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HB: Well, you will be very surprised how this came about, because there were two Jesuit persons who negotiated this for me. One was in Rome and the other was living nearby in the West Cottage, Father Dvornik. And they talked to each other, and the Roman one said, "This young boy should develop." And then Father Dvornik talked to Kitzinger. And eventually, I could apply. I had no idea, I had never been here, and I was just a plain art historian. So, I mean, as things go, you know, there was no big plan. So, one day, I just arrived, initially by boat, then by train – no, by bus, Greyhound bus – from New York. And I found myself at Dumbarton Oaks, to my great surprise and to every other's surprise.
GB: And if I can, in a way, fill in – it's not necessary – but I was so happy to find in our dossiers your letter which you have written –
HB: Oh, really?
GB: – in 1959. You were twenty-three years old.
HB: That's right.
GB: You were about – not only to – whatever – but nowadays a graduate student would do to think up a topic of a Ph.D. – No, you were about to receive your diploma, your Ph.D. in Germany. So, you were 23 years old and you wrote a letter to Professor Kitzinger –
HB: Right.
GB: – not having met him, but as we start here, "In einem Gespräch mit Herrn Professor Dvornik auf dem Byzantinischenkongress in München" –
HB: Right.
GB: – "hatte ich mich nach den Möglichkeiten eines Stipendiums für Dumbarton Oaks erkundigt." This is amazing, because – not amazing that you were twenty-three years old and you were about to think of, well, going abroad – where the best institute at the time was to study. You mention your Ph.D. and you mention, beyond that, that you would like to introduce a specific – well, a specific group of the so-called beneventanische Schule that was your Ph.D. topic. But you brought other things with you. And as I see here, three more research topics.
HB: Really…?
GB: That's amazing. I mean, I thought that this was just – I'd like to hear more about the situation for you when you finished your studies and you were thinking of Dumbarton Oaks – the situation in Germany and the possibilities obviously which you thought you will find here.
HB: Well, I was advised to write this letter and I think I met, indeed, Ernst Kitzinger, at the Congress in Munich. It was a memorable occasion, because it had been the first time he returned to Germany after the war. And he was very nervous. Everyone could see that. He felt uncomfortable, especially so, since he had studied in Munich and received his Ph.D. in Munich. And much later, in '85, I was able to – when holding the chair of his former teacher – to give him his doctoral diploma. But, much happened in between. So indeed, I had written this Ph.D. thesis in Mainz, and its subject was a new discovery of mine: namely, one of the very few cycles of the tenth-century, in South Italy – but all in Europe, there are not so many examples. So Kitzinger, who was then Director of Studies – he was very interested in the subject of this Ph.D. thesis; but when I showed him my thesis, he thought very low of it. So, I asked him what to do. And he said, "Well, I would be able to supervise you." And actually, this was my great luck. I wrote this, eventually; you know, whatever the projects were, I spent this year in writing the same Ph.D. thesis once again under his supervision. And so he received me once a week with reports on what I did and how I got along. So, this was the first real education – academic situation – because I was a wild child. You know, I had done all these things, but you know the real education – introduction – into how scholarship is done, actually, if I may say so, happened in this special relation during the first year. The second year was very different. But that was the first year.
GB: So, the relationship you just described – is that a relationship I would identify as a – it seems to me that when you arrived, you were a scholar, you were not a person who had to be educated. You arrived –
HB: It depends.
GB: – and you met Ernst Kitzinger and you said that you had weekly meetings then.
HB: Yes.
GB: What was that? Can you describe? Do you remember some of those conversations? What kind of exchange on a – what kind of level between the two of you?
HB: Well, I mean, generally speaking, I was something like the returning past for a lot of the émigrés, because suddenly they saw a young academician from Germany whom they had not seen for years and ages. So, I was, in a way, representing the type of student they lost when leaving Germany. There was an emotional situation. The second relation we had was, of course – art history was prominent here, because there was all the faculty. And there were all these relations among the persons, and so I think Ernst Kitzinger – we could talk a little bit – he had a double role. He was, on the one hand, something like a dean of the faculty as Director of Studies. On the other hand, he had a very different relation to the Blisses. But maybe this is already too far to go.
GB: No, no, not at all.
HB: Because he often complained that they took advice from him about objects of whatever time, you know, because like an employee, he was, you know, asked. So, he had a very different – and I think he must have enjoyed, first of all, to teach again a German young person. And second, also to speak German to me, because my English was so horrible that he said, "It's hopeless. Let's speak German."
GB: But you wrote beautiful letters.
HB: Really?
GB: Yes.
HB: I'm surprised.
GB: Well, that's a wonderful topic, and I would certainly like to come back to it, and that's what I think we should do. Because I would like first that maybe you take over to go further on – because the relationship between Ernst Kitzinger and the Blisses and the collection and of course, yeah, your interest that is maybe for a little bit later, before we go on.
HB: Yes, because the second year, which we will talk later about, was entirely different. And is also very interesting, how I got a second year.
AMT: Okay, well, why don't we talk first, then – '59–'60, I know, was the year that Ihor was there in the spring, in preparation, I gather, for the famous Metochites/Kariye Djami Symposium. So, that must have been a particularly wonderful year to be at Dumbarton Oaks.
HB: Oh, yes.
AMT: And I was wondering – I mean, you had been working in this much earlier material – was the fact that this symposium was on Kariye Djami – did that lead you, for the first time, to your interest in the Paleologan Period?
HB: I think so, yes. And indeed, Florentine Muetherich in Munich – she asked me to write about this conference – the symposium. This was my first article I ever published – in Munich in the Kunstchronik. You have a report on the Metochites conference and Ihor, of course, was a great figure because he taught in Columbia. And he was a little bit envied also by those who normally did not teach here. So, this was a constant topic to – you know, "Do we teach? Do we not? How we do it?" So, Ihor was, certainly, when he came here, a great presence. And also his special relation to Cyril Mango – that was obvious.
AMT: So, did you live in this building, the Fellows Building?
HB: Yes, yes. I lived on top of the stair, the next room to the left.
AMT: And I understand that at the time – '59–'60 – there was still a staff in the building who served meals to you?
HB: Oh, yes, oh, yes.
AMT: It was quite elegant, or…?
HB: Yes. I mean, there were two parts always, which you must also remember: the lunch, over there, in the next room, and after-lunch. This was always a solemn assembly in this room – totally intimidating. Because not only the faculty (on which we can talk) assembled, and as you remembered, Father Dvornik would come for coffee, because the after-lunch was independent from the lunch. And we would march in and Kitzinger would ring the bell, and then they would serve the lunch, and he would always preside at the head of the table. And you know, sometimes it became more solemn when it was a Founders Day and the Blisses came. But here was the real center of Dumbarton Oaks – this room, for me, in terms of dialogue/discussion, because everybody was sitting here, around, and also a lot of guests. So, the guests were officially welcomed after lunch here, and they talked with the faculty, and so it was not just the faculty, but a lot of guests, also from Europe – Fellows, guests for a short time, then guests from Princeton or Harvard. So, the biggest impression I got from Dumbarton Oaks was in this room.
AMT: So, it's appropriate that we're interviewing you here today.
HB: Absolutely.
AMT: Now where was your office, or were you in that big reading room?
HB: Yes, I was in the big reading room. And I was sitting at the part towards the street – toward 32nd Street. And we were all in this reading room – the Fellows. It was very entertaining – very noisy, you know, everybody talking. You know, we had some very fabulous Fellows, very colorful.
AMT: Who were they?
HB: Like Father Magoulias, who was a star because he was so extremely funny. And he was here with his wife. And they lived in the big room over there [gestures] – up there. So, they played always a record – "Never on Sundays" – with Melina Mercouri. And he was the social center. Then there was Pia Schmid, who was a fellow German from Munich. And for me, the most important fellow was David Pingree. David Pingree was already then so learned that it was incredible – Sanskrit and everything. He mastered all possible languages from Latin, Greek, and you know, other languages too, and also, history of science. So, he was my neighbor – in the next room. And he was very kind to me because he taught me English – that was a very, very important relation – to David Pingree.
AMT: Now besides Kitzinger, with which other faculty members did you feel comfortable talking?
HB: Yes, I mean, Father Dvornik, anyway, because I knew him from Europe; but Paul Underwood because of the interests. You know, he was so extremely kind. And he would see me so often and show me the latest photographs coming in from Istanbul – from the Byzantine Institute – the new discoveries and so on.
GB: Very exciting.
