with his or her mother and she would watch the children. She spoke only Greek, I remember. And the children would come to the pool and we'd play with their children and they, I'm sure, have gone on – I asked Oikonomides once about it – I think one's a Japanese expert some place. They've gone on to great things in the world, but yes, I remember him very fondly. And later he did me a big favor. He nominated me for a position at Dumbarton Oaks. He told me later on. And so I was very grateful to him. He was a really good mentor for younger scholars. He paid attention to their work and was very kind and solicitous. When I came back to Dumbarton Oaks as a Fellow, '81-'82, there was the great émigré scholar, Alexander Kazhdan, who was the life of the party.
AS: He was not there in the '70s?
RN: He was not there yet. I don't know when he started. I believe he came a little bit after that. You know he was part of these Soviet Jews who were allowed out of the Soviet Union. And that was a certain time. I could go to my computer and we could Google it and figure out what year it was. So, I was there '75-'77. My guess is late '70s, probably late '70s. The Russians allowed a certain number of these Jewish intellectuals to leave. And his son had been allowed to leave. His son, I think, was a famous mathematician at Harvard, became a Harvard math professor.
AS: Yes, he did go to Harvard. We spoke to Professor McCormick last summer and he gave us quite a few details on that. My understanding is that he and Musja are now in Jerusalem, both of them.
RN: Both of them. OK.
AS: I think there was some controversy with – my understanding is that it was his son who was converting to Judaism. And that was the impetus behind all of them being –
RN: OK. That I didn't know. I just got there in '81-'82 and got to know him. And he was absolutely wonderful. Great parties.
AS: Strong personality.
RN: Great parties. I will never, as long as I live, forget the New Year's Eve party at the Kazhdan's place. Never.
AS: This was at their house on the corner of 32nd?
RN: Yeah. The house on the corner. And I was getting married and got married in February, six weeks after that or something. And my wife-to-be had come down and visited. And the Kazhdans had invited us to this New Year's Eve party. And my sister, who lives in Richmond, had also invited us for New Year's Eve and I wanted to accept both invitations, but this was kind of complicated. So, I did. And we drove to Richmond, which is, like, an hour, hour and a half, two hours. We spent some time there and then we drove back to Washington. And of course they fed us. You don't go any place without – so we stayed for dinner. And then we got back to the Kazhdan's and arrived at nine or ten. And they said something about how it would be a late supper. And so we were thinking we'll just have a little bit to eat. So, we sit down and the food starts coming. I don't know if you've ever been to a Russian New Year's Eve party. Be prepared. And so I think, maybe – let's say we're sitting down to eat at about ten. And at three o'clock in the morning, everybody was still at the table and courses were still arriving! It was unbelievable. Of course, I made a terrible mistake by cleaning my plate, eating all that was served at various times. And, of course, between each course there are vodka toasts. It was just too much. At three o'clock in the morning – I don't think I've ever done this at a dinner party – I just – everybody was there; apparently it went on until, I don't know, seven or eight in the morning, or something. And I just said, "I'm sorry. I just can't stay anymore." So, we got up and left. I hope we didn't drive. But I mean, it was – I got back home and – it was quite something.
AS: Now was this the – there was one infamous Kazhdan party where I believe it ended in Alexander going skinny dipping at about six or seven in the morning.
RN: It could have been the same night for all I know. I just couldn't go. Really. I just can't drink that much. Anyway, the Russians are better at this. Also, they know how to pace themselves. That's the key. If you knew the secret to the party, you would pace yourself. Yeah, he was wonderful.
AS: So, it sounds like even – well, of course, this was later, but it sounds like even during the junior fellowship there was a vibrant social life, as well.
RN: There was a vibrant social life. There was, I think – William Loerke was very, well – in some ways you could say – well, many criticized his director of studies period seriously and there were lots of problems and lots of issues. And he wasn't a significant scholar and never had been and never would be. And that, I think, made him a bit of a – made things difficult, because these sorts of places – I mean, you graduated from Harvard; that's one of these sorts of places. There's a great deal of competition; there's a lot of rivalry amongst people and you've seen it among your classmates, you know, and they're all great achievers and they're working very hard, et cetera. Somebody who's in a high position and hasn't achieved a great deal is oftentimes not viewed very positively by his or her colleagues. And there's a feeling of something unjust and this person has gotten something that other people would have deserved better, whatever. So, there was definitely that impression. He, however, was not really being selected to be the world's greatest scholar but to be a capable administrator and he was a good administrator. I'm not sure many people had the capability to make those distinctions, though. That's not something that kind of older faculty would understand. And so, he was a capable administrator and he was always reaching out to the other institutions around Dumbarton Oaks and trying to bring people in to lunch and things like that and to help break down the isolation. Dumbarton Oaks was a very isolated place. That's the way it was built. It was built as a private paradise by the Blisses – I mean, a sort of villa within the city. And, you know, once this turned into an institution, it also had problems like that, too. So, he was reaching out to the National Gallery and various other places. I think that helped the social life and there were, I'm sure, the same number of junior Fellow parties as there are now. I mean, that's a kind of constant, don't you think? I mean, I don't know – I can't – I'm not a Junior Fellow there.
AS: It seems to differ, from what we've heard this summer, from class to class.
RN: Oh, really?
AS: Yeah. Just with the personalities of Junior Fellows. Some tend to be more group-oriented and others are very much, very into their dissertations and library work.
RN: Well, when I was there as a Junior Fellow, we had this one man – I'm sorry; I can only remember how I always referred to him. He was a Polish papyrologist. I liked the alliteration. So, he studied papyri, documents, Egyptian documents. Zbigniew was his first name and I don't remember his last name. And he loved to drink Polish vodka. He loved to have parties at the swimming pool and he was sort of stocky, had a big moustache – I mean, he was just the bon vivant Slavic type and he was great. And there were lots of other people. I mean, there were the Fellows and some of them were there with their families; some were without their families. And the people with families went home to their families in the evening and the people like Zbigniew, who was there alone, you know – he sort of hung out with the Junior Fellows. So, I think it was a good group. I think there are a lot of friends – I'm still friends with all of those people, all of the Junior Fellows, with one possible exception. And that's my friend – I still think of him as a friend – Warren Treadgold, who later had lots of disagreements with Dumbarton Oaks and basically refused to set foot in the place again and stopped speaking to his old friends, which is very painful to me, but I still think of Warren as a friend even if he doesn't see it that way. And I, you know, I hope some day we'll be able to put this all in the past. But, he was a Harvard undergrad and Harvard Ph.D. and had a lot of difficulties with Dumbarton Oaks and its directors over the years. But I don't feel like going into that for oral history.
AS: Well, speaking of Harvard, I guess it was during these years when you were a Junior Fellow that there was a lot of talk about moving Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard.
RN: Right.
AS: I don't know if any of that ever trickled down to the Junior Fellows.
RN: Well, it definitely did. It trickled down. How accurately and how, you know – the Junior Fellows were quite involved with this, because William Loerke shared a certain amount of this with us, which I can see, from my present perspective, was a sign of how great the crisis was, because your professors at Harvard don't share with you, as an undergraduate, you know, details, tenure crises, things like that. I mean, it's just utterly confidential, but the fact that he would share some of these negotiations, I think, with the junior faculty was a sign of great institutional crisis, just as when you at Harvard had your controversy about your president, I mean, I could read the New York Times and see that a lot of the confidentiality was breaking down. That's a sign of a real crisis. So, it was and we formed a Dumbarton Oaks alumni association then, whose purpose was really to lobby on behalf of the alumni for Dumbarton Oaks. And Loerke was – the crisis came, as I understand – again, I have only hearsay evidence; I'm not primary – with his attempt to make Oikonomides a permanent professor at Dumbarton Oaks. And that was rejected by Harvard and they decided there would not be any more resident faculty at Dumbarton Oaks, which forevermore changed the intellectual life at Dumbarton Oaks. For good or for bad, it changed it profoundly, lessened it. And it means that it's now rather more of a foundation that administers money and gives money for other people's projects and no longer is a research institution itself, primarily. That's a Harvard decision, that's an executive decision of how they wanted to run their particular institute. And now since I'm a senior faculty, I can understand that these decisions had to be made, but it wasn't received well in Dumbarton Oaks.
AS: I wouldn't imagine so.
RN: By nobody. Not a person there, because there was a great tradition of these famous professors. Ševčenko and Mango were the ones that I had interviewed with, two of the greatest Byzantinists of the 20th century. They're both alive and not as active now; I guess they're in their eighties. But, they were remarkably brilliant. Both of them were just some of the most brilliant – I would say they were some of the most brilliant intellectuals I've ever read in my career and they were professors there. Spectacular. So, it had the kind of tenor more of an institute of advanced study than a foundation that gave out money for grants. And – [Recording stops, then starts again.]
AS: OK, we're rolling again and I think we were discussing the hearsay relating to the possible closure of Dumbarton Oaks and return of the collections to Harvard.
RN: Right. Well, now that I'm working on this project about the history of Dumbarton Oaks and the Bliss-Tyler correspondence, actually a much earlier history about that, which reminds me, before we get – I want to talk about William Royall Tyler and what I remember about him when I was there as a Junior Fellow. But let's stay on this question of the future of Dumbarton Oaks. It was – the plan was greeted very poorly by – the Junior Fellows were – we all felt much aggrieved by this and we felt – we all identified with the institution and we felt that this was a real threat to the institution. Now, whether this was right or wrong, I don't know, but I'm sort of giving you a witness's evidence here. I don't believe there were any of the Junior Fellows who felt differently. And the Byzantinists in the area that had positions at local universities were terribly upset at this, because their whole career had been based on having access to the library at Dumbarton Oaks. There was nothing in Washington remotely comparable, so they would have lost their scholarly careers and you can see how they would be very upset, so that was really – a lot of time was spent on this and as a graduate student, it was déjà vu all over again, because all of us in my generation had been through similar protests like that for the Vietnam War on our college campuses. And all this was quite mild compared to things that happened during the '60s. You know, I had been through periods like that in the '60s, myself. So, I think there was a kind of willingness to go to the barricades instantly in part because of our experiences during the '60s and the protests during the Vietnam War. And in effect, compared to your generation, my generation's different. We were all radicalized by that to some degree. There's not a person that wasn't affected and I'd say at least 80 or 90 percent of college students participated in some way in demonstrations against authorities. It was simply – and some people, that's all they did, in the spring of their college years, is go to rallies all the time. I don't know about doing any studying; I got into a good graduate school. I mean, I was studying, you know, but I was also going to rallies. So, this seemed kind of similar and it was a period when people of a certain generation were revolting against the system, you know, take it to the man, all sorts of things, all sorts of expressions were used – in this case, quite inappropriate. And those expressions of defiance and rebellion then were by people who felt very much as if they were not part of the system and so they felt entitled or certainly justified in revolting or crashing the system, literally, in terms of the riots that happened in the 1960s. As an historian and something of a social historian, I have to say that that class of people, Junior Fellows, were very much part of the system. We were from elite schools and we had a fellowship at an elite institution. We were not exactly disadvantaged youths in the ghetto or something. But there was a sense of rebellion that went on during that. And Giles Constable, I believe, if I have the history right, became director the next year. And I believe the first year he was director –
AS: '77 was his first year.
RN: Yeah, so that was my second year as a Junior Fellow. And he came and, like all new directors, began making changes initially, because that's the smart way to do things. The President of the United States is pushing very hard on his legislative initiative right now, because if you don't do it at the beginning it won't happen. So, he was doing that, making changes that fundamentally took the institution in a different course. Right or wrong, that's what happened. It was the curtailing, the elimination of the fieldwork program, which affected art history and archaeology profoundly. That was going on. I think for myself personally living through that change is, until this moment, part of my interest in doing this history of Dumbarton Oaks, because I'd like to know the past before that time and to sort of fill in the blanks. You know, I had very much a sense that the world was changing, but I didn't really know what the world was that was changing. I didn't know; I had only a vague sense. Now, I know a lot, because I've read a lot of letters. I know a lot about the aspirations and what Dumbarton Oaks was paying for and the great projects they did. And so, it had an impact, an intellectual impact on me during that period.
AS: And I wonder, while we're on the subject of Constable and directors, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about William Tyler, as the previous director. Did you have much interaction with him as a Junior Fellow?
RN: Not very much. So, he was director for one year there and that's the tragedy. I had very little. Now it's a tragedy. He was aloof. He came to lunch fitfully. Lunch was the place where people would communicate with each other. And perhaps three, four, five, six times during the year, I happened to walk back to the main building with him after lunch. That was practically the only time one could really talk to him, besides receptions. And the lunch was in something we called the Fellows Building, which is now the Guest House, or whatever they call it.
AS: Right, yes, the Guest House.
RN: So, that's where we ate lunch and the walk from there to the main house was a bit longer than the walk from where people eat lunch now. And now they go in different directions, but everybody walked back to the main house. And so, occasionally I walked with him and my teacher, Hugo Buchthal, had been a Fellow there and he told me I should really try to talk to Tyler, because he was a very, very interesting man and had wonderful experiences. And so, I tried, but I couldn't get much out of him. I asked him once what he'd be doing in the summer and he said, "Oh, I'll be going to our place in France." And, "Oh, you have a place in France?" "Oh yes, we have a place in Burgundy." That was the conversation. Now, of course, I know – I've Googled it, I've seen the place on the Internet. I know how much it costs to rent for a week. Do you?
AS: No, but I can only imagine. I mean, he –
RN: It's something like $9000 a week, or maybe it's $9000 a month. In any case, I don't have the $9000 for whatever period of time. It's quite a chateau. And I know the history of it and how much his father paid for it and when he bought it and all these sorts of things. But so, I really – that's my great disappointment, that I didn't get to know him more. I think he felt, I sensed he felt he was not a scholar and couldn't really interact. You know, that was a time when the world was not interested in the history of institutions. It was not interested in historiography. Dumbarton Oaks in many ways was aggressively erasing its past and that sense of the institution continued until a few years ago. The fact that we're having this interview now means that desire to erase the past is past. The fact that the current director is supporting this project to publish the Tyler-Bliss correspondence is a sign that that's passed. I can give you a variety of evidence that Dumbarton Oaks was definitely not interested in the history of its past before this time. And I wasn't interested in that material also, when I was a Junior Fellow. But now I see it as an extraordinarily interesting set of individuals and circumstances that created this unique institution. So, that's my great regret: that somehow I didn't figure out as a young person how to successfully interact with this older, shy, very formal, former-diplomat, rather more European than American – there was a real kind of cultural difference. And I think – and I don't know what else was – I can now imagine other things that were going on in his mind, because I read letters that he wrote as a young man. And all of that, maybe, we'll put in our book and I don't know – it's not something I've really worked out in my mind right now, but I'm giving you the direct evidence. So, that's my great regret: that I didn't get to know him more.
AS: He was still very much connected, though, to the Washington social scene. That's the sense I've gotten. I don't know. I know the earlier days of Dumbarton Oaks very much trickled down to the experience for Fellows. I don't know if it carried over into this period of time or not.
RN: Well, he was a retired ambassador. And I got a sense from him that retired ambassadors were systematically invited to embassy receptions and there are a lot of embassies and there have got to be a lot of receptions. Now, I've read a lot about the life of diplomats and I know that that is one of the principal places where diplomats do business, so you really, if you're a diplomat, you need to go to those receptions. And there's a lot of networking that takes place there and it's rather fundamental to the job. But he was retired and he found all of that quite onerous, he said. And so, he tried to go to as few of those as possible. But he definitely had a ceremonial life there in Washington and, you know, he was a retired American ambassador in the headquarters of the State Department. You can see there were quite a number of contacts that he surely had. He was working on this correspondence to some degree and he was also working on the Liszt papers, as I recall. He told me that. He somehow, or Dumbarton Oaks had, or somebody had letters of Franz Liszt. Actually, I haven't confirmed that later. I don't know where those are or what that was about, but that's what he told me he was working on. That's all I know.
AS: I wonder – a bit of a change of topic, but during the same period – what your interaction was with the D.O. collection, or if there was one.
RN: Sure, there was a collection. The same art that's there now was there then. I would say there was no interaction with the collection. I'm trying – I'm racking my brain for any interaction. I think that's something that's changed now. The collection is much more accessible, I believe. My guess is it was probably more a heritage of the patrons and the whole attitude, the whole gestalt around the objects as being private was perhaps continued on. And so, that was the collection and we were there to use the books and work on our materials. I never felt encouraged to look at the objects and there was never any museum visit for Fellows, even though there were four or five or six art historical Junior Fellows. I would say that was a missed opportunity. We should have had much more interaction with the curator and the staff about the collection. We would have learned a lot. But, that didn't happen.
AS: And speaking of interactions, did you have any interactions with the pre-Columbian center or the Garden and Landscape center?
RN: I did. I liked the Fellows. One of my two years there, there was a wonderful Pre-Columbian Fellow, Linda Schele, a professor at the University of Texas. She was great. She was the den mother of the Junior Fellows. I mean, she was this wonderful sort of charismatic, extroverted, outgoing lady, somewhat heavyset, wore these long – we called them muumuus or something. Long, kind of flowing dresses. This was a long time ago. But it was very '60s, sort of hippie-like fashion: long hair and these long, flowing dresses. And she was just so exuberant. Her parties were wonderful and she was so excited about everybody's work. And I really, I loved that. I found that so interesting. And I was very impressed with everything I learned, that I picked up about the pre-Columbian world. Spanish, actually, was my first foreign language, so I never felt – it never seemed terribly foreign, what they were doing. I grew up in southern Texas, near the Mexican border, so it was just – Mexico doesn't seem foreign to me, in a way. And what they were doing didn't seem foreign, although I don't have a Ph.D. in pre-Columbian studies. Later on, when I remarried, my second wife's father did a lot of business in Mexico and collected pre-Columbian art and even gave me a few pieces, so I feel like something was born there; an appreciation for pre-Columbian studies happened there at Dumbarton Oaks and that's because of the Fellows that I knew. And similarly, for landscape, there was a person, – I'm sorry; I can't remember his name. Mr. Moran, maybe? – an Americanist working on American landscape architecture, and other people coming in interested in Beatrix Farrand, who was the great designer of the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks and also many other gardens. And later on I remembered – those memories were important to me, because I became very interested in the gardens; I became very interested in American landscape architecture in the '20s and '30s, because it's relevant to the Blisses and the Tyler-Bliss project. So, there was also, one year, there was a landscape architecture professor, Miller, Miss Miller, Professor Miller. I can't remember her first name. She taught at Boston College or Boston University. She was a Renaissance scholar. She was very lively and I've always been interested in Italy and Italian art and working on the Italian Renaissance. And so, I very much enjoyed her. So, I liked all of the centers. The music – I liked the music. I like the whole thing that Dumbarton Oaks does. I'm really quite – I buy the whole program. I think it's a great program.
AS: Were Fellows active in the Friends of Music concerts, going to concerts and things like that?
RN: Well, I was. Music is real important to my life and I went to every one. There were some great ones. There was a marvelous concert in one of my years there. Maybe it was when I was a Fellow. I was a Fellow '81-'82. It was the earliest music that Mozart composed, like Opus 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, you know? Mozart was very prolific. So, we listened to things he composed at seven, eight, ten, eleven, fifteen and they played these for – they're not played; these things aren't performed. And the performers talked about them and that was really interesting. And there was – a quartet came; ah, people's names. A quartet came and – or it was a quintet – and one of the violinists was very famous: Schneider? I can't remember the man's name. Anyway, he was a friend of my professor. Hugo Buchthal was married to Serkin's wife [sic: sister], the then very famous pianist. And she – her whole family was musical and they were part of a kind of musical dynasty in Austria, in Vienna, and so whenever I'd go visit my professor, most of the conversation would be about music and, you know, really performers and opera singers and things like that, all of whom were their friends and they socialized with them. Anyway this violinist was – I remember him: very famous and recorded often, but he played dreadfully. He was rather old and he was just basically faking it, I mean, lots of missed notes, and I said something to Hugo Buchthal about this and he said, "Oh, well, you know, this happens later on." I just do remember he was dreadful. I was just kind of wondering, "How'd that happen?" and "Why did he get on the series?" But mainly they had younger performers; obviously, younger performers are cheaper. But, they also have – they did something wonderful and experimental, like the earliest Mozart music. And they can play with a great verve, and I think really there I learned to appreciate chamber music, because that's chamber. That's music in a hall. That's in a setting. And there aren't too many other places where you get to hear chamber music. There are universities and concert halls that try to make small venues for it, but it's not in a home and people are sitting in banks of seats and all that sort of stuff. That was a rare privilege.
AS: Now, these concerts were taking place in the Music Room, or in the gardens?
RN: The Music Room. So, we had this conference for the re-opening of the library, dedicated to the Blisses; we were very interested in trying to have re-stagings of those famous compositions that the Blisses commissioned and that was a great experience a few years ago.
AS: We should move on to your years as a Fellow in the '80s a little more directly, but before we do, just as sort of a summary question about the Junior Fellow period, a lot of people have described these years as a tough time to be in academia more generally and some have talked about how that filtered down to, especially to Junior Fellows, as people who are just getting their feet wet, with a lot of people having to leave the field and, you know, a lot of frustration. I wonder: is that something you perceived in your time there?
RN: Yeah, that would be an aspect of at least this particular person you're interviewing, emphasizing the positive, not discussing with you the negative. So, I'm making it into a golden age, but there was enormous anxiety. It frankly was the kiss of death to go into job interviews saying I was at Dumbarton Oaks. I was so proud of getting the Dumbarton Oaks fellowship. Some letter comes on fancy Harvard stationery and it says in very pretentious, pompous language – I probably have a copy somewhere. "The Board of Overseers begs to inform..." Something like that. "That you've been..." All this. I just thought this was unbelievable. And so, I was so, so proud of being a Junior Fellow. And so, I started applying for jobs using Dumbarton Oaks stationery. I thought this was very impressive. It was a disaster, because Byzantinists were perceived to be – especially coming out of Dumbarton Oaks – narrow – only interested in scholarship, unable to teach anything else outside the Byzantine field, by definition a poor teacher, and something that universities wouldn't want. So, it was a real problem. And that aspect of the profession sticks with me to this day. I never allow one of my graduate students in Byzantine art to leave with a Ph.D. unless they have a broader education than just Byzantine. They cannot restrict themselves to studying Byzantine, because I want them to be qualified for different kinds of jobs. And so, that's something I took from that period. There was one person who was hanging on at Dumbarton Oaks and I can't remember his name. He was a Junior Fellow and had a – excuse me; that's my phone. Let me just look and see who it is. Can you turn it off? Let me – [Recording stops, then starts again.]
RN: – in the University of Michigan, who had been a Junior Fellow, had many years of Arabic, and had to leave the field, because there were simply no jobs for anybody in Islamic history. The study of Islam was even worse than studying Byzantine studies, which is quite a remarkable thing now, since the whole world is terribly interested in Islamic studies. There were friends of mine that in a way were in the process of leaving the field. It was very difficult. The year I got my job, I'll give you the statistics. There were a hundred people applying for jobs in medieval art and if you had a Byzantine specialty you were at a disadvantage. A hundred people applying – this is according to college statistics – and there were two jobs. Two. I got one of them. I got the best one. I got a job as assistant professor at the University of Chicago and that made all the difference in my career. I stayed there for twenty-seven years and then I came to Yale, so my career was very simple. It was terrible. There were very, very well qualified people that didn't get the Chicago job and had to go into other fields. I think the person that comes to mind: my friend Gary Vikan is director of the Walters Art Museum. He was some years ahead of me and had a Dumbarton Oaks staff appointment for several years; a very, very good scholar, very wonderful person, very good scholar, and has been a great museum director. I mean, he's a talented human being and has done very well there, but it's a real loss to the profession that Gary didn't take an academic job and that didn't work out for him. And there were others. It was indeed a very difficult time and I – that was the anxiety. That was the – for many people a kind of depression that hung over us. So, we were there amongst the beautiful flowers and the glorious libraries and great intellectual traditions of Dumbarton Oaks and at the same time we didn't know if we'd be even in the field the next year, so it was a hard time. No doubt about it. And I don't think – in retrospect, Dumbarton Oaks could have done more to deal with that, but they didn't see that as their problem or maybe they themselves were in denial, you know, that there was a problem. I don't know. Later on, institutions grappled with this surplus of academics and Harvard cut its entering classes and, you know, this happened to many places. It was an outgrowth of the great expansion of academia in the '60s into the early '70s, spurred on by the stimulus of federal money and burgeoning economic times and many – a larger percentage of Americans going to college and demand, et cetera. And all of a sudden with the economic turmoil with the later '70s, that collapsed. Some version is going to go on now, but it will be better controlled and more contained than it was then. It was a kind of depression in academia. I got my job at the University of Chicago; I shared this one statistic with you. I got paid $11,000 in 1977, a year. And I calculated my hourly rate. I was working about a hundred hours a week to start, because that's the way assistant professors do it. I was making some incredibly small amount. I was making less than minimum wage. And it was also a period of great inflation, which was a big problem for everybody in the country. And I sort of extrapolated my salary and the rate of inflation and I saw that within three or four years I would be under the poverty, I would be at the poverty level of America. It was that bad. It was really, it was a lot of – universities were really struggling. Yale, I know, suffered a great deal. [Recording stops, then starts again.]
AS: Now we're rolling again.
RN: OK. So, I'm sure Harvard also went through similar constrictions. Endowments went down a great deal. There were a lot of significant losses in endowments. I think Yale lost a great deal of their endowment back then and I don't know what happened to Harvard, but it was a very difficult time in academia and so that's the large – now I can see; if you take the long view, that's the larger context for our anxiety then. But, it was palpable. Yeah.
AS: Well, this was not the case when you returned in '81, or less so, I guess.
RN: Well, I was an assistant professor and by then I had advanced to professor; my career had gone well. And my colleagues liked me at Chicago and so I was there '81-'82 and I'd already had a book published before I got there, which was good – a short book, but it was a book. And I was working on various other projects and I was getting married. It was a good time, a lot better. It was really kind of, in the personal aspect, which perhaps I will mention here – in the first year of my junior fellowship, my first wife died, so I had a great sort of personal tragedy. William Loerke was very kind and solicitous about that, I must say. He was very helpful. And then the second time I was at Dumbarton Oaks, I got married. So, I mean, you know, it's sort of a very concrete contrast there. And I got tenure in the fall of '82. That's the year after I was at Dumbarton Oaks. So, things were looking pretty good then. So, it was a much better time. Kazhdan had come to Dumbarton Oaks and he had, compared to the – which was Giles Constables' brilliant idea, absolutely brilliant – and so in my second year as a Junior Fellow, there was a lot of grumbling about Giles Constable, but by the time he made this brilliant appointment, everybody was, "Well, what a great," et cetera. Things change. He was the same man, of course. But, this was all from the lower echelon point of view. And so, that was a very good and successful year, I think. I got a lot of work done and it worked well.
AS: It would have been different, your different perspective as, being in different places in your career – were there visible changes at Dumbarton Oaks between your two – I mean, you'd been gone almost five years, I guess, between the two. Or did it seem like the same place?
RN: It seemed the same. It seemed the same. I had trouble working there the second time. There was a reading room where the Junior Fellows had desks, in part of the Blisses' house, of course, and it had these gorgeous wood floors, which were from probably the Blisses. When they were there they had beautiful oriental carpets down, et cetera et cetera. Now, there were just bare wood floors and they were extremely noisy, because of people walking around all the time. And the reading room was wood-paneled. It was an exceedingly bright, sonically, room. It's the sort of environment that restauranteurs make so that people won't linger long over their dinners. And it was very hard to study. And I don't deal very well with noise. Some people like – my son's in college and he likes to go to coffee shops and work. I couldn't. I have to have perfect silence. We're completely different. And so, I found it hard to work. And it became even worse when I came back as an assistant professor, because I was used to having an office and quiet spaces and so I remember having earplugs in all day, trying to work, and things like that. So, that's my impression of the environment. Constable, bless his heart, heard the complaints and put a carpet down in the hall. And that cut down the noise. First, there was great grumbling about how they're going to change at Dumbarton Oaks, but he really did cut down the noise of people's shoes, you know. And we used to – some of the women wore high heels and they made a – this is a different age. That even made more noise and we'd really grumble about that. And some people would even suggest they might not wear high heels at Dumbarton Oaks, you know, but they couldn't do that, for the head librarian liked to wear high heels. We didn't feel like we could say anything to her about it. So, I think that's about the only difference that I can think of. Not a profound one.
AS: Well, speaking of the library, how was your interaction with – it would be Irene Vaslef at this point – or any of the librarians?
RN: Oh, I liked Irene. I liked her a great deal and that second time when I came back, she had a son who was a medical doctor and I think he'd taken a residency in Chicago, so we had a lot of Chicago conversations about her son, et cetera. And I always liked Irene a great deal. I was very fond of her; I thought she was an excellent librarian. I worked hard to help them get books and to give them suggestions and took very seriously that responsibility of Fellows, to try to help them get books they didn't know about. I kind of took that attitude, which I picked up as a junior Fellow as well – we were encouraged to do that and when I got to Chicago, all the time I was there, I was constantly on the librarians to get books and things. I still do it at Yale. Whenever I see something we don't have, I shoot off an email. Fortunately at Yale we have plenty of money for books, so they buy everything. At Chicago it was more difficult. Dumbarton Oaks also bought everything, so that was great.
AS: So, it was a very active relationship between librarians and Fellows.
RN: Yeah. Definitely.
AS: And they were very accommodating.
RN: Very accommodating. They would do anything to help us. It was a real, personal – they would take a personal interest in your work and they would go to all kinds of heroics to help you get things. There was a man, a wonderful retired man; he'd had some sort of military career, and his job was to go the Library of Congress to get books for us. He was very talkative, a very garrulous man and you had to be a little bit careful about starting conversations, or you wouldn't get any work done, because he would tell you great – all the heroic actions he'd done to find this book at the Library of Congress and I'm sure finding something in the Library of Congress can be very difficult on some days, but that was his mission, to get these obscure books for us in the Library of Congress, and perhaps they're still doing that. I don't know, but it's probably more anonymous, interlibrary loan, or something now. But then they had their own courier; he would go every day. He was wonderful.
AS: Now, were you still living on Wisconsin Avenue during this fellowship?
RN: Yes, that was the time we still lived there. That was in a way a nice place to live. The apartments were small. As a Junior Fellow, I had a neighbor I got to know, who is still a friend, and she had a one-bedroom; I had a studio as a Junior Fellow. And she had a job in the White House and I got to know her and her boyfriend and then husband. And she invited me down to the White House one day, when the President was away. And this was the Ford administration; she was Republican. And I took along a couple of other Fellows, foreign Fellows, because I thought this would be a good experience for them. I took along Anthony Bryer, famous Byzantine historian at Birmingham, and – oh, dear. I forgot his name, but he couldn't get a job and he went back to Australia and did something on, sort of, educational administration. Perhaps I'll remember his name. He worked on early Byzantium. So, we went down there and went to see my friend in the executive office building. She had a grand office and Bryer, who's just a wild man, looked at her office and on her desk there was some stationery, very classy, even classier than Harvard stationery. It just says, "The White House, Washington, D.C." You don't need a zip code; you don't need anything! That's it, very simple. And he looked at it and said, "Oh, that's beautiful. I think I'll take some of that." And she said, "No, you won't. That's against federal regulation." So, he reached for it and she reached for it, too. And I thought they were going to get into a tug-of-war there and I said, "Bryer, let go of it." I don't think he quite understood the import. And we walked around and we saw – she took us up to the Oval Office and we walked around and saw all sorts of things. It was really cool. So, that's one of the things I got out of 2702 Wisconsin Avenue, was meeting the then Sarah Massengale, who was on the Domestic Council of President Ford. So, that's cool.
AS: Very much so.
RN: Yeah.
AS: Now, my chronology – this is something I think you might be able to help with – is a bit messed up in these years. I know joint appointments were a new thing in these years or perhaps a little bit earlier, but one of our other interviewees mentioned that you had held one of the joint appointments?
RN: No. I never had a joint appointment.
RN: That's never –
AS: Another one of the oral history –
RN: Yeah. Well, it's somebody's memory. I never had a joint appointment. I got a straight job at the University of Chicago at the conclusion of my second year as a Junior Fellow. I had a very fortunate career. I didn't have to be an adjunct some place; I didn't have to take a temporary job. When I was there, John Duffy was an adjunct and he taught at the University of Maryland before he went to Harvard as a professor. I got to know John well, a great guy, wonderful philologist. And when I was there as a Fellow, '81-'82, Mike McCormick was the joint Fellow, a joint appointment with Hopkins. And I think – I'm not sure. There were some others, but I'm a little unsure of the chronology there. But Mike, he was great there. I got to know him in my second period, '81-'82. He was great; still is. Outgoing and very excited about his work all the time, a wonderful, sort of infectious, positive sense of enthusiasm about the field. I remember one day – I can remember the subject, but we were walking to lunch and we got into a serious intellectual debate. I can't remember what it was about, but it was like, "Oh no, you can't say that." "Oh yes, I can." Et cetera, you know. I mean, we just couldn't let it go. We walked in and we kept going at it right there. And I remember Giles Constable was there and we were kind of oblivious that we were speaking loud and people were looking at us and somebody said, "Quiet down. The director's here." And he turned and said, "No, no, I want to hear it. I want to see how they work this out." And so, we actually kept the debate going. I forget. I don't remember – I think it had to do with medieval history in France and it had to do with a French historian that I had been reading, about the middle ages. And it had to do with the book – sorry, I can't remember the details, but it had to do a lot with oral memory and oral traditions – interesting to think about that in this present context. And about the truth and falsity of orally received traditions and things like that and historians could work with them or not work with them, et cetera. It was a great discussion.
AS: It seems like a typical D.O. experience.
RN: It was. That was lovely, yeah.
AS: I wonder: I don't have too many more questions today. You may have other things to say about the Senior Fellow period, or, excuse me, the fellowship period in the early '80s, but I didn't know if you wanted – we've talked quite a bit in passing about Constable and his administration and I didn't know if you wanted to touch upon that more specifically.
RN: Well, it's hard for me to put it in context. Since I was a Junior Fellow and then an assistant professor, it's very hard for me to see the larger context of what he was trying to do. I'm trying to be positive, but I think it was – I must say I think it was a tragic mistake to allow the fieldwork archaeology program to expire. I really do think that's the major mistake he made and it has forever changed the character of the institution. And it's something that now we can't get back and it has had deleterious effect on academia in America. We have few scholars in America who have archaeological experience. That makes us inferior to the intellectual traditions of various European countries: the English are much better as a – there's an English community of Byznatinists much more experienced with archaeology. Same for the Germans, et cetera, obviously the Greeks. It's a major problem in America. And that extinguishing of the Dumbarton Oaks fieldwork caught us – really closed out our national archaeological experience. And it's not been replaced. Maybe it was already dead and maybe what he did was simply pull the plug on a dead patient. And there's some evidence for that, I could say. He wrote an article about this in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, his controversial decision, and actually did a little historiographic work in archives. It's perhaps the first time that an historian began to look for archive information that was in there at Dumbarton Oaks. And he went into the fieldwork, tradition of fieldwork, and there's something there that in the change of the Byzantine Institute of America and the death of Thomas Whittemore – I've written about this in a book and so I've done a lot of work on this, but in a period then in the '50s and early '60s, they allowed the patron network to expire and there was a large patron network in America that was paying for this American archaeology and that was allowed to fritter away. Dumbarton Oaks took over the Byzantine Institute of America's archaeological programs and I can only surmise from a distance now that the world must have thought, well, "Rich Harvard, rich endowment, Dumbarton Oaks is taking over and there's no reason for us to give any money to this anymore." That was the supposition. For whatever reason, that happened and later on Dumbarton Oaks changed its policies, put its money elsewhere or maybe didn't have any money. I think actually Dumbarton Oaks was affected by the same financial problems in the '70s that everybody else was. I don't know. I don't know the statistics. I haven't seen the letters. And there was no way to, sort of, re-establish this patron network that would pay for that. But, it's affected American art and archaeology of Byzantium to this day and as a scholar I'm frustrated by it. I keep trying to work in different ways to support that and lately have been successful, so I'm not an archaeologist, but I think archaeology is very important for history and art history and lots of other fields. Although, I think Constable brought a real professionalization to Dumbarton Oaks for the first time and he was and is a historian of Monasticism. And he said to me one day, "The problem is, Rob," he said. "Dumbarton Oaks is like a saint that has collected a whole series of followers around the saint or monasteries. It's grown up, et cetera, and has survived on the charismatic will and the charisma of the great saint. But eventually the saint dies. So, then what are they going to do? Is the whole thing going to fritter away, or if it's not then a structure has to be built and constructed around it." And so, the way he did it was to construct a structure, an administrative structure. It meant spending more money on administrators, which we scholars never thought was a good idea at the end of the day, but perhaps was the way to change it from this institution presided over by the very wealthy patrons to something that would be a permanent academic institution. So, he began that process of professionalization at Dumbarton Oaks and even though he made decisions – I suppose he was part of the decision to no longer have any tenured professors – decisions that I don't think really helped the character of the institution, he did in some ways make sure that it's a going institution to this day. So, that's what a good director does, I now know. And so, I'm rather more positive about his contributions than I certainly would have been then. Yeah. Maybe I'm just older.
AS: I think that's a common thing that we've been hearing, so I don't think you're alone in that sentiment. Is there anything else in that fellowship period that I've left out, or should we talk about the Senior Fellows?
RN: Sure. Now we get closer to the present.
AS: Yes – with quite a bit of a fast-forward.
RN: So, I've been a Senior Fellow for six to seven years.
AS: Since 2003, I think.
RN: OK, thanks. When I wrote my book – this is an aside; I'm getting to it – when I wrote my book on Hagia Sophia and kind of the history of Byzantine studies, I had decided to end it in 1950 or early '50s, when Whittemore, Thomas Whittemore, the head of the Byzantine Institute of America, died. I think he died in '53. And that was very safe, because everybody I was writing about was dead and of course I could get access to archives and materials. Now we talk about the period from 2003 to the present. There's a lot that I don't want to say, that I can't say, so I would say myself as an historical source becomes more limited. I'm saying all this for the record, but it would be obvious if anybody were reading this. Well, I've been there for two directors – Angeliki Laiou and now Jan Ziolkowski – and different administrations, both Harvard professors, both continuing, in a way, the tradition that Constable inaugurated of a senior, accomplished scholar running Dumbarton Oaks, which would seem, if you walked into the place now, what any research institution would have, but remember Constable was the first. And there are many advantages. The professors come from Harvard. They know the Harvard culture. Let's see: I guess I wasn't – was Angeliki?
AS: I think her tenure ended in 1998, so it would have been Keenan.
RN: Keenan. I guess she was just such a powerful member of the Senior Fellows that I think of her as still the director, even though Professor Keenan was the director. Sorry [laughs].
AS: No, no.
RN: She is quite a powerful person. I also had a lot to do with her while she was director, in part because she offered me a job there, and so we had many interactions about that in the early '90s, which I didn't take. I stayed in Chicago. But so, she was very important and Ned was very important, because all of these people brought real competency and real knowledge about Harvard as an institution, which is very useful for Dumbarton Oaks, because it is a Harvard institution and it needs to function in a capable way within other Harvard contexts. And the problem before, with this retired American ambassador, who I now know had been a Harvard graduate student – perhaps you know this. William Royall Tyler had been a Harvard graduate student in fine arts and failed his orals, the Ph.D. exams, and left graduate school. So, he was a failed academic at Harvard, which will come out when we publish the correspondence. But, anyways, that's a very different person, as a director, from a senior, important scholar at Harvard coming down to be director, as what we had all of the previous times. [Recording stops, then starts again.]
AS: OK. We were just talking a little bit about the Senior Fellows committee and I won't keep you too much longer, so I wonder if you just might talk about some of the – as you mentioned, I know that this is sort of recent stuff and not the stuff of oral history quite yet – but if there are any major, especially towards the earlier part of your term as a Senior Fellow, major issues or projects that were particularly memorable or enjoyable –
RN: Well, it was very enjoyable to watch the growth of the institution and the new building, the building projects that Ned put into effect. I particularly loved his taking me around the project and pointing out different aspects, because he took such a pride of ownership in the whole thing, as if it were his house that was being built, which is good. This is good. You want the person superintending it to really look for every detail and so that was quite interesting. Also to witness from a distance the effects on the institution of, let's say, his forced merger of the different units so they all shared the same library. All the books are now merged together in a single system, so you don't have the wonderful personalized assistants and the genuine scholars involved in the library that were once there, but this would be an example of what Constable would have called the need to move to a professional structure for Dumbarton Oaks, I mean, a continuation of that, which I'm sure on any given day is correct. I remember Loerke telling me one time that the cost of cataloging at Dumbarton Oaks – you know they had their own cataloging system – the cost of cataloging a book was four or five times more than if they used the Library of Congress system, which every other person, every other library in the country, even including money-rich Harvard and Yale, were switching to. Yale still has some old books that haven't been switched over, but there's no rational library in America that is not using the Library of Congress system now, because the Library of Congress catalogs the books and you don't have to pay people to do that. Well, Dumbarton Oaks had to pay people. So, it's inevitable what has happened and probably will help the institution in the long term, because there will be more intellectual sharing, because they all share the common library in a way. I mean, it probably will be good. So, one of the very nice things about being a Senior Fellow is that we break for lunch in the director's home and it's always a very lovely lunch and the conversation changes depending upon the Fellows that are there. The last couple years, John Haldon from Princeton, an historian, has joined us. John has great stories. He's got many great humorous stories and that's enlivened it a lot. I particularly enjoyed Ned's wife, Elizabeth [sic: Judith], and one memorable lunch, I was talking about my son, who was studying political science there at Georgetown and really interested in getting some sort of internship on the hill and she said, "Well, maybe I can help." And anyway, she helped him get an internship with the then junior senator from Illinois, now the President of the United States. So, that was really a good lunch. I really thought that was a good one. My family has stayed in Chicago until tomorrow, when they'll all move here with the moving van, so he was still a resident of Illinois, so he could be an intern in the senator's office. So, that was quite an interesting experience and I enjoyed talking about her times in Africa. I collect African art a little bit and she had lots of wonderful pieces. And now, of course, Jan's wife is very interesting to chat with. Do you know?
AS: I haven't met her yet.
RN: She is wonderful to talk to. She's a chemist who – she's a forensic chemist and works in crime labs, of course, and has an infinity of interesting stories, some of which she can share with us and only a few of which can be discussed at dinner, you know, but that's also very interesting. So, I particularly enjoy the lunches and that's – otherwise, we work very hard as Senior Fellows. We read many applications. What we all do, you know, it's volunteer work for us. Harvard pays our expenses to go down there, but, you know, there's no other compensation, so it's really a kind of volunteer effort and it's a great deal of work. And we work very hard and we have serious meetings and – but we have a nice lunch. So, I like the lunch.
AS: Well, I don't have anything else about the Senior Fellows experience, but I'm sort of jumping around in time, but if you don't mind, you've been involved in a number of symposia over the years –
RN: Sure.
AS: – even acting as symposiarch, I think. And I wondered if you might talk about the Dumbarton Oaks symposia and the role that it plays in Byzantine studies or any memorable symposia that you've been involved in.
RN: Well, the ones that had the greatest impact were the ones I encountered when I was young, as a graduate student, or as a Junior Fellow, or as an assistant professor. I'll never forget the first one I went to. It was a colloquium and it was about Byzantine manuscripts – illumination, palaeography, intellectual history – and it was published as a book called Byzantine Books and Bookmen, which is the title of the colloquium run by Mango and Ševčenko. And there was a question-and-answer period and at one point somebody said, "Well, where did you come up with this word 'bookmen'?" And, you know, one could have said "bibliophile", one could have said "book collector" or something. What is this word, "bookmen", which is a kind of marginally acceptable English word, you know? And one of them, one of the pair – they were quite a pair, in a way. They were yin and yang; they were quite something and both utterly brilliant. And one of them said, "Well, we were talking one day about this and – what language were we speaking? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, were speaking Russian then. And then we decided that, well, it really takes a word like that," – there probably is a word like that in Russian; I don't know, but there are similar Russian words. Russians use the word спортсмен. That's how you say it in Russian, "sportsmen". So anyway, the concept came from Russian. And as a beginning graduate student, I just couldn't believe that they couldn't remember what language they were speaking in and that they were speaking in Russian when they were doing all this. And that was a great one. Professor Irigoin from the Collège de France was there and there were a number of wonderful scholars. Yes, the Dumbarton Oaks symposia: very, very important, I think, for beginning scholars to come and see the older scholars and be a part of something very powerful intellectually. And it still functions that way. The quality of the symposia varies. I think there's been a – [Recording stops, then starts again.]