HB: So, that was for me, of course, a personal introduction to Byzantium, where I never had been. Yes, I had been, at twenty, at the Byzantinist Congress in Istanbul. That I must correct. '55. Then I was just nineteen.
AMT: Now you –
HB: Can I just continue? [looks at his notes] So, of course Downey was a little bit aloof. You know all these people as well as I do. Anastos – very communicative. And there was always, for weeks or so, Philip Grierson. And Philip Grierson made a great impression on me. I did not understand him well – his quick language, his fast language – initially. But this became a long relation for over years. But I must add that during the first year, I think that Otto Demus was here as a guest. Of course, a great figure whom I worshipped and still do. And next year – the second year – there was André Grabar. And then, of course, Kurt Weitzmann came, you know, always for certain periods. But then, I think, in the second year, also, Ernst Kantorowicz moved in for the summer. And he had a specially close relation, of course, to Ihor. And then, of course, meetings – Board of Advisors? I don't know what it was called.
AMT: Board of Scholars.
HB: Board of Scholars. There, I must say, I met all the big German émigrés like Werner Jaeger. I mean, I tell today, I still have seen Werner Jaeger – nobody believes me, you know. And you know, I think there was also Paul Tillich, and so, in my view, the faculty was enlarged by this Board of Scholars who all came for symposia and were here also a lot on and up. So for me, this was a world of learning. And a person I came very close to very quickly was Richard Krautheimer. And this remained a very, very close relation until his death in Rome. I visited him a lot in Rome. And so I visited him then in the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. So it is not just the faculty, but the bigger circle –
AMT: – larger community –
HB: – larger community, that's it.
AMT: So, how did you happen to stay on a second year?
HB: Well, of course, I had the feeling that in just rewriting my Ph.D. thesis it was not enough initiation into Byzantium because – especially so, since the Ph.D. thesis was on an Italian topic. So, I tried to negotiate: "Is there any possibility for me?" And they said, "We will think about it." And I said, "Maybe I can work with something of the Byzantine Institute – with new discoveries, and so on." And then I mentioned the mosaics of St. Sophia would be fantastic. And then they decided, "Young boy, wait a little bit. Wait some years. This is just above your level. We talk about." But then they found, you know, you can imagine, it was really an interesting story. Then they said, "Well, there are the frescoes of St. Euphemia in Istanbul. They are in a very bad condition, and the whole excavation of Alfons Maria Schneider's of the '40s is a mess. So, we have to do a publication on this. So, since you are German, and if you are ready to go to Istanbul to work with the findings, and do all this, then you can come back and work here on the materials from the excavation of St. Euphemia of the '40s."
GB: That's very interesting, in that it brings me to the question to ask: if Alfons Maria Schneider could have been able to do this? Or why is there the Dumbarton Oaks interest in the Euphemia frescoes?
HB: Because Underwood was involved in the restoration of the frescoes. And then he found out, there are not just the frescoes. There is all this material sitting in the archaeological museum nobody knows of. And then there was still the second excavator – actually, Alfons Maria Schneider, to tell the truth, he had directed all this from Göttingen, but he had not done it. The person who had done it was Naumann. And Naumann was at that time director of the Istanbul Institute – of the German Archaeological Institute. So, he agreed that I could stay there for a while and he undertook at the same time then, the excavation of the Lausos Palace nearby. So, I participated a little bit at that and later on too. So, actually this was the hardest academic job I ever did, because there was ceramics, sculpture, frescoes, mosaic, you know, the architecture, the liturgical installation, and there was nothing on all this. There was a brief article in I don't know where from Alfons Maria Schneider. But I did an excavation in the collection. Not on –
AMT: Is this called forensic archaeology?
HB: Yes. Right, right, right. I learned a lot.
AMT: It was a wonderful training for you.
HB: It was a wonderful training. It was a wonderful training. And so I justified my presence here by a function for the activities of the Byzantine Institute.
AMT: But you were called a Fellow still.
HB: Yeah. Right. And out of this came later on a book, together with Rudolf Naumann, on St. Euphemia, which covers everything. And Rudolf Naumann wrote a kind of introduction. But then I really got a good training in Byzantine art.
GB: It is very interesting to listen to you and to the description of the scholars and the impact they had and what you learned in this very decisive year – again, you, being this young promising scholar and being exposed to this kind of explosion of scholarship. And again, by looking through your letter where you have indeed already in the letter you sent in 1959, beginning of February, where you mention that you are preparing your Habilitationsschrift.
AMT: Oh, my goodness. This was...
GB: And you say that it is about the Stuttgart Psalter.
HB: Really? Wow, I forgot completely about this.
GB: So, I think that what you described – and please correct me if this is not the right impression which I have now – which is indeed that you had planned, you had a way to attack the art history field – to find your way. Then, being here, it got changed. And it was maybe, really – the major way, or the most important way one could change, was to be exposed to the scholarship. And then, of course, to look for opportunity to extend this kind of productive work in exclusion. Is that something which…?
HB: Absolutely. Well, the biggest change in my plans with my Ph.D. topic was that Kitzinger advised me to do a monograph, because I had done all South Italy in one thing. And he said, "That's nonsense. That's dilettante. Do a good monograph on the – ." And I did then my Habilitationsschrift on what originally had been my Ph.D. topic – the larger region of South Italy.
GB: And you published in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1972 –
HB: Yes.
GB: – your article in German.
HB: In German?
GB: Exactly.
HB: Oh.
AMT: When I realized that I –
HB: – Exactly. Studien zum Beneventanischenhof. And this was an entirely historical study, in a way.
GB: It has the very last chapter on the architecture.
HB: Yeah. But indeed, I think this article is a mirror of my new awakened interest in historical, numismatic, and other things, in order to describe a court of that type.
GB: Yeah – a very broad picture, again, which you develop in this article, which is just amazing.
HB: Well, you see how much I tried to live up to the level –
AMT: – the standards.
GB: You see in the documents how much the young scholar had already been, of course, not only accepted, but highly appreciated. Because I think – I think, I don't know – but I think in this time, as nowadays, it is not easy – let's put it this way – to publish an article in DOP.
HB: Yes, this was, indeed, a high honor conveyed to me.
AMT: Because most of the articles were by the permanent faculty, or they were symposium papers, for example.
HB: Yes, but I should like to add one thing. If I talk in Europe about my early Dumbarton Oaks experience, my emphasis is always on another aspect: that I met Eastern Europe in living representatives. I had never thought of – to meet – and I no idea of the German Bundesrepublik was a very closed territory. And we were developing to the European Union. So, the other part of Europe was actually non-existent. It was behind the iron wall. And paradoxically, Dumbarton Oaks, suddenly, brought me in contact to that Europe which I did not meet in Europe.
AMT: So while we're talking about the general environment in '59–'61: Mr. Bliss was still alive. Could you tell us something about the Blisses? I believe that Mrs. Bliss came more often to Dumbarton Oaks than Mr. Bliss.
HB: Yes, indeed. I mean, they both came to lunch on the Founders Day. And they usually offered an object for the collection. So, when we had lunch over there, they were unpacked something – a chalice, you know. And then they said, "This is for the collection, for our Founders Day."
GB: Once a year a Founders Day?
HB: Yes.
AMT: And that was the day of the inauguration?
HB: Yes.
AMT: Maybe we should celebrate that again here.
HB: And we were very impressed, of course. Then, really, we had a very solemn lunch.
AMT: And very good food.
HB: Very good food. And besides, Mrs. Bliss came very often from the Founders' Room to the study in order to have tea with us. And she would address me and say, "What did you do today, Mr. Belting?" So, I mean, it was of course, a phrase – polite – but she even took notice of myself, which I find today more astonishing than at the time when I look back. And then of course, the impression they had on me were the concerts, because Mrs. Bliss would be enthroned at the foot of the staircase leading to the Music Room. And he was standing behind her. You know, she was like a queen and he was standing behind her. And both, of course, impressed me immensely.
AMT: And did they greet people as they arrived?
HB: Yes. They received. So, everybody who came to the concert was received first at the entrance by the Blisses. And we were allowed to gather in the back.
AMT: The Fellows?
HB: The Fellows.
AMT: And did you have to wear black tie?
HB: No.
AMT: Because when my husband and I were here a little later, in 1966–68, the men did have to wear black tie.
HB: Ah, yeah.
AMT: It was very, very formal.
HB: Ah, yeah. No, at that time…but we were like Hauspersonal. I mean, we did not count, you know, we were additional people. The others – they all had black tie.
AMT: The rest of the audience?