AS: There we go. OK, we're back on.
RN: So, we were talking about symposia and I was about to make a criticism. The criticism would be that the symposia – to some extent, the topics are yesterday's news. They get topics that are not always cutting-edge and they operate more as a kind of consensus statement on a problem, as opposed to something more experimental, something more challenging. In a way they're a bit like major art exhibitions in major museums, which are seldom path-breaking. They pull together material – I'm talking a Metropolitan Museum exhibition or something like that. But, that's the nature of the beast, I'll say, and there are very good things that Dumbarton Oaks is doing. They've put together these colloquia, which are on a smaller scale, and they're more experimental, often bringing younger scholars and so I think they've got a good system of the kind of major, blockbuster exhibition – that's the symposium – and then the smaller, challenging exhibition in a side gallery – and that's the colloquia. So, I think that system is working well. Otherwise, I think Dumbarton Oaks is a lively, changing institution. It's not an artifact of the past. It's growing and changing and hopefully will remain a credit to Harvard indefinitely.
AS: I certainly hope so. Well, I just wondered if we might expand on that a little bit in talking about the role of Dumbarton Oaks in Byzantine studies in the future. You've touched on it a little – I mean, you're sorry about the fieldwork disappearing and the changing nature of the symposia. But are there areas in which Dumbarton Oaks could play a different role than they do now in the field, in the future?
RN: Definitely. They certainly could play a different role. They certainly could play a role that would have greater impact. Whether they will, it's hard to predict the future. I'll be a Senior Fellow for a couple more years, so I'll have some possibility of changing things. I could name the Internet as changing the whole world. And if Dumbarton Oaks were aggressively to embrace the Internet, it could transcend its fundamental party, that is it's a small institution on a beautiful estate in Washington, D.C., a long ways from Cambridge, a long ways from any other kinds of institutions. It could be the network, it could be the node, it could be the center of quite an extraordinary kind of intellectual world that could be brought through Dumbarton Oaks, in part because it has all of these Fellows, so many Fellows now in so many different places and so many institutions, well placed, et cetera. If Dumbarton Oaks were to aggressively embrace that and see themselves fundamentally in an outreach mode of really wanting to contribute powerfully to Byzantine studies and not to hold on to a certain territory, a certain past, a certain collection, a certain physical space, but if they were to become virtual, they could begin by reassuming control of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and turning that into a major element, a major Internet vehicle for Byzantine studies, which I have been pushing as a Senior Fellow for years and years and years. And it hasn't happened yet, but I'm around for two more years, so I'll keep pushing. And they could do many more things. That would take initiative. That would take a different, perhaps a different kind of direction they want to go for. So, that's what they could do. That would be some of the possibilities at Dumbarton Oaks. But, that might not be what they want to do. And, you know, I will do my best to urge my view, to create my vision of the future, but we'll see what happens.
AS: Well, I think you more than answered the questions I came with and I wonder if in summary you might, especially considering the book that you're working on right now, you might talk a little bit about what you see as the Bliss legacy to Byzantine studies and to Dumbarton Oaks.
RN: Well, the great legacy is Dumbarton Oaks, is the art collection, is the library, and is this large bequest of money, which was – I don't know the details, but I'm sure it was well managed, like the rest of Harvard's endowment and is now a significant endowment. Again, I don't know the details. I know how much they gave initially, et cetera, because I've seen all those records back in the '30s and '40s. I actually like studying the past, because I don't have to get into confidential problems. And they transformed America. They made a very beautiful institution and they made profound, they had a profound effect on three different fields in America. It's a perfect example of selective, successful philanthropy. Successful philanthropy is philanthropy that is targeted to a narrow, realizable objective. It's not like shooting with a shotgun, where all the little pellets go out and scatter-shot. It's precisely targeted, like laser surgery or something. And so, they took these three little fields, three obscure little fields, one would say, from the larger – Byzantine studies, pre-Columbian studies, gardens – and have made a serious impact on all three. Byzantine studies I know the best. Most scholars that have jobs in Byzantine studies in America have passed through Dumbarton Oaks, where most is 90%, 95%, maybe – well, it couldn't be 100, but I don't know a tenured professor in Byzantine studies in America who hasn't had an engagement with Dumbarton Oaks. And I know few major scholars in the world that haven't been Fellows there. It's just like everybody. Publications, very important, the art collecting, very important, so it's – the world before Dumbarton Oaks I'm aware of, because I'm reading these letters and I have a good sense of it: amazing. And I think in a way the Blisses were right to base it in Washington and I think Harvard's ultimate decision to keep it there was right. If it had been absorbed at Harvard, it might not have had the same impact. Washington is a non-trivial place in the world. And the fact that Byzantine studies are in Washington, D.C., I mean. this makes a difference, you know? If Dumbarton Oaks was in – well, now I'm going to impugn wherever I say – Topeka, Kansas – sorry – it would not have had the same impact, in a way. But being in Washington, being in Georgetown, many, many people have been to Dumbarton Oaks, you know, that are not scholars, et cetera. This is great. So, we thank the Blisses. We should raise a glass.
AS: Well, I do, certainly. Is there anything else I've forgotten?
RN: This is fine. OK.
AS: Thanks for sitting down.]]>
Unlike the depiction on BZS.1955.1.4285, Christ does not appear to be holding a scroll. The legend on the reverse has been restored according to the reading of a seal in the Athens Museum described and illustrated in Zacos–Veglery, no. 46 (b). On this specimen Christ is perched upright on the Virgin's arm, while on the Athens seal he leans to the right.]]>
INT: I'm Anne Steptoe.
INT: I'm Elizabeth Gettinger.
INT: We have the honor today to interview Helen Evans and Angela Hero. We are here in New York City at the Metropolitan Art Museum. Good afternoon to both of you.
AH: Good afternoon.
HE: Good afternoon.
INT: Now we can get going. So, Dr. Hero, can you tell us something about your work in editing monastic documents at Dumbarton Oaks?
AH: Well, Professor Constable thought that the entire range of monasticism, both eastern and western, could not be studied properly until sources for eastern monasticism were made available, collected and made available. And he assigned that project to John Philip Thomas, whom he had known from Harvard. John was at that time on a joint appointment at Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown. He was putting the final touches on his dissertation at Harvard, which was published a couple of years after that—I think it was the early eighties—and very, very well received. It was an excellent study of private religious foundations in Byzantium, so it was related, you see. And he became – he took over the project. And I was appointed—this was all started in '81—I was appointed philological editor for the Greek, because when we got a grant from the Foundation for the Humanities, they said that they wanted also a Greek editor, since these were translations. And we got together a group of translators. It was a problem, because these documents were written in various registers of the Greek language, ranging from the classicizing Hochsprache to the vernacular. And there weren't many scholars, many Byzantinists, who wanted to take on such a task. It was very difficult, because there were—to give you an idea—in the so-called inventories, the brevia, there were words that were not found in any dictionaries, so the two of us worked together – it was a very harmonious collaboration between John and me. We were very lucky finally in getting together a group of international scholars that – some of them were from England, others from Belgium, from Italy. And there's also a – very satisfactory, really. It was a very fine work, my favorite. I mean, it's there in five volumes; you can see it. It was published in 2000, the year 2000. It's the index. This is the part that I value very much, because it was, it is research-friendly. You see, if I – can you bring down volume five, please? That whole volume is the index.
INT: Wow.
AH: Yes so it gives you an idea. If you look under "monks", you have so many entries. [Flipping through the book]
HE: Do you use this in your research at all?
INT: I work in Syriac sources more and I didn't – I know what a tremendous contribution this has been to the field. I work more in the earlier period.
HE: What period are you working in?
INT: Late Antique.
HE: Up to about the seventh century, or –?
INT: Up to about the seventh century.
HE: I'm working on an exhibition on the transition from Byzantium to Islam. We should discuss that at some point.
AH: I'll read it to you so you get an idea. For instance, you start: "Monks, appointment of, assignment to fix duties, attempted assassination of, care of aged, conspiring to flee, contract workers, definition of, dietary concessions for, documents offered by, expulsion of, esthete of the community, electoral college, foundation of." You know, you have, on monks you have how many pages, yes? Monks continued, monks, you have four to five pages. But it followed the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium in the format – what it means is that we wanted to produce something that was research-friendly. Now, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium is unique. I mean, Alice-Mary Talbot, who was the executive editor – of course the idea was Kazhdan's, Alexander Kazhdan. There you have a dictionary, an encyclopedia practically of Byzantine life in all its aspects: politics, not just as before, you know, the great, important events, people who took part in these events, patriarchs, kings, emperors; but you have also: sports, food, clothing, footwear. The entry on women in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, it's cross-referenced to Eve, the Virgin Mary, birth of women, girls, you know, education of, marriage, fertility, divorce, concubinage, prostitution, empresses, nuns, so it is – these are extraordinary reference books, standard reference books. That's all I can tell you.
INT: This was a long labor of love for you, these volumes. You worked twenty years and I understand that there were some difficulties at times.
AH: Well, there was, because, as I said, the grant ran out of money, and John and I carried on, on our own expenses. And of course he, fortunately, was – of course we are talking now twenty-five, thirty years ago – he was a master of the computer. He was a computer whiz. And the word processing – he turned in a manuscript over 5,000 pages in '96 to Dumbarton Oaks. And that was all done, you know. I couldn't help there, because my first computer I bought in 1990. And still I use it because it has an excellent Greek font. My Macintosh, the one there, has access to the Internet. I google, now. But I still miss my nice Greek font. In this Macintosh that I have, the Greek font leaves a lot to be desired, especially the accents, the iota subscript – forget it. It's a mess.
INT: Well, while we're on the subject of publications, you were also involved in the Dumbarton Oaks Holy Women of Byzantium series.
AH: Well, I am on the advisory committee on hagiography, yes.
INT: And contributed the life of St. Theoktiste of Lesbos –
AH: Yes, but my dissertation, which was published by Dumbarton Oaks, was – at that time, Alice-Mary and I were doing correspondence, you see, where I did fifty-nine letters of Gregory Akindynos, who was condemned as a heretic, because he was involved in the Hesychast controversy. And then I edited – to give you an idea of my background, it was Professor Ševčenko who introduced me to the study of manuscripts and suggested that I do – both Alice-Mary and myself; we were his students – that we focus on unpublished sources of the fourteenth century. So, she did Patriarch Athanasius; I did Akindynos, and then I edited and translated the only surviving correspondence by a Byzantine woman, the letters of Irene Choumnaina Palaiologina and out of that the correspondence of her spiritual advisor, Theoleptos of Philadelphia.
INT: You were working on sources on the history of women –
AH: They're all fourteenth century.
INT: -- before a lot of people were doing that, really. You were at the beginning of that.
AH: Yes, we were. It was the beginning of the study – you know, gender studies and all that. But, and then of course, you know, in Byzantine Hagiography and Theoktiste of Philadelphia, er, Theoktiste of Lesbos.
INT: When did you first come to visit Dumbarton Oaks? When was that, and what were your first impressions of the place?
AH: Well, originally I was very impressed, because I felt that it was an ideal place for scholarly research. At that time, I think in '66, Mrs. Bliss was still alive.
INT: She was still there.
AH: And during the symposia they had a beautiful buffet, as you know, and the table set out with the best china and silver, and it was something to see. And of course the gardens – the symposia were always during the spring and outdoors. And the opportunity offered of interacting with other scholars – I met some of the world's top Byzantinists there: Robert Browning, oh so many – Romilly Jenkins, Trypanis, Laourdas, Vryonis, Sir Steven Runciman, so many, Anastos from California – my friends, yeah; and Alice-Mary, with whom I feel like, you know, like a sibling, like sisters. We were very close and we still continue to be. But our mentor is sick.
INT: Doing better, though, I understand.
AH: And Meyendorff passed away fourteen years ago.
INT: Can you talk about Father Meyendorff, what he was like, since we don't have the opportunity to interview him?
AH: No, no, he died in '92 and he died – it was so sudden, because I had seen him at Dumbarton Oaks two months before he passed away. He was a real man of God. Bickerman, my other teacher at Columbia—he was of course a classicist—said once that Meyendorff was the last intelligent man to believe in God, which shocked me, of course, because I was still very innocent and very not used to that kind of talk. He said to me, "Are you with Meyendorff?" I said, "Yes." Ha! Last intelligent – I couldn't believe it. Yes, Father Meyendorff was a true believer. He was a pioneer, an intelligent man, despite what Bickerman said, and very erudite, a very learned man. And easy, kind to work with – you know, very congenial, very – I found him. He was exceptionally good to his students. And he had a lot to give. It's a shame that he died. He was in his – sixty-two years old when he died. He died of pancreatic cancer. And fortunately he didn't suffer. As I said, I'd seen him two months before his death. I couldn't believe it when I opened up the New York Times and saw the obituary – because he had then retired from Fordham and had gone to the Institute for Advanced Study.
INT: Right, Princeton.
AH: Yeah, Princeton. They had built a house that summer and everything. He died, and she had to sell the house, Mrs. Meyendorff.
HE: Did he just not know he was ill at all until it was just the very end?
AH: No, no, no, no. All of a sudden he died in Canada. He used to spend the summers there, at a retreat.
INT: Do you remember, as a student, hearing about Dumbarton Oaks from him or did you get a sense – he was quite a giant at Dumbarton Oaks. Did you get a sense of his opinions on the place as a place of study for scholars?
AH: You mean from Father Meyendorff?
INT: Yes.
AH: Oh yes. Well, he thought he was – I think they considered him for director, but he didn't want to accept that job, because he was at St. Vladimir's. He was very active at St. Vladimir's with Schmemann, Father Schmemann.
INT: They made Byzantine theology accessible, I think, to the West in a way that few have replicated. They opened that world up to a lot of people in the West – English-speaking.
AH: Yes, yes. Schmemann's son is a journalist. He's, I think, one of the senior editors – not editors; what do you call them? Correspondents – he was a correspondent for the Times and the head of the Times bureau in, I think, in Moscow for a while. But he went back, you know, to Russia and visited the estates of the family, because these were princely families in Russia – the Meyendorffs, yeah. Meyendorff didn't use the title himself, but it was a princely – again, they were titled people, going all the way back to the first German pope in Rome, before the schism, before 1054. There was a Bavarian pope, a Meyen –
HE: A Meyendorff.
AH: They were Germans, yeah.
HE: And you tell me he came with –
AH: And they went from Germany with Catherine the Great. They married into an Orthodox family in Russia. And that's why he was no longer a Catholic; he was a Russian, he was an Orthodox. But, I asked him – before, of course, the reform of communism, he visited Russia – and I asked him if he went to see their property there, their estates. And he said, "No, my home in St. Petersburg is in the museum." The estates – but Schmemann's son went there and wrote a book. I think it's Echoes from a Native Land – something like that. I don't – I'm not sure, but it's something – yes, Echoes. It's brilliant. And Schmemann's wife was related to another of those, you know, white Russian families, the Trubetskoys, Franz Trubetskoy, so she was the headmistress at Chapin, I think, or Brearley, one of those schools for years. She taught French and Russian, because you see Meyendorff and Schmemann were, of course, refugees from the revolution and they settled in Paris, so they both had doctorates from the Sorbonne. And they were bilingual – more than that.
INT: Multilingual.
INT: It seems that an entire generation of scholars at Dumbarton Oaks had a similar story – Kazhdan.
AH: Kazhdan, yes.
INT: It must have had a very European feel in those first years.
AH: It did. But then after a while, they started, you know, one by one – well, you're the future! [Laughter] It's up to you, now.
INT: Well, I wonder, along the lines of these early years and even later – and you've attended so many Dumbarton Oaks symposia – there must have been some quite memorable experiences among those; I understand there were quite heated debates.
AH: Mm, no. Of course, Professor Ševčenko was always asking a series of questions, you know, but –
INT: How was he as a teacher? How was it having him as your mentor?
AH: Well, I owe everything to him. I'll tell you why: because I went there not knowing what my strengths were, what I wanted to do, my strengths and my weaknesses. And he said to me, "You know the Greek language. You like the written word, don't you?" I said yes. "Well," he said, "continue that." He gave me, when I went to his seminar – he opened up Patrologia Graeca and gave me a passage to translate and I did. He said, "You've seen that before." "No, sir."
HE: It's not my bedside reading.
AH: I said, "I've studied the classics, which I admire, but I never studied the fathers of the church. He said, "Hm. Well. Alright," he says. "You'll be my student. You can take my courses." And I remember: there was another woman, who was – she was also from Europe. And he said to her that she had to take the test. And she said, "Over my dead body." She says, "I have a degree." And he said, "Then, you're not my student." Well, he could be – I'll tell you. I mean, Meyendorff was, by nature, a very gentle, very mild person. The other one – you've known Ševčenko, haven't you? But, I'll say something else for Ševčenko. Ševčenko would go to bat for his students. Yes. He was there for us all the time. And knowing how demanding he was, we worked hard. You couldn't produce for Ševčenko something that was substandard; he'd throw it in your face! Sure. So, I – he was – for me, he was the guiding light. Afterwards, I wanted to continue with him but he left Columbia and went to Dumbarton Oaks, as acting director, interim director. And he told me to go to Meyendorff, because Father Meyendorff had come to Columbia as a visiting professor for a year. And when I told him that I wanted to continue for a doctorate, he said, "You have to come to Fordham. I'm leaving. I can't accept a position here, and I'm offered something at Fordham." And that's it. That's the story of my life, girls. I've got to go now, because –
HE: -- because you think you're going to get rained on.
AH: So, of course, I was going to – I didn't know if you had interviewed Alice-Mary.
INT: We're planning to.
INT: In August.
AH: Yes. And I was going to suggest that you go to her, because she is Dumbarton Oaks. She's been there from '65 all the way to last, this past year.
HE: This year.
AH: She retired. And we are now – in fact, I'm writing an article for her Festschrift. So, she is phenomenal, as far as I'm concerned, because not only is she a superb scholar, but she's also an excellent administrator. I envy this, as far as administration goes. I can't, I hate it, I dread it – administration. Don't give me such duties, no, in my white tower there, ivory tower.
INT: You were quite involved with the Byzantine Center here at Queens.
AH: Well, yes, I was there, yes, but not in the administration, yeah. Right. And it was a small center. We started it with, you know, Professor Psomiadis, who was the founder of the center, and I helped him out. It's – I cannot dismiss – I'll tell you why: because I cannot fire anybody. [Laughter] I can't! I would die before I had to fire somebody, before I tell somebody, because I can't use you anymore. I have a cleaning lady and the poor thing now is getting older, and I do more work than she does. [Laughter] My sons tell me, "This is absurd." I can't, I can't tell anybody, "I don't need you anymore." I can't. But Alice-Mary is fantastic. And then, like Helen – they can juggle, as I said, fifty different projects, here, there. I hate traveling – that's another thing.
HE: She still goes to Greece.
AH: Not anymore. And I can't travel because I've got problems with my back and sitting is not good for me. So, if you'll excuse me – I'm eighty-three years old.
INT: Thank you.
INT: Thank you, that's amazing.
HE: Do you want me to get somebody to get you out to a taxi?
INT: I can walk you out.
HE: Do you need to do your introduction or do we just keep going?
INT: I think we can just keep going.
INT: This is part two and now we will be speaking with Helen Evans at the Metropolitan Art Museum. We're so honored to talk with you today. Thank you so much. So, we understand that you were a summer fellow in 1981. Was that how you first came to work at Dumbarton Oaks, or were you involved earlier than that?
HE: No, it's not how I first came and – I can't remember. I remember being at the symposium that was the first symposium that Robert Thomson from Harvard attended. And I spoke at the symposium "East of Byzantium," and I had not even, really, picked Byzantine studies as my dissertation topic at that time, and so it was a paper I had given for Tom Matthews, and he was one of the co-higher-ups of the symposium. And I remember giving the paper and being so stunned that I was giving it, and my mother had just almost died, so I'd come from the hospital to the conference, and I'd re-written the paper in the hospital so that I hadn't – the research wasn't good enough. I had no access to the books to do anything about it. And I was so nervous that when I finished speaking – and people were very, very positive about it – I essentially tore off the platform and had not unclipped the mic. So, I remember that, mercifully, somebody gasped, I stopped, and the mic cord was as tight as it could have gotten. One more step and I could have discovered whether I fell down or the platform turned over. [Laughter] So that's one of my first great memories of Dumbarton Oaks. But then in '81, as I began my dissertation, I had a fellowship. I started graduate school to do Japanese art history. I think I'm the only Byzantinist that went on the Silk Road backwards, from your point of view. We had lived in Tokyo for several years, when my husband set up a merger venture there. And I began studying at Sophia University, the Jesuit school in Tokyo, and then ended up studying Hagia Sophia, so it was a reverse. And when the man I went to the Institute of Fine Arts to study with retired, himself –
INT: Was that Krakow? [?]
HE: No, I went to study with Alexander Soper, who was the Pelican History of Arts author of art and architecture of China and art and architecture of Japan and was a grand old man. It led me to tell everybody who asked me for advice on dissertations to be sure that your advisor is either tenured, or you have time to finish before they come up for tenure and is young enough not to retire before you finish, which used to infuriate Tom Matthews as a set of basic advice, but it was highly relevant to my life. Soper was a wonderful person to study with. I just had no intelligence that would lead me to have figured out how old he was. I knew he was old, but I didn't know that he would retire, himself. And Tom Matthews, whom – I'd taken every course that Tom had taught at the Institute. I arrived just before, er, just after he did – then let me become a Byzantinist. So I, overnight, left Japan and went to the other end of the Silk Road. And I had published my talk in the Dumbarton Oaks "East of Byzantium" series. It was on an Armenian topic. And the Byzantine topic, Greek topic I thought would be a dissertation topic I couldn't get the permissions I would need to do it. Tom told me that if I would answer a question for him on a book he was working on, then it would be a perfect topic for me, because the manuscript I was studying would be in the States and I would be able to cope with two children and the husband I had—have, too, now. So, I suddenly became an Armenologist and went and took courses in Armenian and have backed up the Silk Road ever since then. So, I have the advantage of – or disadvantage, depending on your point of view of my scholarship – of having skipped classical Greece – took one course. I think the advantage is that I studied Al Gandhara a good deal in college with Soper and it makes you ask two questions that I don't think you always think to ask when you come out of the great western classical tradition. And so one of them is, "Did the motif travel?" but the second question is, "Did the meaning travel?" And we assume a transmission of meaning that I don't think we should always assume, and that's been a part of what I've always thought that you had to prove was how – even when the image is as simple as a Christian symbol, does the community that continues to use it receive it in the way the community that produced it thinks of it. And it may be a subtle difference, or it may be a very big one. For Gandhara it was usually very big. If you go to the Afghan gold show that we have on right now – if you haven't seen it – there's a wonderful necklace that has a cameo, and it's a classical god—I think its Mercury—but it's one of the classical gods and its hung sideways. Clearly the man who had to put it in the necklace did not care that he had a male figure. He could not have missed the head and the feet, so it's not like, "I don't know it's a human being." It just meant nothing to him. To him, it meant, "I've got an exotic rock from the other end of the earth that proves how powerful and wealthy I am." And then in the catalogue, of course, they do it upright so you have no idea that it's a total other meaning to whoever in the world owned it in the vast past.
INT: So, it was through Tom Matthews that you came to know Dumbarton Oaks.
HE: Through Tom Matthews – Tom Matthews encouraging his students to go to Dumbarton Oaks symposia. I went to graduate school, like Angela did, later than you all are. I had returned to – I had come to New York – I grew up in Tennessee – from having studied in Tokyo, and the person I studied with, Julia Meech, had written the letters that got me into the Institute of Fine Arts as an Asian student. And I had been interested in medieval art in college, and so I took all the medieval courses that were of interest to me and that was everything Tom taught, so I had all of Tom's courses, I had all of Soper's courses, and I had, like, three other courses by the time I was taking my orals, but I turned in a qualifying paper for Tom and a qualifying paper for Soper and used Japanese answers for some of the issues that I took my orals on – on Byzantine for Tom – a year and a half later. It was several years before I felt like I really knew Byzantium.
INT: Have you worked at all – or perhaps you could comment on the importance of the collection, Byzantine Collection, at Dumbarton Oaks as you see it as a scholar of art history, of Byzantine art history, and also from your point of view here in New York, vis-à-vis the collection here of the Metropolitan – and the relationship.
HE: My predecessor Margaret Frazer was actually at one point offered the job as the head of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks. And I think that the Met and Dumbarton Oaks in varying ways have not precisely collaborated or cooperated, but also have been respectful of each other's collections. They're the two great collections in this country. I was charged when I was hired here to make the Met's collection better than Dumbarton Oaks – you know, that was fully said to me. And whether you think I've done it or not, that is what I have been certainly trying to ensure – that we were as comprehensive and as important. I think that what the Dumbarton Oaks collection did in – for many decades – was to offer a place where, in this country, you could see a collection brought together and identified as Byzantine. When I renamed our collections – and now my title is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine art, I changed the focus of what this museum did. And our collection is built on the 1880s theory that the great northern tradition took a little bit from the Mediterranean Christianity and infused it with the noble people of the north to create Gothic art. And the early installation of the Museum, actually up until 2000, was origins of European art. And what we had done with the installation here in 2000, which Dumbarton Oaks already had, was to see it as the art of the Byzantine world, which as one of its aspects influences European art, but does not exist only for having influenced European art. So that it is a change that was very important here and with the exhibitions I did. And I think it is relevant, in that Anastasia Tourta, who just retired as the director of the museum in Thessaloniki, said it was the first collection in a major museum that used the word Byzantine. So Dumbarton Oaks was always this beacon that understood Byzantine, but what we added was Byzantine in a larger context, because of the breadth of our collections. The summer I was at D.O., I – which would have been when I should have spent all my time looking at the collection – I never meant to be a museum curator, so it wasn't the way I particularly thought of my life. I actually spent the summer working at the Freer, because the manuscript I was doing my dissertation on was at the Freer, so it was really in their store rooms, looking at all of their Christian objects because they let me look at them all, and they have this amazing collection of Christian material that never goes on display that I remember as more influential on me than actually the D.O. collection.
INT: Do you remember from that time – I think you were also working with a piece at the Walters; am I right about that? Maybe that's wrong in the record. During your summer fellowship?
HE: I went to visit the Walters that summer. I spent some time – I was looking at the Armenian manuscripts at the Walters, maybe that's what it was, if you have notes. I was supposed to do my dissertation on a manuscript in the Freer that had not been fully studied and was filled with illuminations. It was, in theory, by the artist Toros Roslin and was therefore connected to the one by Roslin that is signed that's at the Walters. And in the end, I turned in a dissertation that discussed the western influence on Armenian illumination in the kingdom of Cilicia, which was pretty much every image that Sirarpie der Nersessian had said was a native Armenian tradition. It was a very traumatic dissertation, to disagree with a woman that was as wonderful as she was when I met her and who was canonized in the Armenian community. And some people still don't speak to me because of it; some people do. But at the time I turned it in, my first and second reader had not expected that dissertation, so it was not the dissertation that was supposed to be fast and dirty that I was sent out to do, where I was supposed to agree with her. But I think that has to be it, because I'd go up to the Walters and look at those manuscripts and then I would spend most of my time during the week in the Freer, going through the actual manuscript and then spend half the day at Dumbarton Oaks. And to me what was wonderful about Dumbarton Oaks was that I went in early in the morning and I left about ten or eleven at night and I had my children in camp and my husband in New York and I just read and looked at books all day. I had relatively little interaction with the people there. I was there the summer that the Fellows Building was closed down for something they were doing to it so we did not have the fellows' lunch where we all talked together. And I stayed at night to use the library.
INT: So you were probably in the Wisconsin Avenue apartments.
HE: Yes. I was there the summer Prince Charles got married. This is the way I can remember it. And the Washington newspaper, afternoon paper, was going bankrupt. And they devoted the entire summer to wonderfully snarky articles on the wedding, which I would pick up the paper on the way up the hill, read all these kind of Vanity Fair articles on the wedding and then the next morning go back to Dumbarton Oaks and return to Byzantium. And when they got married – there were several Greeks there the summer I was there and they invited me – they rented a television and we all went and looked at the wedding, and they devoted the whole discussion to how the English had learned from the Greek wedding not to have flowers because that was what drove King Constantine off the throne. And any effort to say, "Well, actually we think it's an incredibly expensive wedding in which flowers would have looked busy on TV," was met with "No, no. They knew." And I learned of everybody who was unacceptable to the Greeks at the wedding, starting with King Constantine. So that was the other thing I learned that summer: I learned more about Greek politics and Prince Charles' wedding – and really remarkably useful and lovely access to the library.
INT: Could you get a chance from your time at D.O. to get a sense of the, I guess – an active relationship between institutions like the Freer, with which you were working closely, and Dumbarton Oaks?
HE: At the time I was there, the relationship was close to zero – largely from Dumbarton Oaks, then. I was welcomed extremely well at the Freer but not because of Dumbarton Oaks. And I made some use of the Library of Congress, where there may have been a little bit more of a connection than I ever perceived, but Dumbarton Oaks viewed itself as a self-enclosed entity. And the only thing I really remember is somebody unacceptable went swimming in the swimming pool and so there were large notes that you – it didn't matter if you were on the board of trustees of Harvard – you were not allowed to swim in the swimming pool. I remember looking at that and thinking, that's just really weird. But I don't even know who it was that insisted that they should be allowed to swim in the D.O. pool.
INT: Was Giles Constable the director?
HE: Constable was the director and it either was the first summer that they had summer fellows or one of the first summers. I did not know that, but later I learned. So I, of course, appreciated very much the fact that he had opened it up in the summer. It was clear that summer that not all the staff was fond of the fact, but I didn't know what they were un-fond of. I just – you could tell from their tone of voice. I think that it depends on where you stand. I came to Dumbarton Oaks late. I have no firsthand knowledge of when Mrs. Bliss had footmen seating people. The fanciest symposium I went to – we were in the Orangery, and the tables did have white tablecloths; maybe the food was served. What happened was that it was a weird moment in time where using red clay flowerpots was very chic for serving chocolate mousse, which would look like dirt and you'd stick some flowers in the middle of it and that was – those were the centerpieces on the table and my table of course was the young nobodies in the back – no matter what our age was. And so we didn't realize that the waiters would serve us the mousse. And I do still remember the look of disgust on the waiter's face when he got to us, having served like three other tables, and realized we had served ourselves our dessert. That's the closest I ever was to the high Bliss years. There was, the summer I was there, a young man, who Giles had allowed to go through the Bliss archives, and his mother had been there before him and he put up a little exhibition on the Blisses and I remember that to me it was just interesting, and to an older generation at D.O. it was horrific. Mr. Bliss made very bad grades at Harvard, so I remember this guy saying to me, "But I found one where he didn't have any Fs and that was very hard." It was all Cs and Ds. But there they were – I think maybe even on the label. But someone was telling me that when you were there in Mrs. Bliss' years you took her for a walk, told her what you wanted money for, and if she liked it, she'd pull the money out of a little purse between her breasts. So, then of course she dies and somebody writes—probably Ševčenko—and says "I want x money for next year," and Harvard writes back, "Fill in the forms." And these are people that have told amusing anecdotes to Mrs. Bliss; they haven't filled in, "I'm going to spend $50 for transportation and $10 for food." So I know there was a great deal of tension in the transition, and that Constable was one of the people that got the pressure of the transition. But for me he was always an extremely helpful person that was someone that I saw. I don't remember particularly talking to anybody my summer there; I remember reading books.
INT: Have you been involved in symposia or colloquia or any of the conferences since your time as a summer fellow?
HE: I've gone to a number of the symposia. I have not been to the symposia for the last four years because I've been the editor – oh no, the head of the editorial board of the Art Bulletin, which unfortunately has its major annual meeting the same weekend as Dumbarton Oaks. So I have been fulfilling that thing and missing each and every one of the Dumbarton Oaks symposia as a result. I have used a number of people involved with Dumbarton Oaks in the writing of the catalogues for my two shows. I didn't actually go to Dumbarton Oaks to do any major amount of research of my own. There are very few books, if any, at Dumbarton Oaks that are not in New York City – just a little bit more irritating how many different physical places you may have to go to to get them, but the getting of them is just as possible.
INT: You've also written on pieces from the D.O. collection for, I think, for catalogues here and in other aspects of your position here. Unless again, I'm –
HE: You may be right. Maybe for "Glory of Byzantium", although I don't know. For "Glory of Byzantium," I was very intent that I would prove that American scholars were on par with Byzantinists in other countries, because if you look at the arc of Byzantine exhibitions, the ones in the generations right before it had been very much Byzantine art in France by French, Byzantine art in England by English. And it seemed reasonable to, in a way, prove that America had come of age in scholars. And I thought very hard at that time against having entries for catalogues written by scholars from other countries or from lending institutions, not that I won every one of them, but overall I won that I should get people who were involved in the object rather than the institution for authors. And then for "Byzantium: Faith and Power," where actually Europe is ahead of American scholarship in looking at the late Byzantine, post-Byzantine period – or was at that time – we went in the other direction and drew on a much more international body of authors. I think Gudrun Bühl is an excellent head for the collection at Dumbarton Oaks, in part because she's able to stand back from the pattern of Dumbarton Oaks and look at it from a perspective that comes out of, in part, the Bode Museum, which is so important in its collection because all the German scholars that were writing on Byzantine and early Christian art were looking at the Bode collection to define that for them. In a way, to me, if you look at collections, what you need to extend to is who's using them. And that's what, in a way, makes the Byzantine collection at Dumbarton Oaks important – is the variety of scholars who, whether they looked at any individual object by the hour or walked past them and to a degree defined themselves by them. I don't know if you've looked at the collections here at the Met, but if you go to the Cloisters, everything's big. Mr. Rockefeller bought a collection of a sculptor and it's what that sculptor bought that drives that collection. Mr. Morgan, which is the core of our collection downtown, liked little things. So, if you take their big things and our little things, you've got some chance of knowing what people had in the Middle Ages. But one looks like nobody had any furniture and there are large stones, and we look like all they had was tchotchkas and no place to put a roof over them. It has nothing to do with the taste of the time; it's the taste of the collector right around 1900, because they were both built up then. Now, Julie Jones is very interested in the pre-Columbian collection, for the fact that it's, in her mind, accumulated largely in terms of aesthetics. And the Byzantine collection is increasingly interesting in the degree to which it ignored religion. The Blisses were not that interested in things that were Orthodoxy. Icons come in after them, and there's a whole body of literature, of which I now have two shelves, of research on – beginning of the twentieth century – you begin to get the argument that modern art will be based on Byzantine art, that they both avoid looking at realism. And to a certain extent the Blisses fit into that – that you are looking at something or an aesthetic that doesn't care about the religious meaning. And now we're in a period where we're going back to a focus on the religious meaning.
INT: They did have scholarly advisors, though, I think.
HE: Oh no, they had very, very good ones, and there was that one exhibition that was done in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia, on the Blisses' collectors – no, and she broke off an engagement with Tyler –
INT: Royall Tyler.
HE: They had very, very good advisors, but they turned down works that they thought were too religious. There's a lovely work in the V&A that they did not buy. They were not collecting orthodoxy. Then you can get into the argument—Rob Nelson enjoys it—whether they were collecting Royall Tyler's taste or not. I think it's actually and ultimately fairly irrelevant. They built up this collection and then supported the scholars. They could have just had this collection in their home and not brought in the scholars to research it. What puts their collection into a larger framework is all the Bliss scholars that came through – you now – if they had just seen it as Hillwood, the Marjorie Merriweather Post collection. Have you been to Hillwood? Have any of you been to Hillwood? Oh, you have to go to Hillwood. It's in Washington, D.C., and you have to make an appointment ahead, but Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, Mr. Davis, bought a lot of things in Russia. Stalin was selling them, and Davis was the American ambassador to Russia. And so you have this house that makes Dumbarton Oaks look like a small, tiny little servants' quarters, splaying across the hill, filled with things that are being studied more now, but if she had put the amount of money into paying for scholars to come out of Russia in those times of trouble and be around Hillwood and look at her pieces as the Blisses did to theirs, we would have a different understanding of Hillwood. It's really the Blisses' great gift that they understood the need to have things studied and to get them looked at from – what we may now go back and look at differently; but we go back and look at Syriac studies differently than 1900, when there's several translations I like to quote. What else can I tell you that is any use?
INT: I wonder if you might comment on – one of the great contributions of your exhibits that you've done here at the Met was really to open up Byzantine art to just a tremendous amount of people, I think, who never thought about it. And just the amount of people who visited – it's wonderful – the exhibits that you had. And Dumbarton Oaks still, despite the choices of its Byzantine art collection, doesn't – there's still a tremendous amount of people who don't know about it. We don't get the visitors, I don't think.
HE: Keenan did not want visitors. Keenan told me he did not want visitors. I think that what the Met offers the opportunity to do – and it's doing it right now with a show called "Pen and Parchment" – is to look at things from a new point of view. I study – I come from the periphery. I come out of Japan through Armenia to Constantinople. I think that the important thing about Byzantium to do in this generation was to knock down the idea that there was a unicum Byzantium that had only great art; it was only Constantinople. Everything else was bad to the margins. But in Europe every single town had a different style. If every town in Europe has a different style, then there are lots of different centers of wealth in the larger Byzantine sphere, and they need to be looked at with a certain amount of interest, at least in what they're trying to say – so, how they receive Byzantium, how they turn it around, how they define themselves in relationship to it. And that's what I tried to do in the Byzantine show and to show that this is an empire that for many, many centuries sets a standard for people, even if they don't know what it looks like. They know it exists. So in "The Glory of Byzantium" we used a lot of quotations, because I also wanted people to know that they could read and write. And one of my favorite – the people coming to the Met don't necessarily know that – in fact that's why they don't go to Dumbarton Oaks. My least amusing memory of "The Glory of Byzantium" was standing halfway through the show in a gallery of ivories, in which every single image had Christ – maybe a baby, maybe a dead man – every image had Christ – and listening to some man turn to his wife and say, "Who are these Byzantines—did they live before or after Christ?" I have no idea who he was. I thought, I'm just not going to be able to say politely: everything in this room has Christ on it. But that's the audience. For all I know that man has a Nobel Prize. But he certainly was well dressed and sophisticated. I sought in the show at the lowest level to have – in both shows but certainly in the first one – to have people walk through the galleries and, if they read no label, to say, "I don't know who those people were, where they were, but they certainly did interesting things. I should go back and read a label." And then at the highest level to say, "I've always been interested in this issue, and she's brought together the works that allow me to come to some conclusions." So I wanted an Alice-Mary Talbot to gain what she could, but also to make people realize it's really a great empire. In the second show a Russian scholar writing on an icon I borrowed – where I only borrowed it so that I could say that the style of the Palaiologan period continues on in Russia until past the end of the empire – her entry on it was that in the fifteenth century in Russia there's a cult that believes that the world is going to end in the 1490s and it's how they count the dates of the apocalypse. And months after the show was over I realized that they were right: the world ended at the date they said because it's almost exactly the same year that the Portuguese break the eastern Mediterranean's monopoly on the spice routes and that there will – it doesn't matter who's going to rule the eastern Mediterranean or Russia. No one will ever have a monopoly as they have had throughout all of history until that date. So, fire and brimstone didn't occur, but a seismic shift in world power. And by the time we have academic institutions in the model that we think of, the eastern Mediterranean has already become relatively dead. Sinai—and I spent a lot of time studying it—looks like it's at the other end of the earth. That's our favorite opening sentence: Sinai at the other end of the earth. Well, Sinai's actually right dead center on the most important trade route until the Portuguese find another route. It's a balance that shifts, and we don't even think about it because once we are doing academic scholarship, it's already shifted so far we have trouble recreating it. So, I think what the shows here have done to a degree is to open it up again. And not everyone is happy with it. But I was quite appalled when I studied Byzantine history at Columbia with Nina Garcoian that I was the only person in the classes that was not from the Byzantine world, that every other student would say they were studying it because of their contact—through a grandparent or a great grandparent—with some aspect, whether it was Russia or Syria. And I think it's – that Byzantium is too important to – what Suger thought at the abbey of St. Denis he built to compete with the church of Hagia Sophia. He didn't build to compete with another church. He writes that he wants to know that his liturgical objects are as great as those the crusaders have seen. But my favorite quote before you end up is Harold the Bluetooth – do you know this wonderful –?, great fun – we borrowed for "The Glory of Byzantium" several objects from Scandinavia, and I wanted to show that the Varangian Guard were Scandinavians, that there was this northern route to Constantinople that we tend to forget, that exists by the ninth century, if not earlier. So first I go to Denmark to borrow, and the director of the Danish National Museum takes me into a special room, tells me it's the office of the first director of the museum, and we have this long conversation in which I cannot figure out what's happening, but I know I'm supposed to be incredibly appreciative that I'm there. And it turns out, which I don't actually learn until the show opens, that in borrowing the Dagmar cross, which to me was a small, cloisonné enamel cross hanging in a case with several other things in the Danish National Museum, I had borrowed the liberty bell of Denmark, and that he has actually had to have a meeting of all of his staff to justify sending it to the show. It is Dagmar, who may or may not have ever owned it because it may have belonged to her sister-in-law or her mother-in-law, became a symbol of Danish nationalism from Germany in, like, the seventeenth century. She was buried next to her sister-in-law and mother-in-law in a church from which the tombs were removed and moved to a fancier burial church for the kings. And the women's jewelry was commingled, so we don't actually know which woman was wearing it. Her mother-in-law was from Kiev, and it led on one hand to a reappraisal of the cross from those who had wanted it to be from Thessaloniki, because it makes no sense for it to be from Thessaloniki. On the other hand, it made the Danes quite pleased to lend it. And I got this quote where Harold the Bluetooth, as he is raising money to go invade England, brings out all of his riches that he's gotten from being a guard, a mercenary in the Varangian Guard, and shows it compared to the man who's just been pillaging the British isles. And Harold has more loot. So Harold leads the next invasion of the British isles, which might have been a great success except that it's the same year that William the Conqueror invades, so Harold ends up quite dead and Harold's army ends up dead, but you have this saga in which Harold of the Blue – and therefore one expects dead – tooth is talking about having served in Constantinople, and I find that whole question of how you go north and what you go through quite fascinating.
INT: Fascinating.
INT: That story reminds me to ask about the different pieces and the story of getting things for exhibitions. In your experience for these exhibits or just in general, what is the accessibility of the D.O. collection, from the point of view of a curator at another institution? – for exhibitions and so forth?
HE: Well, I would preface it with saying that my borrowing was before Gudrun. Dumbarton Oaks liked to be exceptionally difficult, and it's noteworthy for the degree to which it's exceptionally difficult. I borrowed for both of my exhibitions the works that mattered to me from Dumbarton Oaks, and I found my relations with Sue Boyd and Stephen Zwirn to be, on one level, very comfortable and on another level – Sue Boyd, in particular, felt, I think quite accurately, that she was not respected – and one way to try to forge respect was to be difficult – loans – and so it was a circular pattern. Gudrun lent probably less than the Royal Academy would like to have borrowed, but since the Royal Academy asked me for four pieces, and I don't think I sent five, because we opened our new galleries at the same time they opened. The problem for Dumbarton Oaks and its collection – the problem for me and my collection – is, if you're getting ready to do a show, we are both fairly well published and so you pick up a book and you say, "Well, now, I'd like two thirds of their collection and that will solve all my loans." And you just can't borrow the entire Dumbarton Oaks collection and still have it seen at D.O. I think D.O.'s problem, which will be highly related to the attitude of the current director and Margaret Mullett and Gudrun, is – and maybe Georgetown's neighbors – how much it wishes to do an aggressive outreach and try to get people to come. And historically it has not sought to do that. And under Keenan it actively sought not to do that.