HB: The rest of the audience, yes. But we were allowed to come in when everybody had taken the seats and then we could come in and stand in the back or sit in the back. And then the third occasion where I got to know them a little bit was at symposium, because they invited everybody at the end of symposium to their house, you know, which was somewhere there [gestures left] – a big house in Georgetown. So, then after the end of the symposium, we all walked over there and had lunch with the Blisses.
AMT: That was on the Sunday – Sunday lunch.
HB: No, that was Saturday.
AMT: Oh, so you didn't – maybe it was a different schedule, because there were often shorter symposia in the early days.
HB: Okay, okay. No, I mean, I remember that they ended in Saturday at lunchtime.
AMT: I remember now that the early symposia had many fewer speakers than now.
HB: Ah, yeah.
AMT: Often there were just seven speakers.
HB: Yes, yes.
AMT: And from my time, which was just shortly after you, I remember that the lunch served to the symposium guests at Dumbarton Oaks was extremely elegant, with a whole salmon with scales made of cucumber slices, for example.
HB: Mhm.
AMT: Was it the same in your time?
HB: No, I mean, my experience was that we had no lunch then at all here, but we walked all to their house.
AMT: Well, maybe because we didn't go to the Blisses' in our time, we had a more elegant lunch here at Dumbarton Oaks.
HB: Yes, yes.
AMT: That's probably the explanation, okay. So, can we move on now to ten years later, when you – oh, it is '69–'70 when you came back as a visiting scholar. And I just want to remind you that Mrs. Bliss had died in January of '69 and Jack Thacher retired in December of '69 – so, shortly before your arrival. And this must have been a time of great change at Dumbarton Oaks.
HB: Yes. Well, I arrived, I think, in the fall of '69 and stayed until the spring of '70.
AMT: So, you were there just before Thacher retired, then.
HB: Yes.
AMT: Yes, okay. And Romilly Jenkins had died, so was there a Director of Studies? Do you remember?
HB: What was Ihor's role at this moment?
AMT: Well, I think he had been Director of Studies, '66–'67, but I believe in '69–'70, he was what he told me, "Senior Faculty Member." I'm not sure if there was a Director of Studies.
HB: No. Well, but my memory is not very precise in that moment. I have to tell that I got an offer in '68. Then there was already the idea that the faculty was no longer to be the model for the future. But we had several meetings – Ihor, Cyril, and myself – before that happened, before I got this offer – whether we should somehow work together. I was, of course, far younger than both of them. But the idea was a kind of trio. I don't know. I mean, this is very rough, because I've forgot the details. But there was a plan, certainly, that Ihor would be a leading figure. And in my view, he was about to – he was…hmm…in my memory, he was director. And everybody was very curious how he would handle this, but maybe for a short time.
AMT: Because I'm not sure he held that title. He may have functioned as a –
HB: In my memory, he functioned like this. Yes.
AMT: Because we do have in your dossier some of the correspondence about the negotiations with you to become a faculty member – a member of the permanent faculty. And this would have been – well, this actually started even before Underwood died, right? So, it wasn't really to replace Underwood; it was in addition.
HB: No, no.
AMT: But then Underwood did die. And then you were interested.
HB: Yes.
AMT: But then you had another offer from Heidelberg.
HB: Yes, I often talk about this. My life would have taken a different direction. I had already accepted this position here. I had got the parchment and everything. And then I got an offer for a full professorship at Heidelberg, which was quite unexpected because I was definitely too young for such a position. Nobody expected this. Actually, three people declined this, and then in the last moment they thought of myself. [laughter] So, this was a very difficult decision and well, I mean, I'm never sure whether I did the right decision. But indeed, it was a decision to stay with family in Germany.
GB: Mhm.
AMT: And to teach.
HB: Yeah, right.
GB: Although you would have had a chance to teach here, as well –
HB: But this was a big topic, always.
AMT: – Well, not very much.
HB: No, no but, you know, this was a constant problem discussed among the faculty – how they would keep their contacts to Harvard and to go there and teach, and how one could find a convenient solution. But it was never possible to find a convenient solution.
AMT: And in the end, I believe that relatively few did go to Harvard to teach.
HB: Yeah. But the possibility to go there was, of course, very important. But indeed, then they were very kind, and I explained the situation, and then I said I would come for half a year. Since I will not come, I will come for half a year – when I had already accepted the chair in Heidelberg. And that was half the year. That was '69 to '70. And in that time, I worked on the study on the illuminated book in Paleologan time.
AMT: With Buchthal. Or where was Buchthal?
HB: No, that was later – that came later when I did a book with Buchthal on this group of Palaiologina for the Dumbarton Oaks Studies and with Cyril and Doula Mouriki on Pammakaristos. But that came later.
AMT: Okay. So, the illuminated book was just your own.
HB: Yes.
AMT: But I would say that in a way it was fortunate that you accepted Heidelberg, because as it turned out, there was the severe attrition of the faculty at Dumbarton Oaks. And as I just had this conversation with Ihor, and he told me how it was arranged for him to move to Harvard, as the first Dumbarton Oaks Professor in 1973.
HB: Yes.
AMT: By then, all of the faculty were gone except for Bill Loerke. Cyril Mango had gone.
HB: Exactly.
AMT: Yeah. So, in the end, you probably would not have stayed here anyway.
HB: Yeah. Right, right. But maybe I would have been rescued by an American university.
AMT: That's quite possible. [to GB] Do you want us to focus a little more on the book? – On the illuminated manuscripts?
GB: Actually, my thoughts just went on with mentioning – you mentioned the variety of scholars you had then, in the future that you had relationship, of course, working projects together. Is that something which again goes back to your having been in touch with them here and having just developed your interest in the field? So, is that still kind of linking, or is that still the Dumbarton Oaks connection which has even further developed – actually moved you on in keeping in touch with Byzantine art history? Is that right? I mean, between, let's say, the first two years – actually, I thought it was three years – but you were – '59 –
HB: Two years.
GB: – to '61. And then there was a gap. You came back in '69. So, what happened? You stayed in contact, of course. You had relationships, you had correspondence, you had developed your network. There was no possibility, there was no necessity to come back, of course, because you had to teach –
HB: Here?
GB: – you had to develop – To come here, yeah.
HB: No, except for St. Euphemia book.
GB: Exactly, yeah.
HB: And then my teaching in Germany started in '65–'66. And from then on, you know, my interest went on a different road, because I never taught Byzantine art in Germany. It was a position to teach general art history. There was even an agreement in Munich saying they should avoid Byzantine art because there was the other institution, you know with Restle – so, I mean, actually there were these two periods, of the St. Euphemia and the illuminated book in Paleologan times, followed by this collaboration with the two other Dumbarton Oaks Studies. That was a Byzantine intermezzo.
GB: What about later with Hugo Buchthal?
AMT: That's the atelier of the Palaiologina.
HB: Yeah. Well, he had taught at the time at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. So, we met and he learned about my interest in Byzantine book illumination, and we somehow suddenly developed this plan. And actually, student revolts were such a prominent experience in Germany, that this was for me also escape – to go to London and to work with him on this book which, however, proved to be very difficult, because we were two different generations. We had very different views of scholarship, and above all, when we corresponded, his German was of a different time than my own. So, misunderstandings were happening all the time. So, it was finally an unhappy compromise, but the book became.
GB: Aha. What about Richard Krautheimer and your relationship? Now, just thinking of relationships which you have developed with German scholars beyond the time of having met them here –
HB: Well, he then went soon to Rome. He retired to Rome.
GB: Yes, we know.
HB: So, I saw him a lot in Rome. And also my Munich students – sometimes they stayed in his household and looked after him and even gave him medical treatment. And he was such a prominent presence in the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. So, that was, of course, very strong. And then my relation to Kurt Weitzmann stayed very close.
AMT: Can I go back to your collaboration with Buchthal? How did you envisage dividing up the work?
HB: That was a big problem, yeah. I mean, we never really found an elegant solution for it. But I think that, yes, it was a hard time for both of us, and it was also a kind of detective story to trace all these manuscripts and so on. But this had a follow-up – I remember now – that was much easier and even happier one, because a paleographer from Rome showed me a Turin manuscript with a colophon from the year 538 with Belisar on them – you know, the famous Italian paleographer from Rome. So, I did a small book – no, I did a big book, but small in size – not so thick, but a big size, on the Bible of Niketas.
AMT: Ah yes, Cavallo.