INT: I know it's been burned a little bit in the past with things getting stolen or lost. We hadn't heard too many details about that, but we heard some talk of that. I don't know if that's a very old story or –
HE: Nobody kept records like we keep now. The first thing that happened to me when I came here was a very nice woman asked for the return of an object, I returned it to her, and she said, "That's not what it looked like." Mercifully, the woman took photographs herself of the piece when it had been installed in the gallery, so that we could point out to her that it, in fact, did look just like the piece when it was on display in the gallery. But our letter – first of all it was on nice lady stationery: thank you very much for the loan of your boxwood cross with the lapis lazuli pieces attached to it – which were blue glass. We sent a letter that was essentially, "You're wearing purple, so it could have been a ball gown or a cotton smock." We now – Dumbarton Oaks, I'm sure, now also – anything that comes in this building is photographed in every conceivable way. But it wasn't what you used to do. And I don't know how much documentation the Blisses kept of their purchases. They have to have done better than Mr. Walters, who burned all of his documentation, so there is no documentation for anything the Walters owned before the day Mr. Walters opened it in the museum. We've changed tremendously both how objects have to be kept in a building, how they have to be recorded. I don't know what D.O. does but I assume they do something like what the Met does and our registrars office, once a year, comes into every department's area and pulls a card out and says, "Show me that object," and you're supposed to be able to do it within five minutes, so that every work catalogued in this department, all 10,000, we're supposed to know where they are at every section. And for the things that are mainstream, you normally do. It's when they pull out something really weird that you've been hiding in a corner for forever, because you kind of don't want it. So one time I watched the arms and armor people freaking out because they'd pulled out a card for a large wrought iron gate, and it took a great deal of trouble to figure out where over the years that gate had been moved over and over to get it out of the way. It was found. We had it, but it wasn't in five minutes. So, I never know whether things are actually lost – that you used to be more comfortable, in Mrs. Bliss' time I'm sure, with giving something, so you might have a record, but Mrs. Bliss might have given it to someone. Or maybe not. But the packing it up, moving it around – none of that is acceptable and hasn't been acceptable for several decades by museum standards. But you went from being a large house, which people inhabited with objects in it, to being an institutional museum. And I suspect that the transition was awkward in the same way that it was awkward for people who expected to go ask Mrs. Bliss for money and suddenly had to fill out forms. Well I assume those same people had felt comfortable, as all the curators in the Hermitage used to feel comfortable, in taking the work they were studying to their office to study it. I've never seen anything in the Hermitage that was not on display that wasn't sitting in somebody's drawer, often for a long time, because they had to blow the dust off it to show it to me. Now that they've had this woman who was stealing things and then dropped dead on them before there was any chance to hide her thefts, they have all sorts of new rules. But, essentially they assumed that their curators were honorable people. I'm sure Dumbarton Oaks and the Met have always assumed that people are honorable. Now we have lots more security, and I do not bring things to my office to study them as I'm writing up purchase papers or considering where to put them, but Margaret would have. And the Museum would have thought it was reasonable for Margaret to have done it.
INT: Well, shall we wrap things up, maybe?
INT: Sure, I guess. Maybe, just generally, what do you see as the role that Dumbarton Oaks plays in Byzantine Studies, as someone from another institution, another city, and how do you see that role changing in the future?
HE: Well, I think that Dumbarton Oaks was for a very long time the only game in town and that that gave it the ability not to have to reconsider its role. And the Byzantine Studies Conference – I don't know the whole warzones—but the Byzantine Studies Conference started as a war with Dumbarton Oaks, so if you have not interviewed somebody about that you should find somebody that knows its warzones. I came in after the Byzantine Studies Conference was so well established, I was stunned to discover there was actually a war. What's happened now, which I think is for everybody's good, is – you asked Angela about the program at Queens; Rob Nelson is building a strong program at Yale; Ioli's program at Harvard, I think, is a little different because it's tied to Dumbarton Oaks. We now have every year at least one, and in some years four, fellows that are doing Byzantine studies at the Met. Often they're people that in another year do it at Dumbarton Oaks, so that it's not like we do and you don't take or vice versa, but there's a greater diversity of places where you can go consider it. And I think that is making Dumbarton Oaks think about what it wants to be. Obviously there's a greater pressure to have all three parts of Dumbarton Oaks more coequal, and for the Byzantinists, of course, that is not something that we ever recognized as appropriate. Now, for me and probably for you, we came in late enough that it doesn't seem such a shock. But I assume when the will was read and it was recognized that they had left their money equally to all three parts, that that was a shock, that the generation who were there for the reading of the will had expected two thirds to Byzantine studies and to divide the rest to the other two. Pre-Columbian studies have been doing some incredibly impressive things, so it's – I think back then there was a huge shock when garden studies went from formal garden design to social history. So, all those things, I think, move the institution forward and that one part of the institution will continue to do the very necessary translations that – it's easy to fail to appreciate the amount that Angela's text lets you look up aspects, for an art historian or for any other type of scholar, that were utterly inaccessible before and that all of those need to be made accessible and Alice-Mary is doing more translations in retirement. I don't know whether Dumbarton Oaks will ever want to be extremely accessible. Keenan believed that his neighbors in Georgetown who were mad at D.O. for many reasons did not want lots of children coming through D.O. And it was in fact the pre-Columbianists that – who I talked to – that were the most upset, because there is no other good collection of that material in Washington as an alternative. I am hoping that the exhibitions we have done here not only have paid off in more Byzantine exhibitions—certainly Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy told me he did Robin Cormack's show because we got such good attendance here – but that it will also make people look at the larger geographical sphere that you can include within the – sphere of influence isn't quite right – but you can easily go from Slavic studies and Russia and the Balkans to Ethiopia and look at that material, I think, with a new interest. And Syriac studies, I think, is an important aspect of that. If Syria could just get off the terrorist list, my show would be so much happier. I have plans for an exhibition, and I clearly now am going to have to get real and drop the Syrian pieces and go for photographs. So, if you can get the U.S. government to drop Syria from the terrorist list, that would be my favorite choice at the moment. Syria's willing to lend; it's the U.S. government's rule that is the problem. The other thing that I – either just because anybody who's really angry doesn't talk to me or because it's actually changed – is there seems to be a greater willingness, except among some Greeks, to think of the Byzantine sphere in a broader circle. Now there are a certain number of Greeks that don't speak to me so I do know about them, because they tell me so. But I think Dumbarton Oaks had a Coptic symposium a few years ago, which was a first for them. I think that none of this is brand new, but I think we're moving toward a more elastic definition. And Constable may very well have been the beginning of that. He was the director who didn't come from the inner circle.
INT: Well thank you very much –
HE: Thank you.
INT: – for your time.]]>
For the video, return to ICFA Oral History Initiative: Robin Sinclair Cormack.
MM: My name's Margaret Mullett. The date is the eighteenth of April, 2011, and I'm interviewing Professor Robin Cormack in the guest house of Dumbarton Oaks. Also present, Shalimar Fojas White, Günder Varinlioğlu, and Rona Razon, who's going to ask questions about field work later on in the interview. Robin, do we have your permission to record?
RC: You do have my permission to record.
MM: Perhaps we could start with your career before you came to Dumbarton Oaks. Can you give us some highlights?
RC: The question I've often been asked—and I've never answered—is why I came into Byzantine studies at all. And, in a way, I'd like to give the long answer, which I've never given before, because so many other Byzantinists seem to have had an easier answer, like "I was born in Istanbul," or "I had an inspiration when I went to Trebizond when I was three, and I did this ever since," and this is not how it worked for me. And I more or less came into Byzantine studies by chance and happenstance, so could I just say how that happened? I was born in 1938 and I went to a school in the UK of a kind which no longer exists, although people are always trying to bring it back because it was thought to be such an academically successful system. So I went to what was called a grammar school in Bristol, which was a direct grant school and entry to that school was entirely by examination and for those who couldn't afford the very low fees there were scholarships. And I went to that school when I was seven. When I was eight, I started learning Latin and when I was nine, I started learning Greek. And my Greek teacher was a very unhappy, dissatisfied schoolmaster called Philip Sherrard who subsequently I became a colleague of in King's College, London and continually met after he moved to Greece and worked on Byzantine spirituality. And Philip, I suppose, was somebody who introduced me to Greece. In this school, at the age of twelve, you made a choice about your future examination subjects and I entered the Classics form with twenty-three other boys—it was a boys' school and from the age of twelve to fourteen we did a few other subjects—we dropped all subjects at the age of fourteen, in my case, because I was young in the class and then took university entrance at eighteen. So I was with a group and we were an exceptional group in the school, because all twenty-two of the twenty-three got scholarships to Oxford University to read Classics. What was good about the school was, first of all, it was by academic ability only—so you can see it was full of very bright boys—and secondly the schoolteachers at that time were quite exceptional. Every single Classics teacher had a first in Classics from Oxford University. In another generation these guys would not have gone to school teaching; they would have been university teachers. And indeed one of them still is—David Raven is still a lecturer in Classics in Oxford University now. So we had an exceptional teaching at school and we, for example, read the whole of Virgil and Homer in the original language at school. We were trained to do verse, we were trained in accents—we had a very great Classics training, with the result that when I went to Oxford to read Classics, I and all my fellow students from this school were incredibly disappointed. We thought that the dons at Oxford were self-indulgent and lazy and we all wanted to leave Classics. And all of us except one did so. The only one that remained in classics was W.V. Harris, who went to Columbia and is still there. All the rest of us said, "We must get out of this subject with no future," about which we were quite wrong probably but that's what we all decided. And I applied to go to the Courtauld Institute of Art in London to work in history of art—I wanted to move into modern art history, that was my aim, and I had to wait for a year before going there and I had my first job in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where they told me that I would be the only student at the Courtauld who knew how to hang a painting because every month I had to hang an exhibition. And my bosses were Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, who were quite famous critics and collectors at the time, and I learned a great deal from being at the ICA. I went to the Courtauld, after, for a second degree—a two-year degree—to do modern art. The system at the Courtauld was that your first year was spent in learning about the Renaissance and what art history was—this is the 1960s; what art history was in the 1960s was how to attribute, date, and find a provenance for a painting or any other work of art and that's what art history was. You didn't do any more than that; it was an un-theoretical, empirical subject extremely well taught at the Courtauld. And second year, I applied for the modern course but was taken aside by a medievalist, George Zarnecki, who suggested that with the language background I had, I would be much smarter to work in Byzantium or the Middle Ages. And he was extremely persuasive and so I moved, my second year of the Courtauld, to do a survey course on Byzantine art. My teacher was in the Warburg, another part of London University, Hugo Buchthal, and I went for my first class and he explained how the course worked. On paper, you did everything in Byzantium—architecture, arts, all periods. He said, "What happens on this course is that I teach you about manuscripts and you do the rest yourself." A very, I'm sure, typical way of learning in that period. Hugo Buchthal was an amazing art historian who had a complete photographic memory of every manuscript he'd ever looked at. And so as you discussed manuscripts and you would mention an image, you could see him turning over the pages in his mind until he said we've got the folio, 89 recto—that's the picture you mentioned. It was an extraordinary art experience. After that first degree at the Courtauld, I then started to work on a Ph.D. and I was interested in iconoclasm because André Grabar's book had come out, which was a very influential book on my years, and I wanted to work on Thessaloniki after iconoclasm. By this time, Hugo Buchthal, who'd been extremely disappointed not to become director of the Warburg Institute—the post went to Ernst Gombrich instead—in anger left the UK and went to New York to teach, which was a very good decision for him because the Ph.Ds in London, before me, he only had two Ph.D. students—Paul Hetherington, who was interested in Rome, and Cecelia Meredith, who worked on Codex Ebnerianus in Oxford and wrote an extremely good thesis on that subject. And I was the only other advanced student he had. Since he was leaving London, he explained he wouldn't be able to supervise me but by chance Cyril Mango had just been appointed to King's College so they were my two supervisors for my Ph.D. And the happenstance now is, why am I in Byzantine studies? Because Hugo Buchthal went to New York and the Courtauld decided to make an appointment in Byzantine art. It was a new appointment at the Courtauld—not at the Warburg—and it was a joint appointment in the University of London between the Slavic School and the post was advertised and I was the first person at the Courtauld ever to apply for a job rather than be appointed and there was a shortlist and the condition of the post was that you taught Slavonic, east European, and other art in two parts of London University and that the first year of the post you would learn Russian—it was an extremely useful thing to have done; very pleased with that. And so that's how my career began at the Courtauld Institute. I was appointed in 1966 and, apart from some years of leave, I then remained at the Courtauld until retirement in around 2004, when I went to the Getty and currently I do have a full-time lecturing post in Cambridge, in the Classics faculty, so I've gone back to the texts which I first learned.
MM: Let's look at it from the other end. How did you hear of Dumbarton Oaks, first, and what was its reputation in the world of Byzantine studies?
RC: The answer's quite easy. I heard of Dumbarton Oaks through Dumbarton Oaks Papers and Dumbarton Oaks Papers, when they came out, recorded the annual conferences. They were fantastically important volumes and one would rush to read them and that gave you the names of people who were either on the faculty at Dumbarton Oaks or who spoke at the conferences. In addition to that, Sirarpie Der Nersessian gave lectures in London in the sixties on Armenian art and by that time I believe she'd left Dumbarton Oaks and moved to Paris. She was an extremely charismatic lecturer, persuaded me that Toros Roslin was the greatest artist of the Middle Ages—a view I still hold, really. And so Dumbarton Oaks one knew through the papers and then I knew because Cyril Mango, who supervised me, had actually been at Dumbarton Oaks and then soon went back to Dumbarton Oaks.
MM: Great. So you were a Fellow, a Visiting Fellow, 1972-3, is that correct?
RC: That's correct.
MM: And you hadn't worked with D.O. before that; that was your first experience.
RC: That was my first experience with Dumbarton Oaks.
MM: So how did that come about? Someone suggested you apply? What was your project? Why did you decide to come?
RC: Okay. Positive and negative reasons. Cyril had suggested that at some point I should go to work at Dumbarton Oaks. In London that didn't seem the immediately obvious thing to do because the Warburg library is quite superb in Byzantine studies and certainly at that time, one felt, probably matched Dumbarton Oaks in terms of resources. But what was happening at the Courtauld was that the post I had turned out to be quite unsatisfactory, because a joint post turned out to be two full-time posts in two different parts of the University of London, teaching Russian art on a syllabus which couldn't be matched—I couldn't combine any teaching and so I was doing a phenomenal amount of teaching, going to meetings, and not getting any research done. So the attraction of Dumbarton Oaks was to get away from teaching and to have a year of research. And I actually gave in notice to the Courtauld and went to Dumbarton Oaks but was reappointed to the Courtauld singly, leaving the Slavonic school, when I came back, so I suppose you could say it was slight leverage also to go to Dumbarton Oaks in my personal career. But the main aim was to have unlimited time on research, partly because in my Ph.D.—I was appointed in the second year of my Ph.D., so I wrote my Ph.D. while teaching and without much research time. I'd spent one year in Greece and then just a few months in the library. And then I had to write the thesis in between teaching and learning Russian and going to Russia. I kind of needed a bit of space and Dumbarton Oaks certainly gave that space.
MM: And the project was Thessaloniki still, was it?
RC: I think so; basically to write up Thessaloniki, though in the end I never felt my thesis could turn into a book and so I published it as chapters and not as a book.
MM: And exhibitions, too?
RC: Yes, I started. I started doing exhibitions. My first exhibition was also in the seventies, an exhibition of Bulgarian icons which I did in Edinburgh. So I did my first experience of curating an exhibition around that time, as well.
MM: Can you remember your initial or first impressions of Dumbarton Oaks? Are they still fresh? Can you do that?
RC: I think they're pretty fresh. There's various layers of impressions—there's the good things and there's the bad things. And it was clearly a time of transition when I came to Dumbarton Oaks—absolutely obvious that things were changing, which actually was also true in the U.K. Universities changed an enormous amount in the early seventies, as university expanded and teaching and accountability became a major aspect of being a university teacher. And that was quite traumatic for a generation before mine, for whom university teaching had virtually no accountability, with the result that it always looked rather self-indulgent. And there were no projects. All research was individually motivated; one never cooperated with other people. And so that transition from what I would call self-indulgent to a greater accountability was beginning to happen in 1970. It was happening in London; it was clearly happening in Dumbarton Oaks. So my initial impressions were the formality of Dumbarton Oaks, the slight oddity that all the best offices were by the administrative faculty and visiting fellows were quite lucky—I was one of the last to get an office, a very small office—I was very, very pleased to have that. But there was obviously a difficulty of space and it was difficult to see how decisions about priority for space had actually been made. The good side was the book library; the way it was organized with art history at the center was quite amusing and there was a runner to the Library of Congress so any book not here, you simply filled in a list and they were brought by a runner the next day. And that was important for me because I was interested in interdisciplinary aspects of Byzantine studies and that could be fulfilled—the system, that was excellent.
MM: I wanted to ask about daily life—where you worked, where you ate, where you slept, and that kind of thing.
RC: Yes. There was a problem about daily life, because I had a wife and two small children and my wife gave up her job in mathematics teaching to come to Dumbarton Oaks and we were housed in McLean Gardens, up by the Cathedral in the apartment which in previous years had been occupied by Henry Maguire and his family, who had fully briefed us, in fact to enormous details like the fact that there were no egg cups for eating boiled eggs out of, a detail which never really worried us. McLean Gardens was quite a walk and we were advised not to walk. And we didn't have transport and there was no doubt that in that period spouses were excluded from participation in institute; they were not expected ever to appear or to be invited to any social occasions. And this was deeply resented by my wife, who spent the year being very angry, and our children, who were age four and five, went to excellent schools—one to a Montessori school—and so they, the children, were extremely happy, but my wife, who was after all a fellow academic but in mathematics, felt that the treatment of spouses was most regrettable and, in a way, my wife never forgave me for taking her to Dumbarton Oaks for a year. I'm no longer married to my first wife.
MM: So there were social events in Dumbarton Oaks, to which spouses were not invited as well as work. Did the tea still exist? Daily tea?
RC: Daily tea still existed. The problem with Dumbarton Oaks, in my time, was there'd been a major change: that Mildred Bliss had died fairly recently, that Ernst Kitzinger had decided he wished to go to Harvard to undertake teaching and therefore had to be replaced as director of studies, and there was a small faculty—Meyendorff I assume was on the faculty, certainly around. But Ihor Ševčenko and Cyril Mango were essentially the faculty and they made it quite clear that they were opposed to the appointment of William Loerke as Director of Studies, causing a pretty unpleasant atmosphere throughout my year. And this was exhibited by lunches where they generally spoke in languages not understood by William Loerke. And there was definitely a stand-off between the faculty and William Loerke, which I—all of us—felt was unnecessary, but we had to live with it and one of the things that William Loerke initiated was a seminar for the visiting fellows and Cyril Mango was asked to do a seminar and, perversely it seemed to me, he chose that we would work on a manuscript which was of such extraordinary difficulty and obscurity that it would hardly bring a group together. This was the letters of Ignatius the Deacon and the seminar consisted of translating those letters, which we found very, very difficult, all of us, and some discussion of the context of those letters. It's quite interesting that, years later, Cyril did publish an edition of those and our names are recorded as being in that seminar. It wasn't really an ideal subject to bring people together, though we certainly got more benefit out of that than had there not been a seminar at all. Otherwise, fellows—the Byzantine Fellows—gave a talk about their work and the seminars for the Pre-Columbians and Garden Fellows were separate. Having said that, I don't think there were any Garden Fellows. Betty MacDougall was in charge of the garden department, an extremely open and useful person to talk to. And I did go to some seminars for the Pre-Columbians. At that time the main interest was understanding language—it was a lot about language transcription and archaeology—extremely interesting to go to.
MM: But it was clearly a crucial time in D.O. and it was also the Golden Age, wasn't it? It was a time when archaeology seemed to be very dominant. Was that your impression?
RC: Yes. I mean, all the faculty were extremely positivist and empirical and that's the tradition I had been trained in. I haven't mentioned it, but before I went to university, in my gap year, I was trained in archaeology by a medieval archaeologist, Philip Rahtz, an absolutely brilliant English archaeologist of the same ability of Martin Harrison, whom I also knew. And so yes, positivism was absolutely—and empiricism—was the order of the day.
MM: If you look at the staff list for that period, it's extraordinary, the way resources were put into the material side of things. Were they around? Were they part of daily life or were they out in the field and occasionally came through?
RC: Well, the person who was working in the building was Robert Van Nice, and he was in the basement and was fascinating. I spent quite a number of visits going to ask Robert Van Nice about the work on St. Sophia. By this time it was supposedly drawing to an end, and he was obsessed by the paper that was going to be used in the printing, because he believed it was going to expand seasonally—it'd be larger in the winter and the summer and therefore his drawings would be inaccurate. He was also very angry that he'd been stopped by Paul Underwood and was not allowed to measure the minarets of St. Sophia. He was stopped one meter, I think, from the building because someone realized, no doubt quite correctly, that he would never finish if he really did what he wanted to; those drawings and talking to him about them were quite extraordinary, seeing the mason's mark on slabs, the detailed drawings. He was criticized by Ernest Hawkins for not asking any questions, and I don't know if that's an aspect or not. At that time, it was mooted that Rowland Mainstone should cooperate with him to write a joint book. And Rowland Mainstone did ask many questions, but they were entirely limited to the statics of the dome. Rowland Mainstone had no interest in Hagia Sophia except why the dome fell at various points. And they didn't get on, and that joint publication never happened. So, certainly Robert Van Nice was very much here. Peter Megaw came during the year and was present, and obviously William Loerke had to consider what the future of the field program would be, although this was already the period when permits for Turkey had come to an end because of the purchase of the Sion Treasure—and that was obviously an element at the time. Another big discussion at the time was whether Dumbarton Oaks should move to Harvard—that the whole place should move and become part of the Harvard campus. That was a very big, well-discussed issue in that year.
MM: So it wasn't just the library, it was actually the whole institute?
RC: The whole institution.
MM: Interesting.
RC: And one of the most exciting things that year was the concert of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in the Music Room because I think there's nothing more exciting than going to a performance of a piece of music in a place for which it was written—and that's an experience I've only really had repeated in San Marco in Venice, going to a concert of music composed for San Marco. I think that should be regular, though I do remember the permanent faculty—this had obviously happened before—they said that it was a tedious, inferior piece of music, which shouldn't be played. It was actually – Stravinsky being one of my favorite composers anyway, I thought it was a great thing to do. I hope it's often done.
MM: I was very fortunate to hear it when the Bliss symposium happened a couple of years ago. And it stood up extremely well.
RC: There were very few Bliss stories, but the one that I always remember—and I guess it's been recorded elsewhere—is that Mildred Bliss, on the whole, didn't have much interest in the Byzantine center but that to their surprise she turned up to one of the symposiums which was never published, which was the reconstruction of Holy Apostles in Constantinople. And it was noticed, I was told, that Mildred Bliss came to Underwood's reconstruction of the ground plan of the church and at the end asked him if she could have a copy of his plan. He went around to her place a few days later to give her a copy and asked her why she wanted a copy of the ground plan of Holy Apostles in Constantinople and the answer she gave was, "It looks as if it would be a great plan for a garden."
MM: Interesting. So, did you work with, did you have interactions with the collection when you were here? Was the museum – interactions with scholars?
RC: Yes. The curator was employed, and she was in the basement and I discussed various objects with her. I was particularly interested in the provenance of where things had come from. And in the seventies there was a general concern among all museum curators about how much information on file should be made public. And so that was some difficulty and Sue was uncertain what the correct protocol would be, but we did look at some files and noticed that the number of works that came through George Zakos documented as coming from the Lebanon, and obviously that was interesting for anybody who knew that George Zakos had a shop in Istanbul, in the bazaar, and that, therefore, provenance from the Lebanon from George Zakos was obviously an interesting provenance. This was the time when a book was written about George Zakos and other dealers; it's a book—I now can't remember the author and I haven't seen it since, but all dealers were given pseudonyms and George Zakos was called Gregory Omega. So I ought to find this description of George Zakos. So it was easy to see the museum. I was not allowed to see the Sion Treasure, which was not accessible for viewing by anybody—and anyway it was no doubt in desperate need of conservation. But otherwise any question to Sue Boyd, she would answer as well as possible and also comment on the inadequacies, as she saw it, of the Ross catalogue, which, on the whole, there was a feeling that it was good to have it, but it could have been done better.
MM: And she produced another –
RC: Of course. It was improved.
MM: How about photo collections. Was Marlia around here at that time?
RC: Yes, Marlia Mundell was in charge of photographic collections, and they were accessible and easy to use. In the course of that year, Marlia decided to leave Dumbarton Oaks and applied to the Courtauld to do an MA with me, the following year, so the next year Marlia Mango and Lucy-Anne Hunt and a third person did a course on Syrian and eastern Byzantine art, as part of the MA.
MM: And a lot came of that.
RC: Yes.
MM: How about publications? Did you see anything of Julia Warner at that time?
RC: One saw Julia Warner, but I had not much contact with publications.
MM: What about the Director of Studies? Did you have daily interaction with Loerke? What did the Director of Studies actually do in those days?
RC: Well, it was William Loerke's first year; there were all these big issues about the future of fieldwork, of Dumbarton Oaks, which I'm sure he was very concerned with. He certainly had an open door – his study. But obviously, the seminar chosen was one to which he, with no Greek, would never have come. It was carefully chosen to exclude William Loerke. He was very sociable, so we all went to William Loerke's house for Thanksgiving and met his wife and his family. I guess I didn't have very close relations with William Loerke because I was a Cyril Mango student and since all the tensions were between individuals, he would have assumed that I would be on the other side, I guess, though I gave him no reason to think that. And in the course of that year, he agreed that I could work with Ernest Hawkins on a project we had to publish the southwest rooms of St. Sophia. So, that was something for which I asked his permission and permission was given that that should be done. I guess that he was also very concerned with setting up the San Marco project, because Irina Andreescu was in her second year as a junior fellow, finishing her Ph.D. for Grabar in Paris, and she also had initiated the San Marco project, which was supported by Peter Megaw when he was here with Loerke and was to be headed by Otto Demus with whom Irina met. So in a way, the big discussions were setting up that project, which was obviously a complicated and difficult project to set up because it was essentially a photographic project, not in any way an examination project, and of course the ultimate difficulties about the project, was that Otto Demus had decided the answer to all the questions in the 1930s and just wanted to photograph in the 1970s, and when scaffolding went up, there then did become questions of how far you could recognize Byzantine and later restorations in San Marco.
MM: I'm not sure which way to go, whether to say, to ask – let's think about the intellectual life. You talked about the seminar and you all gave talks. And occasionally people would come in and give talks. What happened?
RC: There were very few talks from outside. I only remember one, which was a German scholar who talked about the bronze horse, and I only remember this occasion because of what I'd felt at the time was the outrageous introduction by Ihor Ševčenko, who introduced the visiting scholar with an introduction that took one hour and ten minutes and covered all the aspects that were going to be covered by the speaker, who had rather little to say when it finally came to speak. It was a very odd experience. So I don't remember many seminars. What was good was that in the second term, the speakers at the conference arrived, so Kurt Weitzmann came, who was speaking, and Hans Belting came, and others – and so one had the interaction with them to discuss their papers before the symposium, and that – it was the first time I had melt Hans Belting, and that was a very good interaction, and we also traveled together, both to Cleveland to see objects there and to New York. So, it became very, very useful for meeting researchers in the field from outside, as well as from inside.
MM: That was the provinces symposium?
RC: That was the provinces, yes.
MM: And they were there for what, a month beforehand?
RC: Two months, at least.
MM: Two months?
RC: I think Weitzmann came soon after Christmas. It was extremely interesting to meet Weitzmann, with whom I had a slightly difficult issue, because, not knowing I was going to meet him and being young, I had written an extremely hostile review of his latest book in Burlington Magazine. This was his publication of the Sacra Parallela, Paris Greek 923, and I'd written a long review attacking his methodology, his questions, the results, in fact every single thing about what he said, which I felt rather strongly, and still do, is a striking example of how not to study a manuscript. And I met him and he had read the review and he was very generous and said, "I'm perfectly happy with your criticism, but beware my students." And it's a prediction which turned out to be correct, that his teaching of his Ph.D. students was so extraordinarily thorough that, although Weitzmann's work I think had always been criticized in Europe—and not only by me; also, about the same time, by Christopher Walter, who, both of us said that his methodology of treating pictures as if they were text was inappropriate and seriously wrong and misleading and that the reconstruction of lost manuscripts was a cul-de-sac which we didn't like—but I think in the States, critiques of Weitzmann have only very recently emerged and his initial students maintained that methodology right up to the nineties. So it was extremely interesting to meet Weitzmann. He was not an easy person because he didn't like children and I happened to have children. He didn't like children because he thought they were full of germs, which is obviously quite correct, and he had always felt his health had been wrecked by his visits to St. Catherine's on Sinai and that he needed to be looked after, as indeed he was very well looked after by his wife. He retired that year, which was wonderful for me because Gary Vikan put on an excellent exhibition at Princeton of Princeton manuscripts, and there was a symposium at Princeton, and that was really one of the many important things I did while I was in the States during that year.
MM: So you traveled quite a bit – with Dumbarton Oaks people?
RC: I only traveled with Hans Belting or, to Princeton with Dumbarton Oaks people, though in my year there were two other English fellows, Elizabeth Jeffreys and Michael Jeffreys, who took it in turns—I can't remember which one was Fellow that year and which one was fellow the next year. And unlike us, they had a car, and so we did travel places in the region with them.
MM: Was Tyler a distant figure?
RC: Tyler was an extremely distant figure who maybe one met at the Christmas party in the distance. I had no contact with him at all.
MM: You were aware of the administrative structure; I mean it's something you have an eye for. Did you, at that time, see how the place was run, think about it, have ideas about it?
RC: I was aware of it. The big issues I think I've already mentioned, and there were all sorts of ways in which one could see that the Byzantine section was felt to be over-privileged by other sections, so there were certainly tensions in the place.
MM: Could Pre-Columbians come to lunch at that time?
RC: Yes.
MM: They did.
RC: Pre-Columbians were extremely extroverted and a good group in my year, but there was clearly a feeling that resources weren't necessarily allocated fairly. I wasn't privy to those conversations, but that was clearly thought to be so. I haven't mentioned: the Ševčenkos had an open house quite frequently; one used to go for drinks in their house and Ševčenko would show the latest books that he – or off-prints that he'd been sent. And so that was a way of keeping up. Ševčenko was very prominent. I remember an announcement he made at lunch one day, which was that he was sad to announce that the only other Byzantinist with a sense of humor had just died, Anatole Frolow, a rather typical Ševčenko announcement at that time. And the faculty – one thing I definitely remember with Ševčenko and how the library worked was that we had the system of taking out the tabs so you knew who had the book. I wanted a book on the inscriptions of Palestine. It was out to Ševčenko, so I went to his office and asked if I could use it and he graciously said, "You can have it for thirty minutes." When I got it to my office, I saw he'd already had it out for 25 years, so you can see that there were kind of hierarchies in Dumbarton Oaks.
MM: What about the fabled Mango-Ševčenko relationship?
RC: Actually, one was very unaware of the Mango-Ševčenko relationship. They were so united in their hostility to William Loerke that their personal relationship was on a high that year.
MM: What can you tell us about the library? I mean, apart from the plan to move it. Irene Vaslef, I think, comes in just about this time?
RC: Yes, she was certainly there. Yes. The problematic of the library – in terms of art history it was brilliant; it really had everything you needed. Finding texts was somewhat more difficult. And that was exaggerated by one of the fellows in my year, Mr. Stephen Gero, who for some reason only worked at night and had an office, which was locked during the day. But he removed all the Bonn Corpus, for example, to his office, and so we all had a bit of a problem with texts because they weren't easy to find and they'd all moved to Mr. Gero's room. Mr. Gero had a very difficult year because, although he'd recently finished his thesis with Ševčenko, Ševčenko made it quite clear that he thought the thesis was a waste of space, really, and that looking for eastern sources of iconoclasm had been a fruitless pursuit. So I think that Stephen Gero was not a particularly happy man, that year. But he certainly didn't make life easy for us. But the combination of the Library of Congress and the art history made the library excellent. However, it was very slow in acquiring books, particularly from Greece. And also, binding meant that the books that had come in the previous year were now all the way at the binder. In a rather bizarre way, I lost out on, in my year at Dumbarton Oaks, on recent literature. It took me some years to catch up, because the one thing that you couldn't read here was the recent literature, unless you went around to Ševčenko's office, who, of course, was being sent every offprint that was ever written and had a full-time secretary to acknowledge his off-print collection.
MM: But presumably if the scholars were in the attic, in the third floor, the periodicals were not up there and art history was not up there at that time?
RC: I don't remember where the periodicals were. I simply don't remember.
MM: But there was still a sense that books were all over the house?
RC: Yes, absolutely. Yes.
MM: All over.
RC: Yes, you collected. But, I mean, I guess that you collected a lot of books at the beginning of your year and thereafter you basically – most people seemed to have in their rooms what they needed.
MM: I think I probably want to ask you your comparative reactions now. You've been back as a visiting scholar for almost a month. How do you feel about similarities and differences?
RC: Since the seventies, I've called in on Dumbarton Oaks while Giles Constable was director and later, and so I met Kazhdan here, but this is certainly the most substantial amount of time I've spent since – it's a long time ago, isn't it? And, I mean, everything about the place is very different, even though physically the front door may be the same. There's a feeling of access and openness and friendliness, which certainly was not what one felt back in the 1970s. My initial feeling about the library was that it was absolutely brilliant compared to what it was before. I have in the course of the month had some misgivings about the way the library works and I'm sure it will have to evolve further. What one notices is the expansion of the Museum and the expansion of the Museum offices—and the combination of Pre-Columbian and Byzantine in the Museum. But there's a very much greater feel of activities and interaction – I mean it is a very different place, both physically and socially and intellectually. It's active in a different way, which, as I said, you would expect because there's been a change from personal scholarship to projects. And that has been such a phenomenal change in the way academics have worked between then and now. But certainly Dumbarton Oaks has participated in that revolution.
MM: And you could argue that it was actually quite early in the game, through the big fieldwork projects, which were so much a part of that Golden Age period.
RC: Yes, except the big fieldwork projects were actually begun by Whittemore and inherited by Dumbarton Oaks. So they didn't actually initiate; they made the decision to continue and I think that the fieldwork done, when taken over by Dumbarton Oaks, in Cyprus and in Istanbul, particularly, was the highlight – or one felt that was the importance of Dumbarton Oaks, that whereas other places were letting material decay, decline, that Dumbarton Oaks was in the forefront of preservation, conservation, and study. And certainly when I came, that was my picture of Dumbarton Oaks. My picture of Dumbarton Oaks was the extraordinary importance of its activities, but I would, as I say, modify that by saying they made the decision to continue rather than to start those activities. And from the beginning, it seems to me, Dumbarton Oaks was an academic-centered institution.
MM: I ought to link a little bit to the fieldwork questions that Rona's going to ask you, I think, and ask you about your own participation. So you talked, during your year here, and then you did the work. I was trying to figure out whether it was before or after you did the room over the southwest ramp. It was afterwards.
RC: It was after that. That was initiated while I was here and, while I was looking at materials in the photographic library, I was also in touch with Ernest Hawkins and he, who I'd met before—and it's conceivable that we'd talked about this project before, but certainly it came together by an agreement with Ernest that we could handle the permit difficulties—because it would be impossible to be officially working for Dumbarton Oaks; at the same time, William Loerke agreed that the work could be published by Dumbarton Oaks but by this time Dumbarton Oaks was forbidden to work in Turkey as a result of purchasing the Sion Treasure. That had caused a great deal of concern, particularly among British archaeologists. And Martin Harrison came to Dumbarton Oaks to beg Dumbarton Oaks to give back the Sion Treasure and not to continue with this. And I met Martin Harrison and Nezih Firatlh, the director of the archaeological museum, and they felt very strongly that Dumbarton Oaks would always be punished until the treasure was returned.
MM: So, you spent that summer in Istanbul.
RC: That's right.
MM: And I seem to remember you were very kind to young scholars who were visiting at that time. You entertained us in the Dumbarton Oaks apartment.
RC: The Dumbarton Oaks apartment was really useful. And it was not only a base for others working in Istanbul, but it had a library there and it was absolutely invaluable being there. Yes, all sorts of people came, and I obviously remember that Lee Striker was working at Kalenderhane and Martin Harrison was working—I guess it must have been finishing off on Sarachane, on St. Polyeuktos—and seeing those two operations going on was extremely exciting.
MM: How long had D.O. had that space?
RC: I don't know, because Ernest, until that time, had had an apartment at Moda on the other side of the Bosporus and so, because he had been required to retire by William Loerke that year—something about which he had a considerable anger and bad feelings—and so as he retired he gave up his apartment in Moda, and therefore he was also staying in the Dumbarton Oaks flat, which he hadn't done before. I simply don't know—Michael Hendy was there. I just don't know how long it had been or how long it went on for, but for that year it was really important.
MM: Did Richard Anderson come through?
RC: Yeah. Yes.
MM: Was he – did he come through often in Georgetown, as well?
RC: No.
MM: So he was basically in the field.
RC: Yes.
MM: That was quite a commitment, in a sense, to have an architect on staff all the time.
RC: Yes, but we didn't – I mean, we only knew him socially. He wasn't any part of the projects. And I will perhaps come back to the other things I did with Ernest later on.
MM: Before I hand over, is there anything else that you remember from the D.O., the academic side of it, that you haven't talked about?
RC: I haven't talked about some of the personality clashes, which in a way should be on record. And an obvious personality clash was between Cyril Mango and Ernst Kitzinger. I don't know how far this has been recorded but—this might take a few minutes, but the – because of my age I was able to meet: Buchthal was my supervisor, Cyril was my supervisor and Kurt Weitzmann, who again like Buchthal had a phenomenal photographic memory for images—and as much as I disagree with his methodology, I've never disagreed with his datings and re-datings of material, in which I think he's always been great. I met Otto Demus, who also had a phenomenal eye and was the most, probably the most generous art historian. I mean he never wrote a review which wasn't positive. And his book on mosaics in Norman Sicily I think every student should continue to read. And I've mentioned Nersessian and I met André Grabar in Paris but not here. But I didn't meet Kitzinger until after I'd been to Dumbarton Oaks. Because he had personally appointed William Loerke, his name came up quite often when I was here. And the most surprising episode for me was the review by Cyril Mango in the Times Literary Supplement, TLS, of the collected papers of Kitzinger, edited by Eugene Kleinbauer, when a devastatingly hostile review came out in, I guess, the eighties, which was both unfair and, I thought, mean-minded but embarrassingly often correct, in that he had seen the problematic in some of the philosophical thoughts of Kitzinger. And so I think that that publication probably did shift perceptions of the importance of Kitzinger in art historical work and began to undermine his theoretical interest. But when I did read Kitzinger, he seemed to be the most generous of that generation in sharing ideas. Whereas Weitzmann would tell you what he thought, Kitzinger would ask you what you thought and it seemed to me that partly lay in his different career, because when he left Germany he had to write his Ph.D. thesis in three months. When he left Germany, he left of his own will and came to London without any employment and he made his living by writing reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, for which he was paid, and that was enough to keep him going. And he wrote his book on the collection of the British Museum. And, he explained, that's how he survived. And when war broke out he was sent to Australia, and on the boat to Australia he learned Russian, spent his time learning Russian. When he arrived in Australia, a telegram came from Dumbarton Oaks, inviting him to Dumbarton Oaks, so he then went from Australia to Dumbarton Oaks, where he then remained until just before I came. And he invited Cyril Mango to Dumbarton Oaks, having read Cyril's thesis on the Brazen House. So when he arrived, Kitzinger said, "You're fully untrained in art history; you should go on some courses." Cyril resented this, and it began a kind of mission against art historians who were trained but impractical. And he always quoted Kitzinger being in his house in Dumbarton Oaks, unable to work out how to use a hedge trimmer and somehow this became Cyril's metaphor for the incompetence of art historians. And they were obviously completely conceptually ill-matched for each other, and Cyril, when I talked about this review, said, basically said, "I wanted to put on paper why art historians are so bad at doing Byzantine studies." Kitzinger, I tried to—they were both at Oxford—I tried to invite them to meet each other and they both told me they would never be in the same room as each other again. So their feelings were very strong, and recently in the Getty I read the Kitzinger archive and the letters he wrote at this time – [pause to change AV tape]
RC: I want just to finish this important episode, I think, in, really, in intellectual history. I read the archive of Ernst Kitzinger, which is complete in boxes at the Getty and the correspondence that he received after the review—he wrote to various people saying, what should he do about this review by Cyril Mango—and the few replies he got all said the same, which is what advice I would have given too: don't do anything. Don't write a letter, complaining, because if you do, it will give Cyril Mango the chance to write yet another devastating comment. Unfortunately, Ernst did not take the advice he was given, wrote a letter, and got an even more unpleasant follow-up letter from Cyril Mango. As I said, I think that it was written in an unpleasant way. Intellectually, I think it's a very important critique and it's something that – you now can't look at Kitzinger's attempts to explain stylistic evolution without taking the caveats of Cyril into account. But what you see is one man who had no interest in theory, Cyril Mango, I would say, and one who had enormous interest in theory and was always struggling to find new theory. So that is important. And I did talk to Cyril about theory, because I wrote a book, Writing in Gold, in the mid-eighties, which was a complete change of approach for me from positivistic art history into theoretical art history—the main impetus was Michel Foucault's work. And I asked Cyril, since he could have gone to Foucault's lectures in Paris and could have read the works, what the influence of Foucault was on him and he simply said, "I don't have time to read books like that." As just one final footnote on my personal career, I do think that the change and the move into theory in Byzantine art history and other subjects has been a really exciting thing. For me, because I was trained in Classics and came to Byzantium—from the ancient world to the modern—my theoretical frameworks have always come from Classics. And Foucault and post-structuralism permeated Classics in the early eighties, and that's where I came from. And I've always found that there's a difference of mentality between those who come into Byzantium from the Classics—those who find it at the end, as it were, of the sequence—and those who come in from the modern, looking back, and find it rather at the beginning of the sequence. And I think there is a healthy disconnection between approaches of people from where they've come at the subject.
MM: Alright, thank you very much. This is the point we'll move to fieldwork questions.
RR: Hello. Thank you, again. My name is Rona Razon. I'm here on behalf of the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives. First let's talk about Ernest Hawkins. So, specifically, when did you meet him and what was your relationship with Hawkins?
RC: Okay. I think it's well stated by Steven Runciman in his autobiography that people who went to Istanbul in the fifties and sixties – they all seemed to have an introduction to Ernest Hawkins. They somehow managed to find him somewhere, and he would take them around the city. Ernest Hawkins also lived in London in the winter. And I met – I was introduced to Ernest Hawkins by Hugo Buchthal in the winter of 1963-1964 in London. He explained that—have I got the years correct?—he explained that he would be putting up a scaffold in St. Sophia in the summer and that I would be welcome to go, but actually as a student I didn't have the funding to go. But as far as I can see, every other Byzantinist went and went up the scaffolding to see the apse Virgin. And when Ernest came back in the winter he did explain to me what had happened. The only person who didn't go was Ernst Kitzinger. And the scheme of that work—they had permission to put up a scaffolding in the apse because Ernest always felt that the Whittemore job in the 1930s had been inadequate and that the dispute about the date of the virgin could be solved with a reexamination. And the plan was for Cyril Mango and Ernest Hawkins to look at the archaeology and for Kitzinger to write on the iconography of the virgin. It was well known that Ernst Kitzinger had vertigo and had never been up a scaffolding in Sicily, so that all his work in Sicily was done from photographs. They constructed a very special scaffolding for St. Sophia, which was—apparently it was just like a staircase, a covered staircase from the gallery. And it was constructed so that Ernst wouldn't even know he'd done anything to go up a staircase into an area. Even so, it was a step further than Ernst took and so the iconography was never published. But Kurt Weitzmann, for example, went up the scaffolding and informed Ernest that the mosaic was definitely fourteenth century, and Ernest was very pleased that when he went down the scaffolding he agreed it was ninth century, and that was one of Ernest's triumphs in his view. To me, the archaeology and the subsequent report by Cyril Mango and Ernest is absolutely convincing that the mosaic as we see it is the mosaic uncovered by—inaugurated by Photius in Lent, 867. And I think it's slightly unfortunate that Dumbarton Oaks, later on, even published an article by Nicolas Oikonomides, incompetently, from the archaeological point of view, attacking this view. And I was a lot less angry than Ernest Hawkins was, though. And he was hopping mad about the publication by Oikonomides. And I think it hasn't helped the subject for it to be published in such a prestigious journal, such an ill thought-out contribution to the subject, but there you are, that's a bit of my prejudice, but I'm reporting Ernest Hawkins' very strong feelings that the question was solved by the archaeology and that work was done for Dumbarton Oaks.
RR: So did you meet him before your fellowship, or...?
RC: Yes, so I met him in the winter 1963-4 and I subsequently was in Greece for a year, for my research in 1965, and then went to Istanbul and visited the monuments he was working on. So, at that time he was not doing much on Sophia, he was working on Fethiye Djami, work was being finished on Fethiye Djami, and he was working the Kariye Djami, and what was important to learn from Ernest was his methodology, because what was utterly striking about Ernest, since he was trained as a sculptor and not as a Byzantinist, and went to Istanbul in 1938 as part of Whittemore's team to conserve—so he always looked at Byzantium with a sculptor's and a painter's eye and the question he always asked in building was, "What did it look like before the artist began work? What were the problems that the artist faced when he worked, and how did he solve them?" And that was his systematic method. And the outcome of that was, he revolutionized the description of how mosaics were made. He worked out that the current view, which you'll see expressed by Underwood and Kitzinger and many others before Ernest changed it, was that mosaics were made in the studio with a cartoon, carried down to the church and fixed on. He showed how that was completely impossible, because the effects of light position and curvature were taken into account and this meant that the mosaics could only have been made in situ. And that gradually shifted the way that Underwood and Kitzinger wrote. That also came out in the important article by Underwood in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers on the Nicaea mosaics. That was a paper completely initiated by Ernest, because Ernst Kitzinger, in his paper on art between Justinian and iconoclasm, had argued a nonsensical analysis that the Nicaea mosaics – Ernest went through with Underwood how you should actually read the evidence of sutures and how the work was done and that – nobody's ever doubted that we understand the secrets of work in Nicaea, as published in Dumbarton Oaks, a very important paper.