HB: Cavallo. Guglielmo Cavallo. Exactly. So this was very easy – quick, you know – everything was clear. We could bring together three manuscripts. But this was a kind of episode, so to speak. You know, it was too tempting to do this. And to rename a whole group with the donor, Niketas, and then trace it back to a Bible from the time of Belisar – you know, sixth century. This was not a big project – it was very easy. And I sent around our Heidelberg photographer to Turin, Florence, and Copenhagen to do photographs under the same conditions so one could see this is the same edition of the Bible. But this is not typical, because at that time, I did very different things. I wrote a book on image and its public in the Middle Ages.
GB: And this is after you had worked with Hugo Buchthal and it worked. And it was still, in a way, of course, in exactly this kind of – I mean, leading back a Middle Byzantine manuscript to a sixth century prototype – is of course, precisely what Hugo Buchthal was dealing with for the Renaissance and all that. This is exactly the type of research. So it was still in his –
HB: Absolutely. I reached Buchthal also because of Dumbarton Oaks – of the connections: Richard Krautheimer and also – and he became a big source for me on German émigrés. You know, he knew everything. He was a student of Panofsky. So, he told me every – you know, I felt some times I had lived pre-war, you know, as a student of those authorities, because I was so familiar with these stories.
AMT: With those people. Now, Hans, to change the subject a little bit back to your year, '69–'70, that you were here. That was, I believe, the time, at which some discussion began of moving Dumbarton Oaks to Cambridge. I know you were a Fellow at that point, but were you aware of these discussions?
HB: Yes. Sue Boyd has reminded me that I even played – as she sees it – a big role in this question, because we had a conference at New York in '76–'77, when Giles Constable had just become director here. And it seemed that he was determined to do the move to Harvard – at least that was the gossip and what he said also pointed into this direction. And she tells the story – I do not remember – that I stood up and did a long, you know, energetic talk: "This should never happen! Because…" And so on, so on, so on. And she says – I don't say this… – that from this time, the move to Harvard had no longer been pursued by Giles. Not because of my talk, but because of the whole atmosphere in New York at this conference.
AMT: I remember that conference quite well, because I was appointed to a committee to meet with Giles Constable, representing the Byzantine Studies Conference, to also protest against this. So, that was exactly the same time.
HB: Yes, I mean, I think Tyler already changed the climate somehow. You know, Thacher was completely – he was a society figure of the same class like the Blisses almost. And he was so close to them that he was also continuing their plans. Whereas, then, Jenkins was, you know, different story. But then Tyler – we had the impression immediately, in '69 to '70 – did play a different game. You know, he wanted to change the place somehow.
AMT: That's curious, because, as a friend of the Blisses, or at least, the godson of the Blisses, you would think that he would want to continue the status quo.
HB: That was not our impression at the time.
AMT: Now, after '69–'70, you came back to Dumbarton Oaks at a later time, to work on icons.
HB: Exactly. I mean, Giles, to whom I was, after a while – I had the feeling – I was closer to him than before – we developed a project which led to my book Likeness and Presence that the materials from Byzantine time should be studied here, and I got a long-term appointment, or whatever, which meant that I could come every year in the vacation period – between the two terms. In Munich this was very good, also, because March and April are free from teaching – in Munich. So, that was a time I came here – several times.
AMT: So that would have been the early '70s.
HB: That was the late '70s.
AMT: Late '70s.
HB: Up into the '80s.
AMT: So, that's after Giles, right?
HB: No, no – I think –
AMT: – No, you're right, I'm sorry. I'm confused – into the '80s, yes. Mhm.
HB: So, then I wrote a book, practically, in Rome – when I had a year in Rome: '85 to '86. But then I already had assembled a lot of materials and we also had negotiated with Kurt Weitzmann that he would part with some of his precious photographs, which was always a big topic, because they were not kept in Dumbarton Oaks. And the question of accessibility of his material was always a big topic. So, indeed, but then I only came for this one project here. And only for brief stays between Munich terms.
AMT: And you told me that you actually offered Bild und Kult to Dumbarton Oaks for publication?
HB: That's true. But then it was still in German and there was not yet a translation. But actually this book is absolutely, you know, a product of my relation to Dumbarton Oaks, I think. Yes, yes. So, this was very important. Then I saw a lot here, but only as brief time guest, because at that time I had already the chair in Munich and I had a huge teaching load, and very different problems. For instance, I wrote my End of the History of Art?, which was translated in ten languages, I don't know – so I was in big battle over methods and so on. So, Dumbarton Oaks was for me like a paradise. I could go there for two months and do real research.
GB: And that means that when you were here during this period, you came to study and to do your research in the library, I guess?
HB: Yeah, absolutely.
GB: So, that was the need and purpose of your visit here. Is that because there was no other library in Germany to do that? Or was it still more than that?
HB: It was more than that. It was much more than that. I had a feeling I could do a certain type of work only here.
GB: And because of the retreat? And because of the being close –
HB: That was part of it but not only – but meeting people. For instance, for Bild und Kult later – Likeness and Presence – I asked a lot of people about sources. Typical, you know. Nancy Ševčenko was very generous. But I asked Cyril, you know, when they were here. So, I went around and got my sources and – this was, for me – I could not have gotten it any place else.
GB: So, while you were here working on this important book – you can't say it otherwise – it was still that you had exchanged, you communicated, you had your thesis, your –
HB: Yes.
GB: That means that you were sitting still and reading in the readers' room while the others were still there as well? Or how close was –
HB: No, no. At that time, they offered me for a short period an office – in varying places.
GB: And lunches, then. What about lunches? You had lunches then together with the Fellows when you were here?
HB: Yeah, yeah.
AMT: In that room?
HB: Yeah, yeah. But it was already much freer. We didn't have the faculty lunch.
AMT: Yes, because Giles democratized lunch.
HB: Exactly, yeah, yeah.
AMT: And people came at different times. We didn't all sit down at exactly the same time.
HB: Exactly, yes.
GB: So, you came during the time Fellows were here, not in the proper summer term?
AMT: In the spring.
GB: In the spring.
HB: In the spring, because of this Munich arrangement, that I was free in March and April. And of course, then Philip Grierson would come from Cambridge, so there were things which were going on. My English is today awful. But anyway, you know I'm – for this climate – and I have a big program this week down there – so I feel a little bit tired because of language. But otherwise, I'm delighted.
GB: We can switch to German if you'd like.
HB: No, no, that's fine. That's fine.
GB: Actually, we did not ask about the time frame, but we've been going for more than an hour.
AMT: I think we've covered a lot of ground. I think we've covered most of your visits here. Is there anything we haven't asked you that you'd like to have a chance to tell us?
HB: Yes, I mean, my last official presence at Dumbarton Oaks was a symposium of 1990, which I did together with Herbert Kessler, on icons. And that was a very special event for me, because we invited both what we regarded as our teachers – as guests of honor. He invited Weitzmann and I invited, as symposiarch, Kitzinger. So, they both were not always very close but then they enjoyed terribly of being invited as guests of honor. And then I had also invited friends from Holland – Henk Van Os. But I think this was the last official event in which I participated at Dumbarton Oaks.
AMT: That was the symposium in which Oikonomides did that wonderful one on the icon as asset.
HB: Exactly, yes. Exactly.
AMT: – famous, yes…I remember that.
HB: And there was another episode I remember well because I had invited also David Freedberg from Columbia. And I had proposed to him that we criticize our books as friends, not just for doing damage to the other, but just to exchange freely, which he did not dare, quite. But that was the idea – that I am talking about his book about images, and he talks about my book, which had just come out at the time (1990).
GB: Yeah, exactly, in German. And then four years later in English.
AMT: And so it was like a colloquium, or just the two of you?
HB: No, that was a symposium – that was part of the symposium.
AMT: Part of the symposium. I see.
HB: And Ihor was very – how should I say – dissatisfied with this idea because he said, "We are talking here"… [looks at his watch] We should…oh, yes.
GB: Oh, four minutes. Can I then maybe ask one question which is just – because we haven't talked about – maybe it's not even really necessary – but it's a question I'm very interested in, of course. What was the role – what was the collection during that time? You, now having seen, of course, the re-installation – I having seen, experienced your excitement about it – about seeing back the objects and so on – of course, I was interested in hearing what it was like being here, living here with the scholars, being exposed to those objects which were on display.
JM: Let's pause and let you have as many minutes as you'd like, okay?