RR: Well let's go back a little bit, to when he started in Hagia Sophia, in 1938. When we talked before, you mentioned that he was recruited by Thomas Whittemore. So, what were the challenges that he encountered with Whittemore and other fieldworkers at that time?
RC: Well the work had begun earlier. Apparently, Whittemore, when he needed more workers, would go during the recession in England and advertise and pick people up. Alwyn Green was one of the other people that were picked up, who did the work of the facsimiles; I think, in Dumbarton Oaks, they're done by Alwyn Green. And I think that they worked together but they were highly temperamental artists and they disagreed with each other and Ernest Hawkins had a sneaking admiration for Whittemore, although he was a class of diplomatic American completely outside his experience. And he had a sneaking admiration because, of course, Whittemore did delegate everything—not only the work but even the writing, the so-called, the preliminary reports; the work on Hagia Sophia, published under the name of Whittemore, are attributed by Ernest and others to Anatole Frolow, who wrote them in Paris and they were not written by Whittemore at all. And so there were obviously tensions, but he gave them work and Ernest never went back to being an artist, except, in his later years he went back to life drawing classes, but he never – it ended his belief that he was going to be an important British sculptor. He changed into a conservator and Byzantinist, so Whittemore changed his life and he was very happy with that change, though his wife was never very happy, because she just wanted him to live in London and be a sculptor. She was never comfortable with his nomadic life between Cyprus, Istanbul, and Chios. So I think that he was a critical part of the team. He claims that it was he that persuaded Whittemore to start work in the Kariye Djami, because Whittemore only had permission from Ataturk to work in Hagia Sophia. So I think Ernest must have been quite a nuisance, even, to Whittemore, but that's kind of – they got along with each other.
RR: Was he close to any other fieldworkers in Hagia Sophia?
RC: Alwyn Green was the person he was closest to and he corresponded with Alwyn Green right up to – so, he was still writing in the nineties – so, up to both their deaths, they were in close contact. And when I asked questions about the thirties, I used to write to Alwyn Green to ask if he could remember things which Ernest couldn't remember.
RR: Let's talk about your relationship with Ernest when you started working with him at Hagia Sophia, between '72 and '73, is that correct?
RC: Yes.
RR: So when you started, here in Dumbarton, you also started working with Ernest Hawkins?
RC: We discussed what possibly I could do. It was agreed in Dumbarton Oaks that we could go there. The problem – so I worked with Ernest, and although previously when I'd seen Ernest he was officially working for Dumbarton Oaks, everything was organized so that there were problems in the Fethiye Djami in that when he asked the Turkish laborers to rebuild a wall, they would rebuild it in Ottoman style and not in Byzantine style and they had to take it down again and rebuild it. The problems with my work were quite different and so you have to contextualize this, that going to work in Hagia Sophia in the summer of 1973 meant we could not mention the word "Dumbarton Oaks." We were given permission to work and used Underwood's material, which I'd read, but in Istanbul we went to the director of Hagia Sophia and asked permission to look at the icons in the southwest rooms. We knew—Ernest knew—that the icons that were removed from Turkish immigrants in 1917 were stored in those rooms and that if we said that we were going to look at those, we'd actually confess what our plan really was. So I'm afraid it was a bit underhand. The director agreed we could work in the southwest rooms for two weeks and that we would be supervised by Şinasi Bey, who was an assistant, and that all our time would have to be with Şinasi as the commissar. We were perfectly happy with that except that Şinasi had a drink problem and tended to arrive late in the morning—we arrived at six in the morning and waited for him to arrive, any time between six and ten. And we also had to take him out to lunch. So Şinasi was both an essential part of our work but also made it slightly more difficult. We went into the southwest rooms, knowing that what we wanted to do was understand the sequence of the mosaics, describe them, and to clarify exactly what had happened to that part of St. Sophia, which was an addition to the building – of the original Justinian building. It was part of the picture of the palace. Şinasi was slightly surprised when we put up a scaffolding up to the height of the mosaics, but we said this was necessary to photograph the icons from the scaffolding—and of course we didn't actually look at the icons at all in the two weeks. But, we just managed, working fast, to take enough photographs and to look in detail at everything in those rooms and we both felt at the end of that time that we had solved the secrets of the work in those rooms. And that we published and we felt that publication was archaeologically accurate and I don't think it's been challenged since; that was good. We hoped in that time to do work in the southwest buttress. The chapel had been photographed, and Ernest thought it eleventh century. Şinasi was unable to find the key and we never got into the southwest buttress. I've been in it another time, but I never got in that time, so that work we didn't do.
RR: And this project was financed by Dumbarton Oaks, correct?
RC: I think it was financed by us. I may have got my fares to Istanbul, but we stayed in the apartment.
RR: The Dumbarton Oaks apartment?
RC: The Dumbarton Oaks apartment. So in that sense it was financed, but any costs I think we probably covered ourselves.
RR: What were the challenges working with – between Hawkins and Underwood. What did Hawkins think of Underwood?
RC: Okay. Yes. Can I just say two other things I didn't say and then come back to that, because that leads on to Kariye Djami.
RR: Sure.
RC: Subsequent to that work, in either the next year or the year after, having established a relationship with the director, we went out and we put scaffolding up in front of the Deësis mosaic, and we did about seven days on the Deësis mosaic, which we weren't quite comfortable about results – we thought we dated it – we weren't quite comfortable and so we kind of always published that in dribs and drabs. We've never done a full publication of our reasons for that. And we also – I have to say I can't remember when this happened, but I spent a month with Ernest in St. Sophia when the bronze doors of the vestibule were brought back. And maybe you know what year that was but I can't remember what year that was, but I do remember the quite extraordinary circumstance that the bronze doors had been taken down, left out in the atrium, the front of St. Sophia, had been robbed by thieves – enough of the bronze had been stolen that to – this has never really been confessed, but there were then conservationists from Rome—Madame Borrelli—did a remake of the lost bits of the bronze doors. And then – and I think they may even have been taken to Italy, but I don't know how that was done. Then, the doors had to be put back. And Ernest and I were there, because nobody knew how to get the doors back. They'd been taken off so many years before, even the floor had been filled in and there were no workers. And it seems, judging from the photographs here in the Archive, that the only workers we could find were an aged Armenian team, and they may have been the ones that took it down – took the doors down. And it was quite extraordinary having six aged Armenian laborers putting up these massively heavy doors. And we had to dig out a hole to put the base in. We had to put them up. And we worked at night, because we tried working during the daytime but there was no – people had to come through those doors. And Ernest used to get extremely angry, because instead of going into St. Sophia they would stop and watch us digging up a hole. And I remember Ernest saying, "You've come to see the greatest monument that man has ever put up and all you're doing is watching us digging a hole. Go away." So we worked at night, which – maybe sometimes slept – Ernest had a stove and two camp beds up in one of the rooms of the gallery of St. Sophia and I feel very fortunate to have been at night in St. Sophia, because it takes people a long time to appreciate the size and scale of St. Sophia, but you sure appreciate much quicker if you're there in the dark. So I did work with Ernest on the Deësis and on putting up those doors and obviously he was regarded by St. Sophia as an American worker from Dumbarton Oaks, but a person in his own right, as well. He played the ambiguity of his position to allow us to work there.
RR: Because when you worked with this door project, it was a secret project, right?
RC: Yes.
RR: And it was financed by –?
RC: It was financed by FIAT. For St. Sophia, though, obviously the monograms and so on are published in Dumbarton Oaks papers, so not only did I do the work in the dark, I can see my memories of it are rather obscure as well.
RR: Why was it a secret project?
RC: Because it was being covered up, that there had been damage done to the doors. And I don't know why they were ever taken off. I think the whole episode is obscure to me.
RR: Well, Hawkins – I believe you said before that Hawkins thought of Kitzinger and Underwood as armchair scholars?
RC: Yes. I've tried to write up something about Ernest's relationship in the recent publication of the Kariye Djami, under an article called "The Talented Mr. Hawkins," where I do try and portray him as a kind of extreme British 1930s artist, up against very professional American academics, and I tried to portray the views that Ernest had of Dumbarton Oaks, which were really, in the event, unjustified, but which he certainly felt very strongly. He felt that the fieldwork program – that he did, unrecognized, a great deal of work, that Underwood spent insufficient time in the field to be able to write the kind of report that Ernest would have preferred, and so there certainly was a tension between Ernest's work in the field and those people who came from the States.
RR: So, Hawkins also worked in Cyprus with Peter Megaw. First, I'm just curious: why, because Megaw's name is Arthur Hubert Stanley – so why Peter?
RC: I don't know. Everybody called him Peter, always. That was what you called him. I mean, Megaw was trained, I think, as an architect in England, or at least professionally trained. But he went out to the British School at Athens in around 1935, '36, and he wrote a phenomenally important article called "Some Notes on Some Little Byzantine Churches," which actually solved the chronology of most little Byzantine churches in a wonderfully understated way. This was a period at the British School when I knew many people who went there – it was kind of a Boy Scout era at the British School, where they literally wore shorts and tramped all over Greece and looked at monuments. And Megaw must have tramped to all these buildings he talked about; he must have been extremely energetic. And he—and this is the important contact with me—he began to look at the drawings of the British architects for the school made in the 1880s and 1890s, particularly on Thessaloniki, and his project was to publish a corpus of the monuments of Thessaloniki. And this I learned later on. But Megaw, in I think 1936, was appointed director of antiquities in Cyprus, as part of the British Civil Service. And he clearly did a fantastic job in giving, really, very good professional British attitudes, using them inside but without being colonial, so that the whole antiquities service in Cyprus, I think, owed a lot to his administration; he was a great administrator and that's where he worked with his Greek wife, Electra. And the problem with Electra was that for tax reasons, she couldn't – she had to be in Greece. And they both wanted to live in their house in Hampstead, but they only ever stayed there a month a year, for tax reasons. So, Megaw worked in Cyprus, and he worked with Ernest. Ernest started the project in Asinou with Peter Megaw – that was definitely a personal project of theirs. And they then recommended Dumbarton Oaks take it over. Megaw had to leave his post in Cyprus because of political changes and he became director of the British School at Athens in about 1964, which was lucky for me because that's when I went out as a research student to Greece, so he was the director there. And without that I had a problem, because I was living in Thessaloniki and that caused administrative problems in Greece because I was the first supported Greek government scholar who had not been in Athens and it was conditioned that you had to register as a student in Thessaloniki but they had no way you could register as a foreign student. And the Dean of Arts, faculty, Linos Polites, a wonderful Byzantinist, tried the whole year to get me registered but I failed to do that. And then, when I came to Athens to work in the British School library, I was told I wasn't allowed to work in it because their rules were: you had to live in Athens and not Thessaloniki to work in the library, so Peter somehow got me. So that was my contact and I think it must have been this time that Ernest and Peter recorded the work on Zeyrek Djami, on Pantokrator, which was a Dumbarton Oaks project but which they did together. So they were a kind of team, it seems to me, that came into Dumbarton Oaks. And obviously they published Kanakaria. The working was a team with each other on Cyprus—I'm never quite clear what the relation with Dumbarton Oaks was for Kanakaria. And I'm not sure what relation with Kiti, which has never been published and I'm not sure where the manuscript of that is.
RR: So, what year was this when Hawkins and Peter Megaw were together in Cyprus?
RC: In the sixties. I don't, I mean – Pantokrator is, the work is – I think one probably can work all that out from preliminary reports in D.O.P. And I'm not sure, not quite clear. And maybe not clear because Ernest probably wasn't. Ernest was completely hopeless in terms of secretarial organization and he kept getting things wrong, sending a card to the wrong places, so he would never be sure who he was working for, whether he was working for Peter or for himself or whatever. So that makes perfect sense that I'm not very clear, since I can see it partly through Ernest's eyes. I mean, basically I met Ernest and he showed me the various works they were doing in the sixties. I worked with him in the seventies. In the late seventies and eighties we traveled together because he wanted to have seen every Byzantine mosaic, so we went to Sicily, for example. We went to Poreč. So I traveled a lot with him and when he died he gave me all his papers and all his slides, and his slides are in the Courtauld and are being digitized; and the papers I still have and, although I've always wanted a student to work on them, there isn't very much new in his papers that isn't published so they're not of great value, but in the end a home needs to be found for Ernest's papers. He did not want his slides to be – he didn't give them to Dumbarton Oaks because he was not allowed to photograph on Dumbarton Oaks scaffolding; that was only official photographers who were allowed to. And he was extremely angry that he had to take all his own photographs surreptitiously and unofficially. So he didn't feel they should go to Dumbarton Oaks, since they had been – his work had been officially, kind of, banned.
RR: How was it traveling with him? How was that? How was he, as a person?
RC: Ernest was appallingly energetic, very fidgety, apparently required no sleep whatever; and so he was not an easy person to travel with. Even on our visit to Sicily, on which I learned a lot, because the great issue between Demus and Kitzinger is: what's original, and what is not? And we just spent a lot of time with binoculars, trying to find out a methodology of how you decide, in Monreale, what's original and what's not. And his methodology was: if you can see a part which looks absolutely 12th century, then you look for the sutures and outside the suture it will probably be later. But I think there still remains a difficulty of how much re-working has been done in Monreale—probably rather a lot. But that's what we worked on. But meanwhile, walking through the street, because he had his bag snatched and his binoculars snatched and so he wasn't a, kind of, easy person to travel with, except that intellectually he's very exciting to be with.
RR: You mentioned before that he was forced to retire from Dumbarton Oaks—is that correct? Can you tell us about that?
RC: That's how he put it. And I guess he was probably 70, but he could not see how any professional rules would apply to him, basically. And he certainly had so much – you could do anything in Istanbul under the name of Ernest Hawkins. He thought that Dumbarton Oaks, by giving up the fieldwork program and by not using him, was really wasting resources that had been so important.
RR: You mentioned a while ago that he thought that Thomas Whittemore's work was inadequate in the 1930s. How so? How?
RC: His word would be, a bit highfalutin. I mean, he did not think it was down to earth, practical, careful enough. And it's true. If you go through those enormously long descriptions of the mosaics – real flowery language and not very accurate. So, it looks – he felt that it's a façade: it looks like a highly careful piece of work but actually it's all a bit of a façade. And it wasn't quite as careful. And that's why redoing the apse mosaic was, for him, an absolutely major, important reworking of inadequately done work, he thought.
RR: You mentioned a while ago that you traveled with Hans Belting. Can you talk a little bit about Hans Belting and where you traveled with him? What was your relationship with him?
RC: Yes, alright. I met Hans Belting in Dumbarton Oaks and very much enjoyed traveling around places in the States, but that – we went, for example, to see the Cleveland marbles and the tapestry in Cleveland where Alice-Mary Talbot's husband was the curator at the time and took us in on a closed day and we spent a whole day with them. And obviously we were very interested in the question of whether the Cleveland marbles were fakes, which was a big issue in the seventies, to some extent still is, and what you could say about the tapestry. So we, on the whole, looked at works of art together. I think an interesting case of more separation from Hans Belting was over Fethiye Djami. When Cyril decided to publish the Fethiye Djami, he decided that he would do the history; Hans would do the style and would do the iconography. And Hans applied for scaffolding but that was refused because he applied through the name of Dumbarton Oaks, so that was inevitably refused. Ernest was very angry and said, "If you'd asked through Ernest, it would've gone up." And then Hans wrote his piece and subsequent to that, Ernest and I went back to Fethiye to analyze Hans' work and we both came to the conclusion that he'd gone seriously wrong in Fethiye. And I published a critique of that in an article, which actually came out in Greek, so not many people may have read it. Basically, Ernest and I looked at the mosaics and came to the conclusion that they were all done by one artist, whereas I think Belting had dozens of workshops in a church, you know, which you could hardly get two people into. So we criticized the notion of a series of three or four workshops, we criticized the notion of developing style. In particular, we criticized the notion that some parts of the mosaic had a mixture of fresco technique and mosaic technique and that this was a positive method of the artist, which could be picked up in Kiev and other places. The reason for that particular fact in Fethiye is because those mosaics are in very dark places where no light came and you can see that the artist has economized on materials where you could never see the mosaic. So we thought that – this is very much an Ernest Hawkins and in that case positivist Cormack view against the extraordinary formalist, abstract views of Belting. So, in that sense, I've always enjoyed being with Belting but I've always, kind of, disapproved of his formalist work. And when he was writing his big book on lightness, we talked on the telephone and he compared it with Writing in Gold, which he said was very trendy and he said his book was very traditional—and it's actually true; although people think Belting is trendy, he's incredibly traditional and working absolutely in the parameters of Otto Demus, as a stylistic – he's a stylistic formalist, I think, in many ways; does it very elegantly, in very, very difficult German.
RR: So, when did you meet him exactly?
RC: I met him at Dumbarton Oaks, when I came.
RR: So, seventies?
RC: Yeah.
RR: Let's go back to Cyril Mango. What was your relationship with him, besides – we know your relationship with him as an advisor. Did you work with any projects with him at all?
RC: No. Just, when he was in London he was working on Neophytos and—that's the hermitage in Cyprus—and we talked quite a lot about it, but he'd already done the work with Ernest. So, basically my relation was that he was my Ph.D. advisor and we met on infrequent, irregular occasions and talked about issues, and when I sent in written work, he was not the kind of supervisor that sent it back with any comments, except references you'd missed. I think I missed a reference on this about the iconography ascension in Ukrainian in 1892. And I would say, "Send me this one," on a postcard. I'd discovered that this reference was only available at Dumbarton Oaks. And I'm afraid I've never followed it up—so be it. So, the benefit of talking to Cyril Mango is his extraordinary clear mind, his ability to talk through a subject on his terms, giving the pros and the cons—very positivist, and this is the claim he makes in his critique of Kitzinger, that he's a naïve positivist, I think he calls himself. But he is extremely good at balancing facts, one against the other, and coming to a pragmatic conclusion. In the years that I was at Dumbarton Oaks, he was writing his book on Byzantine architecture and he appeared to write that between ten o'clock and midnight, regularly. I mean, he had his day completely organized, what was done, but between ten and midnight, he would be in Dumbarton Oaks, typing his manuscript and thinking it through and quite often, at lunchtimes here he might talk about what he was going to talk about, so putting his ideas together. And that book is an extremely careful, analytical balancing of facts with, of course, a subtext of extreme polemics against Krautheimer's work on Byzantine architecture, so it's a book with a purpose, because he particularly disapproved of the theoretical framework of Krautheimer, which he thought was inherited by Tom Matthews, and is polemic against functional architecture – it's extremely strong in that book. But that was – so I always found Cyril extremely good at just sitting down and giving you an opinion very well thought, usually ungenerous toward any critique but carefully thought through. And that has remained Cyril's strength. His extremely articulate and careful description of a city, particularly of Constantinople, where he grew up, was discovered by Ernest Hawkins when he was a schoolboy, fourteen. Ernest, actually, as far as I know, brought Cyril into the orbit of Byzantine studies by treating him—as me and others—to "please come and look at this. What do you think?" And so, Ernest, I believe, was as much a teacher of Cyril as he was of me.
RR: Do you still correspond with him today?
RC: With Cyril?
RR: Mhm.
RC: Not much. Cyril has felt that those who moved into theory have always taken a wrong turn. And he – we asked him to do the history for the Byzantium exhibition, which I was the curator for, at the Royal Academy, and he willingly did that but he did not so willingly come to the exhibition. He came to the opening, I think; I doubt he came again. So he's – Cyril is now somewhat of a recluse in the countryside outside Oxford. I last saw him at a really good day on Sinai, on the manuscripts at St. Catherine's on Sinai, which he chaired. He was a good chairman, but actually slightly misinformed on some of the literature, but he is – Cyril has never deviated in his methodology ever. And he's always used his own talents to the maximum ability. He drew his own ground plans for the architecture book, he takes his own photographs. He's an extremely practical person and an extremely precise scholar with an extremely good knowledge of Greek, but in some ways slightly too good, so that the book which most people use of Cyril Mango's, Sources and Documents, which he put together very quickly and had just done before I came to Dumbarton Oaks – he himself said it was a great pity that the Greek text could not be reproduced side by side with the English translations, and I have found, using his translations, that very often they're not translations, they're paraphrases. And I think his facility with Greek meant he sometimes didn't use a dictionary, when somebody who was less able might have realized there was a difference between Medieval Greek and Classical Greek. And he's made a number of mistranslations. But usually it's not mistranslation so much as paraphrases. And I think that book, in particular—it's so important in the subject—you should never use those passages without checking the Greek, and I'm sure Cyril would say exactly the same.
RR: You talked about how you became interested in Byzantine and Classical studies. So, why Thessaloniki in particular?
RC: Really because Grabar's book gives the materials from Thessaloniki and because it was rather clear to me that people had totally underestimated the materials in Thessaloniki. And I wasn't the only person that thought this. So when I arrived in Thessaloniki and went to Hagia Sophia, which was going to be the center of my thesis, I met two other research students who'd come to the same conclusion: Jean Spieser, who was also there to work on St. Sophia, and a German scholar who was also to work on St. Sophia. We kind of divided up the territory, and so the German scholar then worked on St. Irene in Constantinople, instead of St. Sophia, and Jean-Michel Spieser worked on St. Demetrios; and I worked on St. Sophia. So it became slightly awkward, a few years later, when I came across the W.S. George drawings of St. Demetrios, because it kind of wasn't my territory; I'd ceded St. Demetrios to Spieser. But I did publish that. So, it was striking when I went to spend a year in Thessaloniki how nobody ever visited the place—very few people there. Unlike my contemporary, Julian Gardner, who was in Rome, who was networking every single day of his life in the British School at Rome, in Thessaloniki I became the local guide for visiting British government ministers who had to go to Thessaloniki. And also there was a British Council office there so I went there but I was required to go to lectures in the university—even though I couldn't get registered—and I soon opted out of those. They were given by Stylianos Pelekanides, and they were a translation into Greek of Grabar's L'iconoclasme byzantin, which, good book though it was, I reckoned I didn't need to go to a rather long series of lectures which were no more than translation. And Pelekanides was a rather odd art historian; I did meet Chatzidakes and Xyngopoulos. I met them, had appointments to meet Xyngopoulos in Thessaloniki and these were very impressive scholars and I was very lucky to meet them. But it was absolutely clear that the monuments of Thessaloniki were not well known and that when you read people who talked about them, they hadn't been to the monuments; they used the old plans of Letourneau and Diehl or in the nineteenth century. So I was—I think it was a good place to go: I was able to get to Mt. Athos from there, I traveled to Cappadocia from there, which was very around-the-bend. But I got to know very well the monuments of north Greece and I still feel that people don't know them as well as they should—really a fantastically exciting place to be.
RR: And currently, your research interest is in the cultural history of the Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai, is that correct?
RC: Yes. I first went to St. Catherine's in 1971 with a small group, which in retrospect was quite amusing. It was organized by Hugo Buchthal to see the manuscripts. And I went with Beat Brenk, Hans Belting, Hans L'Orange, Bezalel Narkiss, and me. And I went for a month to the monastery, which at that time was in Israel. And you fly to the Santa Catarina airstrip. The only obligation was to take food for a month with you. And so I spent a month in the monastery then and saw a lot of material. And over the years I've been back more and more frequently, and I've been fortunate enough to be inside most of the parts of the monastery, including the storerooms. And I – what I want to talk about in my book is not the art history, because the art history of Sinai is not going to be published for another 50 years, there's so much, but the feeling that you get in Sinai of: why do people want to live at the end of the world? So it's a kind of cultural history of the solitary – and partly how Sinai can both be the most exciting cultural center and also the most remote, so that's the paradox at the center of the book. But, simply trying to write down those bits of work I've done, but obviously one by one the icons, the manuscripts, and all the other objects and the architecture will be published by art historians, but that's going to take a long time.
RR: Is there anything else that you would like to add that I haven't asked you?
RC: Yeah. What I wanted to do in my first job was work in Russian and I learned Russian. And there was endless money in the sixties and seventies to work in Russia, basically as a spy. And since my boss was actually Blunt, all this was quite interesting, although when I first was going to Moscow I went to Anthony to ask if he'd got any advice on visiting Russia and he said, "I only visited Russia once, with Ellis Waterhouse, in the 1930s and it was a dreadful place and I never wanted to go back," which in retrospect, since he emerged as a spy for the Russians, was an interesting comment. I thought that visiting Novgorod, Pskov, other places for which I got visas in the Soviet Union, was immensely exciting. I was able to go to Georgia, to Armenia. I had money to go anywhere. But at that time the rules of access for foreign scholars were extremely strict so in the Lenin library in Moscow you could order a manuscript but you were not allowed to write notes or have a microfilm or take photographs. So I felt that the obstacles for working in Russia were too difficult, and actually I shifted into working in Turkey, at Aphrodisias, so I became the medieval consultant for Kenan Erim at Aphrodisias; we did publications of Aphrodisias. And then, I moved back into Greece and –
RR: So, around what year was this when you went to Russia?
RC: I went to Russia in every year from 1968—except the years in Dumbarton Oaks—for the next ten years. I saw – you know, I got quite an expertise in Russian material, but just felt the hazards. And what I would say for any person now is that there remains opportunity in Russia, and there's immense opportunities in the New York Public Library; the Slavonic holdings are unbelievably rich. I only discovered these about five years ago, when I was taken around, because Trotsky worked in the New York Public Library and in the twenties invited the librarians to purchase libraries and materials – quite unbelievable, the richness of the material in New York, including photographs of all the Russian monasteries as they were in the nineteenth century with the pieces which in 1917 were removed from them in situ. So, one thing I shall never do but think should be done is to work out the sources, the inventories, where things were in the nineteenth-century Russia, which are now in museums. So I regret not having worked in Russia, but there's so much to do in Byzantine studies – I mean it's just, it's still the fastest growing subject in art history, in my view.
RR: What are your future projects or lectures, besides the research project that you're doing now?
RC: Well I've just recently finished an article to be published in a conference on the Anglican cathedral at Khartoum, because I've been able to go to Sudan. And that article is about how the work of George and Weir Schultz in the late nineteenth century in Greece influenced their later work and in particular influenced the design of the new twentieth-century building in Khartoum, how it relates actually to St. Demetrios; the model is St. Demetrios. And how Demetrios is reinterpreted as primitive Christianity in Sudan. So I think that's one of the things I've published. And I'm also working on a book on Classicism, which is about continuity and discontinuities, but somehow that's got subsumed to Sinai, which is at the center of what I'm doing.
RR: Do you have any advice to future scholars, Byzantinists out there?
RC: We had a conference—and I'm sure Margaret Mullett was present at this in London—where we lined up every generation of Byzantinists, from Steven Runciman in his nineties—were you one of them, Margaret?
MM: I chaired it.
RC: You chaired it – where people were asked what the priority was and the younger you got, the less you thought Greek was a priority, it transpired. I think that the problem for Byzantinists is always going to remain languages. You can't but admire people like Cyril and Ihor, who already had about ten languages by the age of sixteen and learned a few more, but learning languages is absolutely essential in this subject; you've got to go on doing it. You have never learned enough, and languages do get easier. They get more difficult as you get older, but easier as you learn more, so my advice certainly is that in this subject you must use languages, you've got, somehow or other, to have a familiarity with Latin and Greek, but that wonderful things are written in nineteenth-century Tzarist Russian. They're not easy to read, but their nineteenth-century material is good. My own program is that what an art historian has to do is to be interdisciplinary and to balance empirical knowledge of the objects, the material objects, with methodologies and ways of looking at it; and that the challenge of art history, but particularly Byzantine art history, is how to balance theory and object-led art history. And, you know, I think some people have done it better than others, but it's the challenge for everybody.
RR: Well let's go back to the Byzantine Institute. If we could talk about Nicholas Kluge and his work –
RC: Yes, I mean, Ernest must have had some contact with Kluge, but basically Kluge was a photographer for the Russian Institute and also recorded in St. Demetrios and in Nicaea. And Kluge's work is basically held by Alicia Bank in the Hermitage—I think that's who it went to—and she gave a print of his records of Kiti to Ernest, which Ernest gave to me, in his will. So, Kluge's work is—and all the work done by the Russian Institute—is extremely important. Kluge was a recorder for them. I thought that his work was not as good as the work of W.S. George, when you could compare them. And it's slightly more colorful and less accurate, but it's quite atmospheric. Beyond that, Ernest certainly talked about the Russians: Karadakov, who went to Prague; Frolow and Kluge went to Paris. But they were an older generation, even than Ernest. So I know their importance but I know nothing about them personally.
RR: Did he mention anything about Kluge's death? Because I read in one of Hawkins' notebooks, where he states he was hospitalized all of a sudden, and then a few months later he dies, I believe in 1947. Do you know anything about that?
RC: No, no I know nothing about that. No. I mean, it does remind you: one of Ernest's complaints about fieldwork in Istanbul was that the – he wasn't allowed to photograph. The photographers came out and took photographs and then went back to Dumbarton Oaks, and they never knew what photographs were taken or whether they'd come out. I mean, you know, in Dumbarton Oaks they did, but Ernest actually didn't know what records had been taken – it was a kind of ignorance on the ground.
RR: Well, if you want to, Günder and Shalimar, do you have any more questions?
GV: Since you started to talk about Hawkins, may I ask a question about him?
RC: Yeah.
GV: You mentioned previously that it was possible to do any work under Ernest Hawkins, because he had built relationships with the Turkish authorities. And his relationship with Dumbarton Oaks was very clear. How was that possible? How did he manage to be in good contacts with Turkish authorities even after the Sion Treasure problem?
RC: Because he was a complete individual in his own right, extremely attractive person. He wined and dined everybody that mattered. He was, socially, extraordinarily expert and likable, so I think people just liked Ernest. His Turkish was bizarre in the extreme, as all his foreign languages were, but everybody kind of worked out the sort of thing he was saying without knowing exactly what he was saying. And so it was just immense good will and also the belief in Istanbul that he'd done a very good job and that he was the right expert. And he had made it quite clear that his expertise were different from Italian restorers, who would take mosaics off and redo them, so he had managed to sell his particular brand of scholarship and expertise—rightly—and that was how it worked.
GV: My second question is regarding Aphrodisias. How did you get involved with the project? Was it through Kenan Erim, or –?
RC: Yes. What's odd about Aphrodisias – when it started, with National Geographic money, it was the quickest dig that there ever was in Turkey, I suspect – I mean, they used bulldozers to get rid of the mosque and the Turkish village to get down to the Classical area – got rid of it very, very quickly. And also he wanted results for funding, because funding had to be done every year, with the result that—I guess the date would be about 1962—by the '80s, all that material had been got but nobody had studied it. Kenan didn't find it easy to get on with other scholars, but there was – a lot of expertise came from the UK, so Joyce Reynolds worked on the inscriptions, and then she trained Mary Beard and Charlotte Roueche to work on inscriptions. Mary decided that wasn't the direction she wanted to go, so Charlotte took those over. Michael Hendy came from England to work on coins. So, when Kenan thought that somebody ought to look at the medieval finds, it wasn't surprising that he asked advice from Joyce Reynolds and found somebody in the UK, so he asked me if I would look at the materials. It was a pretty severe shock to see the condition of the materials in Aphrodisias, because, while it's true that Kenan had kept the objects, as soon as he discovered that something was medieval, he stopped excavating it, so looking at medieval meant looking at churches, which had been abandoned as soon as it was discovered they were churches. Also, the medieval materials were not well recorded in the notebooks. Only ancient sculptures were recorded. And he had made the terrible mistake of – all the photography was done in Polaroids. So by the time I came, the Polaroids were faded, the notebooks were thin, and the labels on the objects had been eaten by mice. So, one was actually starting from first beginnings. That was possible in the temple, though actually the temple wasn't completely excavated. But tri-conch church was something that I worked on and I published a really important fragment of a sixth-century angel, Michael, which I put together, which I published but which has subsequently disappeared, I believe due to a fire in the storerooms. So, actually I had immense respect for Kenan Erim's ability to find things and his ability to reconstruct broken sculpture, which is a wonderful expertise. But as a social place to go, Aphrodisias was pretty hateful and no one was happy there. I happened to overlap with Martha Joukowsky, who was working on the prehistoric materials and Martha, who's a millionaire, used to order beer for us but it went into the kitchens and we were not allowed to go into the kitchens so she'd spent all this money on beer, which we were not allowed to go and get a beer during the hot afternoons; and it was very weird to work on a site with a treasure-hunting archaeologist, as he fully realized. And the annual visits, which I was at, between Hanfmann from Sardis—we went to Sardis and they came to us—you couldn't see two more different kinds of excavations. But all of us had a kind of sneaking admiration that Kenan Erim had got the funding for Aphrodisias – and the finds are just phenomenal. You know, it's a wonderful site to have worked on and I think that currently, through the work of Bert Smith and NYU and the digitizing of all the notebooks, that it's a much better place to work now. It's a very good site. But you had to have been there.
RR: You had briefly talked about Robert Van Nice a while ago. Would you like to add anything—more information about him? How was your relationship with him?
RC: Bob Van Nice would – any question you asked him, he would open his notebooks, his photographs, and he would submerge you in material. And you got the feeling that Bob Van Nice was submerged in a mass of material – graffiti, whatever it was, he had recorded it and he always said that he had a mortgage out on St. Sophia – if it went up for sale, he should have the first option on it. And, seeing him working in the building and seeing the accuracy of his methodology, it was very, very impressive. I mean, I think that is an absolute model, that book, for any architectural record—it's beautiful.
RR: Did you collaborate with him with any projects at all, small or large?
RC: No, I mean, I asked him questions about things. But he was a model thinker. Really, I think. I mean he just had too much material. He never got out from beneath it, it seemed to me.
RR: Did he have any help at all, or was he just working by himself?
RC: His family used to help him. I think he did have help, but basically –
RR: His family?
RC: I think his family did a bit. But basically he was a one-man band, definitely.
RR: His family helped him with his projects?
RC: I think his daughter – didn't his daughter used to go out to Istanbul? I don't remember this clearly at all, but that was – he was doing a project, but it was a one-man project. That's what academic studies were like until quite recently. People – you know, research was what you could do, yourself, not what you could do with a group. And except for archaeologists, who learned to work in teams, I think others didn't. Archaeologists were brilliant at working in teams.
RR: How about David?
RC: Yes. David Winfield's career is really important, I think. He, as he put it – he had a disastrous student career in Oxford, and the one thing they told him was he wasn't going to be an academic. And he left Oxford. I don't know why he got interested in wall painting— but he went to Yugoslavia, as it then was, and he was trained on Sopočani by Serbian restorers. And he was then discovered by David Talbot Rice, who'd got permission to work on St. Sophia at Trebizond and needed somebody to do the work and hired David to do the work. So David went out, and again we've got the position of the academic in the UK and the worker in the field, thinking he's carrying all the work. David took photographs, which were printed up, he said, locally in Trebizond, and would sell them to Talbot Rice, who thought – completely misunderstood them because they were so badly printed up. They were much better than that and then, the publication of Trebizond – he used these badly printed-up Turkish Trebizond photos, which is why the plates in the book are absolutely dreadful. The problem – problematic at Trebizond is what exactly the dating is and Winfield and Talbot Rice thought it dated to the 1260s. And the funny thing is it looks awfully like Sopočani and there's an awful lot of repainting there. And I asked David about the wall, and I said, "There's repainting there, isn't there?" and he said, "Look, I didn't do it. I think some of the Turkish assistants did it." But how did Turkish assistants manage to work in the style of Sopočani, I've always found slightly baffling. And so certainly what they found at Trebizond was extremely disappointing from the point of view that it was a funded project, which didn't look too good. And I think it was a bit enhanced, somehow. And obviously David has been attacked. He, at the same time, worked for Michael Gough on Eski Gumus, on the rock-cut church at Eski Gumus, and restored those works for the British Institute at Ankara. And of course there's a lot of repainting in Eski Gumus, as well. And it means that a number of people have criticized David Winfield's work at Asinou and Lagoudera, saying that there is repainting on it. I do not know the truth; I know that David says there's not repainting in those churches. But his early reputation has somehow clouded – what may be gossip or what may be accurate, I don't know. The important thing, it seemed to me, because I visited David at Lagoudera, is his cooperation with June Winfield, his wife. They worked extremely well together and she's more of an artist than him. And in some ways, he's followed the Ernest Hawkins principle of trying to work out exactly, from first principles, how the monument was painted. And that led to his article in Dumbarton Oaks Papers on methods, which is, I mean, exactly an Ernest Hawkins methodology. And Ernest read that article and approved of most of the things that are said – it says a lot of very good things. But David has always been kind of self-consciously anti-academic. And the feature of his writing, which is usually a bit verbose – but it's also aggressively simple – so, in his work on Georgia – he did important work in Akhtala, on Georgian buildings; when he reported those, he always described churches as being either square or rectangular or oblong or cross-shape. This was kind of anti-Krautheimer, to over-simplify things. So there's a kind of faux naïveté in Winfield that is perhaps, I think, intentional. But his work is exactly in the tradition of Ernest. They knew each other; they both worked together on Asinou to start with. And it's exactly the same principles of seeing how the artist worked on the spot and June then did a lot of reproduction—drawings and copies; and in Asinou she did a lot of copies of the frescos. And so he's a real hands-on, not angry anti-academic but just anti-academic, really. But not angry in the way that Ernest was. And after Lagoudera was finished, then David returned to England, where he surprisingly became a restorer-advisor for the National Trust, which is the state—I'm not sure if it's state or private, whether it's English Heritage or National Trust—anyway, a very official body for English country houses. David took a lot of very good photographs, of which the negatives for a number are in the Courtauld Institute in London, but I believe that his negatives and the photographs he took to the Hebridean island where he lives were lost in a fire. So I believe that it's very important to pick up on the copies that David had made both, I think, for Dumbarton Oaks and for the Courtauld, because I think the negatives don't exist anymore.
RR: Well thank you very much for your time and for sharing your story with us. Thank you.]]>
In Charlemagne's Survey of the Holy Land, Michael McCormick rehabilitates and reinterprets one of the most neglected and extraordinary sources from Charlemagne's revival of the Roman empire: the report of a fact-finding mission to the Christian church of the Holy Land. The roll of documents translated and edited in this volume preserves the most detailed statistical portrait before the Domesday Book of the finances, monuments (including exact dimensions), and female and male personnel of any major Christian church.
Setting these documents in the context of economic trends, archaeological evidence, and a comparison of Holy Land churches and monasteries with their contemporaries west and east, this study shows that the Palestinian church was living in decline as its old financial links with Byzantium slackened. In recounting Charlemagne's move to outflank the Byzantine emperor, McCormick constructs a microhistory of the Frankish king's ambitions and formidable organizational talents for running an empire.
Supplementing McCormick's major synthesis, The Origins of the European Economy, this volume will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in medieval rulership and economics, and in the history of the Holy Land, its Christian communities, and its late antique monuments.]]>
Only in the last decade has much serious attention been paid to the Byzantine garden, so indirect is the mass of information, both in literature and the visual arts, that is available for scholars. Byzantine Garden Culture, which comprises the revised versions of papers delivered at a colloquium of the same title held at Dumbarton Oaks in November 1996, is the first book ever devoted to the subject.
Individual chapters deal with Byzantine conceptions of paradise, the textual evidence for monastic horticulture, animal and game parks, Palaiologan gardens, Theodore Hyrtakenos's literary ekphrasis of a garden, the horticultural sections of the agricultural manual known as the Geoponika, herbs in medicinal pharmacy, and the famous illustrated copy of Dioskorides' herbal manual in Vienna. An opening chapter explores questions and observations from the point of view of a non-Byzantine garden historian, and the closing chapter suggests possible directions for future scholarship in the field.
To increase the usefulness of this book, both the bibliography and a chapter on the scholarship of Byzantine gardens cover every aspect of the subject, and have been brought up to date to October 2001. An unusually thorough index is provided.
Byzantine Garden Culture provides both garden historians and those interested in Byzantine civilization in general with information and insights into this neglected but fascinating area which, as is clear from their own innumerable allusions, was of paramount importance to the Byzantines themselves.]]>
"This concise monograph examines the technology, iconography and context of Late Roman gold coin jewelry…excellent photographs and drawings vividly illustrate the ostentation of these symbols of power and wealth…This exhibition catalogue of fifteen items, which also includes a complete bibliography, extensive footnotes and a useful glossary, is a beautiful and scholarly contribution to the study of ancient jewelry, a Vorbild for its kind, as essential tool for specialists and a sumptuous delight for general readers." —Revue des archéologues et historiens d'art de Louvain
Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications, no. 9]]>
This introductory booklet on Byzantine coinage, first published in 1982, has been updated and expanded to include a description of the creation of the coin collection at Dumbarton Oaks. This new edition marks the completion of the five volume series Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection.The booklet covers phases of the coinage, gold, silver, and copper coinage, types and inscriptions, and ruler representations. Tables of values corresponding with various times in the empire's history, a list of Byzantine emperors, and a glossary are also provided.
Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications, no. 4 (second edition)]]>
This book stands alone as the first general survey of lighting in Byzantium. Although relatively well known by specialists, Byzantine lighting devices have not been treated independently, but rather presented and discussed in connection with other Byzantine minor arts. The first part of the book discusses the technology and types of lighting devices and explains their decorative symbolism and social function. The second half illustrates this narrative by drawing on a Dumbarton Oaks exhibition, "Lighting in Early Byzantium," which presented to the public some of the finest surviving late Roman and early Byzantine lighting devices. Some of these are now published for the first time.
Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications, no. 9]]>
Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art explores the portable artifacts of eastern Mediterranean pilgrimage from the fifth to the seventh century, presenting them in the context of contemporary pilgrims' texts and the archaeology of sacred sites. The book shows how the iconography and devotional piety of Byzantine pilgrimage art changed, and it surveys the material and social culture of pilgrimage. What did these early religious travelers take home with them and what did they leave behind? Where were these "sacred souvenirs" manufactured and what was their purpose? How did the images imprinted upon many of them help realize that purpose? The first edition of this pathbreaking book, published in 1982, established late antique pilgrimage and its artifacts as an important topic of study. In this revised, enlarged version, Gary Vikan significantly expands the narrative by situating the miraculous world of the early Byzantine pilgrim within the context of late antique magic and pre-Christian healing shrines, and by considering the trajectory of pilgrimage after the Arab conquest of the seventh century.
Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications, no. 5 (revised edition)]]>
The "Parangelmata Poliorcetica" and the "Geodesia," two Greek treatises on the construction of devices for siege warfare, are products of 10th-century Byzantium. The texts are presented here in critical editions based, for the first time, on the archetype manuscript "Vaticanus graecus 1605" and accompanied by an English translation and commentary. The illustrations, reproduced in this edition, go beyond the traditional ground plans of the time and show elevations to represent finished devices in action.
Dumbarton Oaks Studies 36]]>
More than fifty years after the earthquake of 365 destroyed Kourion, the seat of the Roman administration of Cyprus, a Christian basilica was built upon the remains of its pagan predecessor. This basilica became the center of a large complex that included a baptistery, atrium, and numerous other structures and buildings. Replete with mosaics and revetment, the Christian basilica was the center of the ecclesiastical administration of Cyprus until its destruction in the late seventh century. In this long-awaited report, A. H. S. Megaw and colleagues present in full the results of excavations from the 1930s, 1950s, and 1970s. In addition to the stratigraphic history of the complex, there are reports on the mosaics, revetment, sculpture, coins, inscriptions, glass, pottery, lamps, and small finds.
Dumbarton Oaks Studies 38]]>
The longevity of the Byzantine state was due largely to the existence of variegated and articulated economic systems. This three-volume study examines the structures and dynamics of the economy and the factors that contributed to its development over time. The first volume addresses the environment, resources, communications, and production techniques. The second volume examines the urban economy; presents case studies of a number of places, including Sardis, Pergamon, Thebes, Athens, and Corinth; and discusses exchange, trade, and market forces. The third volume treats the themes of economic institutions and the state and general traits of the Byzantine economy. This global study of one of the most successful medieval economies will interest historians, economic historians, archaeologists, and art historians, as well as those interested in the Byzantine Empire and the medieval Mediterranean world.
Dumbarton Oaks Studies 39