GB: Oh yeah. [break to change discs]
HB: And it was clear for instance when I accepted the chair in Munich that, you know, this would be – No, I just wanted to go – plead. It was very amusing, you know. I have a long history with Ihor too. But his complaint in this symposium was that we should talk about each other, so I should talk about Freedberg, and Freedberg should about me. He said, "This is not done here at this place. We're talking about history and not about living persons." So he made a big speech against this terrible behavior, to write on – to speak on colleagues, and so it was an interesting situation. But now, let's come to the collection. The collection was of course the major topic of Kitzinger.
AMT: Yeah, yes, of course.
HB: And the things which come to mind immediately are his problems with identifying certain pieces, whether they are maybe fakes, like the Theodosian thing. So, that was a big topic, you know, and he was very tense. So, actually for the majority of the faculty, I would say the collection was not very much on their mind. Different with Cyril Mango, of course, but then there was a special relation between Cyril and Ernst, because Ernst never took Cyril seriously as an art historian, because Ernst was educated in the German tradition. And he even offended Cyril once, I had heard, before my time, in proposing him to do a Ph.D. in art history in addition [AMT laughs], because then he said, "Then I will accept you." So, the two often were very [HB brings hands together for emphasis] – you know, this was a delicate point.
AMT: Yeah.
HB: Because they were talking about the same things from very different angles.
GB: Oh yeah, sure.
HB: And Kitzinger had been, of course, as a really young scholar in the British Museum. He had written this famous small catalogue, so he was very attached to the collection. Then, of course, there were lacunae in the collection; for instance, there was not yet the St. Peter's icon. You know, the Byzantine large-scale object – it was just present as copies of frescoes of the Kariye and so on. But you know, so this was dissatisfaction, that for some, the collection was too late antique and too little Byzantine. So, they always said, "Yeah, this is nice, but Byzantium, we think, is something different." So, I think there was, of course, the question of acquisitions, and that was a prominent topic, a difficult topic, because the majority of the faculty could not deal with this topic, you know, whether this is right or wrong, but – then Mrs. Bliss was still very much involved, so there was also authority from above. So, it was more a diplomatic subject than a scholarly subject, I think.
GB: So, it was not that there was a major interest in what Kitzinger definitely did publish articles in – there was the interest in doing research with the proper collection?
HB: Not so much.
GB: But it was, yeah. That was much later than when – like the '80s, I think, or late '70s – and Cutler did the research on ivory with a fresh approach.
HB: Yes, yes.
GB: Not those done in the manner of the Weitzmann school, so to speak, but the material aspect –
AMT: But he wasn't a faculty member.
GB: No, he was not. No, I mean, exactly, but even the research scholars and Fellows who came – why, you came back and had your short-term stays here – was there a time where you had more activities, research activities, reading related to the collection and to the specific objects?
HB: I don't think so. But when was the St. Peter's icon acquired?
GB: That was '80–'81.
HB: That was a big topic.
GB: Yes, sure. There was Weitzmann's article –
HB: Then everybody was, you know – but then already there was no longer a faculty.
GB: Yes. What was – that is the question I'd like to return to – previously you spoke about the plan to move Dumbarton Oaks up to Harvard. What was at that time the thought about the collection?
AMT: I think the collection would have stayed. Yes, the collection and the gardens would have stayed, but it would have just been for the public.
GB: Aha, the public, okay.
AMT: But the studies center, especially the Byzantine studies center, was to move to Harvard.
GB: And Kitzinger would have – would kind of – do you remember his opinion on that?
AMT: Well Ihor and I had slightly different recollections. I recollect that he was in favor of it; Ihor, who was in favor of it, said he thought Kitzinger was not in favor.
GB: That's interesting.
AMT: So, we'd have to check the archives on that, where there is a lot of information about this topic.
HB: Yes, but Kitzinger was a happy man in Harvard, if he ever was able to be a happy man, but at least in Harvard he was. But here he was more tense; he lived under certain pressures. Also, to balance art history against other aspects, you know, other Byzantinist disciplines, but also because he lived under pressures from the Blisses.
GB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HB: They gave him commissions to do research on Baroque jewelry and so on, you know, which he did not enjoy, of course. So, I think he was as a teacher in the department at Harvard, he was happier.
GB: That seems as if the Blisses considered him as a kind of envoy advisor, being – of course, he was responsible, kind of, for the reaction that what they had received – well, going back to Royall Tyler, if they hoped that they still have – Or, of course, they corresponded with a lot of different people.
HB: Sure. But the problem was not anything connected to the collection. The problem was when it extended the territory of the collection and was just their personal likings, when they wanted to make nice acquisitions for themselves.
GB: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Although they should have learned this lesson which Royall Tyler tried to teach them –
AMT: So strongly that –
GB: – to focus.
AMT: Yes.
GB: – to follow the Byzantine track, and then, of course, later on, you know, without, of course – well, the Pre-Columbianists were also – but they still, I think, got very tempted whenever they just – when something showed up on the market. That's –
HB: Yes. But I also remember – if I may just mention it – the twins, as we saw them, of Ihor and Cyril, you know. That was a very prominent part of Dumbarton Oaks' history, in all its ups and downs, I think. And for me it was important to meet them also for my own decisions, what to be, because I decided then for art history, because I could never, you know, match their knowledge and their different backgrounds, you know. It was very impressive. But I think we all trembled – we all hoped, you know, they would become – and this was my impression – they would become the two pillars of Dumbarton Oaks. At least this was my view.
AMT: But that didn't work out.
HB: No, no, no. Exactly. But as a whole, as you have seen, Dumbarton Oaks in many ways has been maybe the most important, you know, factor in my academic life, even if I followed different routes.
GB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, especially now that – That's very, very interesting to hear that the first two years, I think – whatever happened afterwards – is not a direct path, that being here, and the feeling. I mean, I think that you would not have had the chance to be in such a scholarly community at any other place in the world at that time.
HB: No, absolutely.
GB: And again, at that time, I think, without having decided to be a Byzantine art historian, of course not – I mean just really looking for the opportunity to –
HB: No, exactly. But also the encounter with the group of German émigrés, with all these celebrities, was for me a decisive moment, so I am very grateful to this place.
GB: We are grateful to you.
HB: Thank you.
AMT: Thank you so much, Hans, for spending this time with us.
HB: It was my pleasure to come here today. It will be a part of my memory of this place, a very important part. Thank you very much for this opportunity, and on this beautiful day, eh?
GB: Yes.]]>
EG: Elizabeth Gettinger.
AS: And Anne Steptoe.
JNSL: We have the honor today of interviewing James Carder. We are here at Dumbarton Oaks to speak with the Archivist. Do you guys want to start with a question?
EG: Sure. So, I guess just a sort of start up question – we see that you were a Junior Fellow here in the '70s?
JNC: Yes, I was.
EG: And so we wanted to hear how you first got involved with Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were.
JNC: I actually first got involved very modestly when I was an undergraduate. I was working on an excavation in Yugoslavia at the Palace of the emperor Diocletian and wanted to read an eighteenth-century description of the palace by Robert Adam, a rare volume of which the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine library had a copy. And I somewhat naively came to Washington to work in the library as an undergraduate and learned – then as now – that undergraduates don't have easy entree, but I did manage to get a photocopy of that book sent to me, which was otherwise hard to come by. I was on a Ford Foundation Archaeological Traineeship Grant, so there was money for doing that sort of thing. So, that was my first introduction in the later '60s, and then when I went to graduate school I applied for a Junior Fellowship and received it, as you said. It was a two-year – it turned into a two-year fellowship at that time and I finished my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: So, what was the fellowship program like when you first arrived here?
JNC: It was, I think, pretty much the same as it is today in many important aspects. Like today there were more Byzantine Fellows than Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Architecture Fellows. One difference that I remember, and I think it might have been both a difference of chance and possibly a difference of design, was that there were more art historians in the mix of Fellows than there has been in subsequent periods. There were easily five if not six art historians in my group, which made for a very nice situation in terms of getting intellectual stimulation from your peers. Ioli Kalavrezou was a Junior Fellow as was Ruth Kolarik and Jeffrey Andrews and Kathleen Shelton. And Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow in my second year. And besides that, Otto Demus and Hugo Buchthal and Carlo Bertelli were Fellows, and Ernst Kitzinger came occasionally from Harvard. And, of course, Bill Loerke was Director of Studies, so there were a lot of Byzantine and Early Christian art historians around. The other thing that I remember very much about my fellowship years was that there was a great camaraderie, and the Fellows themselves organized parties and all sorts of events, sometimes costume parties, where, for example, at Seka Allen's home, we put on elaborate silk and brocade clothes and masqueraded as some historical figure, real or imagined!
JNSL: What did you dress up like?
JNC: I think I was an emperor. It wasn't very – my costume wasn't particularly successful, as I remember, but I tried. Many of the staff, including Sue Boyd, who was assistant or associate Byzantine curator at the time, as well as Seka Allen – Jelisaveta Allen – a research librarian – were very conscientious in inviting Fellows to their houses or otherwise organizing events for them. There was a real spirit of being part of a group that was well taken care of.
AS: Did this social camaraderie extend between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian fellows, or was it more of a Byzantine community?
JNC: It did extend among all of the Fellows. I believe – and I really should check the archival record on this – that there couldn't have been more than two Pre-Columbian Fellows and maybe only two Landscape fellows, or possibly only one. The numbers in those junior programs – junior in the sense that they came later in the institutional chronology than the Byzantine Studies program – and really only began having Fellows in the early '70s. I remember Frank Alvarez in Garden and Landscape and Peter Joralemon in Pre-Columbian. But even though there were only three or four non-Byzantine Fellows, I think they were always included in the parties. Then occasionally there were Byzantine-specific activities, such as an exhibition at the Walters or something like that – then it was just the Byzantine group that went.
EG: How did you find the atmosphere here academically; was it an easy place to work on your dissertation? What resources were of the most value?
JNC: It was a dream. I didn't have too much to compare it to, though I'd had a Fulbright the year before I came here in Germany, and I was using primary material libraries in Wolfenbüttel and elsewhere and not necessarily so much using secondary resources. But I had that as a benchmark. But here, even before I came, I received communications asking what microfilms or -fiches I might need that I would be expecting to work on as they wanted to check whether they had them or not. And if they didn't have them, they'd do what they could to get them, which I just found wonderful and remarkable. I don't think I ever needed a secondary resource, a book or whatever, that they didn't have or couldn't get. And at that time there was a liaison person to the Library of Congress, and he had the wherewithal to make a weekly trip to the Library of Congress and bring back materials that Fellows and others had requested. I don't think that program lasted much longer, but it certainly was in effect the two years I was here and that, of course, just doubled the possibilities of doing research. So, I thought the resources at Dumbarton Oaks were terrific, as I believe people continue to think to this day.
AS: Were there any academic mentors that you met and became close with during those two years?
JNC: Yes. As you probably know from the history of Dumbarton Oaks, there actually were, in the early period, faculty members – permanent faculty members – here, and that was just being dissolved, in a way. But Ernst Kitzinger was still here – or at least occasionally – when I was a Junior Fellow. Although he was frankly more in Cambridge than at Dumbarton Oaks, though he did come to Dumbarton Oaks for several months and, so, he did have a presence. And he and I discussed many aspects of my dissertation. Hugo Buchthal, I don't think, had a professorship but he had an appointment of some sort while I was here, and he was invaluable. And then people like Kurt Weitzmann would come around, and he had asked me to write some catalogue entries for the "Age of Spirituality" exhibition that he was planning for the Met, so we knew each other in a way, and his advice was great. But I also think that my peers were terrific. We did the same thing that's done today, we gave progress reports on our dissertation topics or our research topics depending on our level. And it wasn't pro forma; people thought about them and critiqued them, and if there was some tangent that perhaps the speaker hadn't considered, someone in the group might say you should look at this book or you should consider this primary source of some ancient author and see what they have to say. I found it invaluable.
AS: How often did those occur?
JNC: Those research reports? I think on average once a week, as they do now, scattered throughout the academic term – followed incidentally by a sherry hour. There was also sherry served before lunch on Tuesdays, I think it was. I think Jan has now revived this and has it at his house, but that apparently was a tradition that Mildred Bliss had inaugurated before her death in 1969, and I don't know if it had continued unabated until my tenure here in the mid-'70s, but I think it then sort of fell off the board soon thereafter.
JNSL: Did you ever hear any anecdotes from the older, say, the older Fellows or older scholars about Dumbarton Oaks while you were here as a Junior Fellow or any stories about some of the early days that caught your ear or that stand out in your memory?
JNC: I didn't – I don't remember much, if I did, and so consequently I think I didn't. I heard innumerable times the story about climbing over the perimeter walls to swim illegally in the swimming pool. I must have heard that fifty times from fifty different people or people reporting on their best friends who had come over the wall at night to swim, and otherwise I don't remember anything either boring or juicy. I'm not sure how much I was really aware, too, of the institution and its institutional history. I don't know how much I was aware of the Blisses, although I did meet Jack Thacher who was still alive at the time. I had a friend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, David Owsley, a curator, who knew Jack Thacher, apparently fairly well, and he suggested, since he knew I was coming as a Junior Fellow, that I – that Jack Thacher invite me over for tea or something, which he did. He talked about the Blisses, and I remember now that you mention it, thinking that I should somehow know more about the Blisses. It's too bad I don't have a time machine and could go back, as I know a great deal more now. But he talked about Mildred Bliss at this tea.
JNSL: And how did you come into your current position today? What was the story behind that journey?
JNC: When I finished my dissertation and left Dumbarton Oaks, I started as an assistant professor, first at Case Western Reserve University while someone was on sabbatical, and then I came back to Washington where I was at Mount Vernon College and then at George Washington University at the Mount Vernon Campus. And in 1989, I received notification from Sue Boyd that there was a notice of a job position – but it was a part time job position – at Dumbarton Oaks for someone to advise on the objects that are now formally known as the House Collection. Apparently, the president of Harvard University had received some letters questioning whether some objects were in the best care, and the president had written to then director Angeliki Laiou, asking if there was curatorial responsibility for these prints and drawings that were hanging on walls and that sort of thing. And so she realized in a way that there wasn't – there was a Byzantine curator and a Pre-Columbian curator and so forth, but the so-called House Collection was not particularly well situated in anyone's sight lines. So, I interviewed with her and was offered this job, and the first element of it was to do an assessment, a condition assessment of things – especially things of value – and things that were possibly in harm's way. And I did that, and while I was doing that assessment I was also trying to get any information on these objects, because there were no dossier files and, really, no sort of curatorial management for this part of the Collection – the House Collection, as we know it today. So, I was bothering people asking where invoices might be kept or where conservation reports might be kept, and so forth. And that caught Angeliki Laiou's attention. So, she asked me to start putting together a complete dossier for the House Collection. You can see the snowball moving down the hill here!
EG: When was that?
JNC: This started in '89, as an advisor; and I became a staff member in '92. So, I was here during her entire tenure. When Ned Keenan came, early on he talked to me and said that he wanted to revisit the new library project and even revisit it situated under the North Vista – that very controversial location where it had started out in the 1970s. He said, "I need to find all the plans and all of the correspondence and documents from the '70s to see where things were left off." And so he went around looking for them, and of course there was no Archives at the time and things were where you might least likely think they should be. But since I had also taken this route trying to put together things for the House Collection dossiers and had literally looked in the attic and in the basement and in people's file drawers – really just any place – I had something of an unwritten road map of where things were. So, I was actually able to put my hands on these drawings which I knew to be rolled and stored under this building in not the best of circumstances, and I also was able to put my hands on the correspondence files. But there was no logic to it, and they were in cardboard boxes, and I think they were labeled but there wasn't any reason to know that they were there. So he was both horrified – Ned Keenan was – and relieved, and he said, "Would you be willing to take on the reorganization of the archives in much the same way as you took on the dossier building of the House Collection?" And I said, "Yes." So, that's how I came to be House Collection Manager and then later Archivist.
EG: So, what were some of the goals of the archives project and what was the organization of it?
JNC: The mission of the Dumbarton Oaks Archives is to retain and conserve in perpetuity any item that is of importance to the institutional history of Dumbarton Oaks. And that, of course, can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, and a caveat to that is to understand the physical limitations of space, at least in terms of hard copy or hard object storage. So, not every scrap of paper that happens to have survived is fair game for the Archives because it would overwhelm the real estate. So, the first objective was to find out what was still around that really was critical to retain and, if it was in deteriorating condition, what to do to make an analog copy of it somehow to keep its shelf-life going. Then, to find a way to organize it so that it could be easily accessed by people who would want to see this material in the future, and to weed out things – but not capriciously – weed out things that shouldn't be saved. And so I spent the first two years of my life as an archivist just interviewing people in their offices and seeing and telling them that I thought that it was very fair game if they were actively using files or materials that these files should continue to reside with them, as that was a very good use of institutional space and resources. But, if they had things that were just clogging their file cabinets that they themselves felt should be retained for the institutional memory, these should come to the Archives. And so, things began to flow in, and it was greatly interesting to me to make coherency out of all these disparate files and images and objects. And the system I devised now can be added to very easily. For example, when Alice-Mary Talbot retired recently – although she had been a very faithful contributor to the Archives – she did one final sweep of her office files and took things out that she didn't think Margaret Mullett would necessarily need and sent them down to the Archives, and that's how it's grown. And it works pretty well, as I think you can attest because you've been using files from the Archives.
AS: What role do you see the Archives playing at DO?
JNC: It has an absolutely critical role in that we've never written either a periodic history, other than the annual reports or biannual reports, or an official history of the institution. There are a number of history-like discussions – the Pre-Columbian Studies program has a good one and so forth. But, there's a lot of very important institutional activity from the past that hasn't been chronicled in a historical narrative, but it is captured in the correspondence and in the interim reports to the president of Harvard University and so forth, and this material sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. And this material really informs us as to what happened and what people thought they were doing and how they went about their business as they defined it at the time. And it shows that there were mistakes and how people learned from them and how the institution moved on. I think every institution needs an archives and it should use its archives to find out who it was. Here we also use the Archives to check when scholars propose things to us – either fellowship applications or research proposals or what have you. We can go back and see what they've done for the institution before, what we have on file. It's not always complete, but it's very useful. And unfortunately when a scholar dies we often use the preserved archival material for writing an obituary, because sometimes we're the institution that has the best knowledge of the contribution that that particular scholar has made to the field of Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Studies
JNSL: Could you perhaps comment on the uniqueness of Dumbarton Oaks in terms of an institution and what its mission is – both the museum and the professional library, the fellowship program, and its sort of general position here in Washington?
JNC: In a certain sense, Dumbarton Oaks is not unique, in that it's a research institute. There are many research institutes, and they tend to have all of the same phenomena: they have libraries, they occasionally have collections that support the focus of the research, they have a fellowship apparatus, and so forth. But Dumbarton Oaks is, to a degree, unique, and part of its uniqueness is the mandate of its founders, the Blisses. They wanted the institute Dumbarton Oaks to be in Washington, D.C., and although it was to be administered in many ways through Harvard University, they did not want it at Harvard, and during their lifetime they were very clear on that point. They thought things that happened at Harvard were perfectly wonderful and that the student body and the faculty interaction with the student body and all of these good things were what a university of great standing such as Harvard should have. But, for them Dumbarton Oaks was something other, it was, in a way, a retreat, and although they wouldn't have used and didn't use the term "ivory tower," in a way it was just that. Dumbarton Oaks was something other than an urban campus, it was sixteen acres of beautiful gardens, it had an ambiance of sophistication and, to a degree, elegance in the architecture and appointments of that architecture. It allowed people the breathing space and the environment in which to be reflective in their studies. And then, of course, the studies programs themselves are not your average studies programs. You don't have a choice in Byzantine studies between twenty different research studies programs so that you might apply to them all and choose the best one that responds. If you're a Byzantinist and are going to go to a research institute in America, Dumbarton Oaks' Byzantine studies program is probably the first and, to a degree, only choice, and Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Architecture are very similar. In a way, the narrow foci of this institute ensure its quality and ensure its ability to remain vibrant and relevant. If we did twelve other things from ancient to contemporary abstract expressionist studies programs, we would dilute ourselves. You have to be very wealthy to do that. CASVA is very successful because of its high level of funding and amazing resources. But to be a CASVA you have to be very wealthy and you also have to be very astute at what you collect as research materials and what mix of people you bring together in a far-ranging research institute. So the very small focal nature of Dumbarton Oaks makes it unique, I believe.
EG: Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and the Bliss archives at Harvard which I believe were moved to Harvard in the '80s?
JNC: In 1982, right? In 1982. That was, of course, before my time. I believe from what I've read is that the Blisses themselves had deposited at Dumbarton Oaks a considerable collection of their correspondence and memorabilia. How well organized it was and how topically organized it was I can't say because I know it was completely rethought and re-catalogued at Harvard and wonderfully so. The woman who took that on as a six-year project – I don't believe she was working on it full time necessarily, but I think she was working on it consistently – she did a really remarkable job putting together a first rate finding aid and so forth. Anyway, Dumbarton Oaks had this on its premises, and it had other related things that the Blisses themselves had not accumulated. And the librarians here put this material into folders and boxes because they were, I think and rightfully, concerned about it: one, in terms of making sure that it didn't get lost or misused or thrown out or left to deterioration, and two, they were concerned that they didn't really have the physical room to store it. Until the new library was built, the Main House, as you well know, served as the complete campus with the exception of the Fellows Building, and that really wasn't used for much other than the purpose of feeding and housing Fellows. So, the Main House was really everything: it was library, it was research space, it was meeting space, it was museum space, it was everything, and as Ned Keenan was fond of saying, it was at two hundred percent capacity when he came as director, and that was very true. There were bookshelves in the hallways, and there were often bookshelves in people's closets. And, you know, if you said, "I have 125 linear feet of Blissiana memorabilia, where shall I put it?," there wasn't an easy answer. So in 1982 under Giles Constable, it was decided that everything sort of pre-1940, the date of the Blisses' gift of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, would be sent to Harvard which was willing to accept it to establish the Bliss Papers, and that was done. And everything 1940 and after would remain at Dumbarton Oaks. But as I've said, not much was done with this later material until the '90s. It was in boxes and filing cabinets, and I don't think anyone much cared about these archival materials. The problem with the decision was that there is now a segregation: there is a sort of Bliss family, residential pre-1940 group and a Dumbarton Oaks institutional, post-1940 group of documents. So, there is a segregation. But, there is in fact a seamless continuity between these two groups of documents, and anyone who is researching the origin or the early years of Dumbarton Oaks has to use the Bliss Papers at Harvard to get the complete picture. So, it's a little inconvenient. On the other hand, Harvard is a wonderful caretaker and curatorial manager of such things and they're in perfect storage conditions and housings. Although I personally would like to have the Bliss Papers closer to hand, but I don't think they need to be sent back here. I'm not going to compare them to the Elgin Marbles, because I don't think we would have lost this material, but they're at Harvard and well cared for in a way that perhaps historically Dumbarton Oaks wouldn't have had the physical space or the staff to look after them.
AS: After the Archives, you've had the opportunity to work on a number of publications, lots of cataloging projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most memorable projects?
JNC: Yes. I started using the Bliss Papers in order to complete the dossier files for the House Collection, learning, as I just explained, that many of the pre-1940 documents were at Harvard. And since many of the objects that the Blisses acquired that are now at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired before 1940 – in fact the vast majority of them were – much of their dealer correspondence and any other kind of ephemeral reference to an object that might be in the House Collection would be at Harvard rather than here. So, I was able periodically – usually yearly – to get a small budget line item to go to Cambridge and sit in the Archives for a week or so and just call up box after box after box of correspondence and either key-enter it into my laptop or get a Xerox of it and enter it into the dossier system. And that really allowed me to get a much better understanding of where the Blisses came by their Renaissance, Baroque, Western Medieval, Asian, and other collections, the documents for which didn't end up in the Byzantine Collection department because they weren't relevant. As you can imagine, for one good document you read five hundred that are very interesting but aren't relevant, so I also knew to a large degree what else was going on in the Bliss Papers, and I soon realized that there was a player out there in the Blisses' life, Royall Tyler, who was just absolutely instrumental in forming the Blisses'– that is the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. I mean, but for Royall Tyler, I think the collection as we know it today would not exist. And as it happens, the Royall Tyler Papers are also at the Harvard Archives. These are a long series of correspondence between 1902 and 1952 mostly from Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss. And when I was asked to do some catalog entries and essays for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia – when Byzantine objects and American paintings from the House Collection were asked to go on loan there – I alerted Rob Nelson, then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University – who had been asked to do the Byzantine Collection essay for that catalog – that he should look at both the Royall Tyler Papers and the Bliss Papers at Harvard. And he did, and it opened his eyes as it had mine, and so we then began to think about how useful this correspondence would be if it could be transcribed, annotated, and published in whatever format – hard copy or perhaps electronically, or both. And so, we wrote up a proposal, and the project was put into the works. And so, now when I go to Harvard, I'm also looking at the Bliss-Tyler correspondence. The correspondence starts in 1902 and ends roughly in 1953, the time of the death of Royall Tyler, and I'm through '35 on it. The '30s is the most voluminous part of the correspondence run, and '35-'39 is still a sizable chunk, but in the '40s and early '50s it drops off, so I'm about eighty percent done with the transcription. I've written an introductory essay to what will be the first chapter, and I've annotated the letters from that first chapter. I'm hoping soon to do the second chapter, and Rob is working on the '20s and '30s material – he's working on the '20s material now. And when the '30s' correspondence is transcribed, that will chronicle the meaty, Byzantine-centric part of their buying and corresponding. So, we hope in a year and a half time, if that's not too ambitious, to have this at least in a good draft form. It's going to be huge – that's the unfortunate part of it. It's – if you publish every letter, which I think we should, even the ones that say "Thank you very much, it was a delicious meal," and they occasionally do that, although these are intellectual people who take some time to write what they want the other person to know about life as they see it and art as they know it. I think if we publish it all, it's going to be very lengthy. If it's in hard copy format, it would certainly be two or more volumes, and there's cost implications there. If we publish it electronically, it'll be very usable by people in the future no matter how it ends up, because you can search it – if the spelling is correct, hopefully it will be. And, for example, I was talking with Gudrun – I don't know how anecdotal you want this interview to be, we can scrap this at the end if you like – who was interested in why the Blisses never acquired significant enamels, Byzantine enamels. And I said, "Oh well, you know, they really wanted to and they wrote to Tyler and Tyler to them about getting a significant enamel," and she said, "Oh, that's very interesting. I'd always wondered if they just didn't like enamels or what." And I said, "You know, once this document is done, you'll be able to, even in a Word format, type in the word enamel and just graze through their correspondence finding every time the world enamel is mentioned. It'll just be easy to sate your curiosity as to what the Blisses were doing with enamels, or icons, or manuscripts, or Stravinsky, for that matter. It's just going to be much easier to do research on the Blisses, if anyone is interested to do that. So, those were my two primary uses of the Harvard Archives, for the House Collection dossier files and this Bliss-Tyler project. And, in the interim, every time I've found something of interest to me about the Blisses or about Dumbarton Oaks, I've typed it in a document, a so-called chronology, called "master chronology," that is easily three hundred pages long now in Word format, and is just date, line item, and the source, taken both from primary materials such as the correspondence and secondary materials that tell the life of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: Is that something you intend on publishing someday?
JNC: I don't at the moment, although I think a history of Dumbarton Oaks is long overdue. Certainly this chronology will remain at Dumbarton Oaks, and it can be migrated to whatever technology is used in the future.
EG: So, in terms of your role as the manager of the House Collection, could you speak a little bit about what your impressions were of the Blisses' mission in collecting the House Collection and about their acquisitions there?
JNC: Yes. If I could answer it slightly differently, I would say that when I came as a Junior Fellow to Dumbarton Oaks and long thereafter when I talked to people at Dumbarton Oaks or colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks I always had the strong impression that the Blisses collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare landscape books and sometimes botanical prints and manuscripts, and that they had a focus of collecting that brought about the collections as they were then displayed. And then they had some household furnishings and some paintings and sculptures, but in a sense just as they had clothing and a wine cellar: these were part of the comme-il-faut nature of being a wealthy resident. Since I have taken on a curatorial role as House Collection manager, I realize that the Blisses were considerably broad in their collecting interests. And we tried to make this point in our first special exhibition, "The Collector's Microbe," where we talked about how the Blisses not only collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, but also Asian and American and this, that, and the other. And I see my role as House Collection manager not only as a true curatorial position to protect and catalogue the collection as it has come down, but also as an advocacy position to make sure that the Blisses' vision for Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of art, isn't interpreted in as narrow a way as I understood it initially and I think others have understood it. And this is proven, I think, much beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you look at what they collected in the '37 through 1940 period when they knew that they were gifting the property and its collections to Harvard. That's when they bought a Degas and a Riemenschneider and a Rouault and other great paintings and sculptures knowing that they weren't going to ever really live with them, but believing that this "home of the humanities," the famous phrase that Mildred Bliss uses in the preamble to her will and testament and was used other times in her correspondence, needed to have these great things; that great art inspired great conversation which inspired great research. And the same was true with music. There is absolutely no reason to continue musical offerings at Dumbarton Oaks in a Harvard institutional fellowship arena, because it wasn't a music research institution. But the Blisses were adamant about that and really hoped Harvard would find the wherewithal to continue some kind of musical programming. And the Friends of Music series, which was inaugurated in 1946, was the result of that. All this they saw as being for the Fellows. The music was for the Fellows. The art was for the Fellows. The garden was for the Fellows. Yes, they eventually were opened to the greater and broader public, but that isn't the Blisses' initial interest. The uniqueness that we talked about earlier in the Blisses' vision was that this was for scholarship and fellowship enrichment. So, I see that also as part of my job description to try to make the House Collection a little bit more integral to the institutional wealth.
JNSL: What is the most exciting project that you have been a part of in your time at Dumbarton Oaks, of all these wonderful things, the one closest to your heart that brings back the happiest memories?
JNC: Had you not qualified your statement at the end, I'd have given you a couple. But, the most exciting event – clearly and without a doubt – was the planning for and all of the activities that ensued with the building of the new library and the renovation and rehabilitation of the Main House, including the Music Room. This would be the thing that is dearest to my heart and that makes me the happiest. But the whole renovation will stand out in my memory after I leave here as being my most important contribution. That said, it was arduous and it was painful and it was time consuming and often laborious, and I often thought I never, ever wanted to do that sort of thing again. There are the seemingly never-ending meetings over minutia on plans and the inevitable problems that come up when you're planning for new architecture and the renovation of historically significant architecture. But, it really was terrific; I learned enormously from it. I had great colleagues and superiors – Mike Steen, certainly, who was project manager on a consulting basis, and certainly the director Ned Keenan – and working with great architects, I really loved that. The renovation of the Music Room ceiling is probably my fondest part of the project, especially because the results were, to my mind, so stellar, and I worked with great people on that project as well. But the removal of a world class collection from its housing, the incredible amount of detail work of making sure you knew every object's condition and crate housing and shelf storage housing and this and that and then bringing it all back and making new mounts and new vitrines and designing all of that in the interim before it comes back…. Again, I never want to do it again, and probably won't have to, but those are once-in-a-lifetime curatorial opportunities that would probably be distasteful to many who are not curators, but I think are just the meat of what you do when you're in charge of a great collection.
AS: If we could go back a little bit to your curatorship of the House Collection, to what extent have acquisitions been active after the Bliss days?
JNC: The House Collection is not an actively acquiring collection. That said, we do still acquire, although not in the way or to the degree that the Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or rare book collections from the library might collect. They would want to collect great examples of their particular genres, if they can be acquired legally on the marketplace. That is their mission. Their collections are not necessarily static as they were deposited by the Blisses. The House Collection, on the other hand, is. What remains from the House Collection is a kind of finite collection of Blissiana material, some of which was sold off to increase revenue for collecting in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian. We don't do that any longer, but we do acquire for the House Collection occasionally. We acquire furnishings when things wear out, especially Middle Eastern carpets. We also – although we haven't done much of this in my tenure – we also buy Blissiana material, if it's relevant. We would certainly try to buy any portraits of the Blisses that came onto the market. And they had their portraits made many times – Mildred Bliss, in particular – but they didn't choose to retain them. The one painting of Mildred Bliss that hangs over the fireplace in the Refectory they actually gave away to a friend, who later gave it back to Dumbarton Oaks. If there was some significant object that the Blisses had owned that had left Dumbarton Oaks, we might try to get it back if it was relevant to us. There have been pieces that have come up for auction – furniture in particular – that we know the Blisses owned that we haven't tried for. We just don't need it.
JNSL: Was anything ever stolen? Was there ever any – as far as you know, were there any issues with that?
JNC: There have been a few thefts, particularly of things in the gardens. The Pan figure that sits in an arched bricked area pointing towards the Acadian pool that's called Lovers Lane Pool was stolen twice and returned once and not recovered the second time. The artist who did that sculpture was Francis Sedgwick. A cast of it had been acquired or given to his daughter, and she still had it. So, after much convincing and effort, the daughter agreed to make a new mold from her sculpture from which our Pan was recast. One of the eighteenth-century putti riding dolphins that are in the Fountain Terrace was stolen, also twice, once recovered, and once not. And fortunately they are an exact pair – they're not bilaterally symmetrical, as bookends are, they're literally the same object cast twice, so we made a cast of the existing one. There are two in the garden, and one of them is modern, cast from the other, which is the original. Smaller things have been stolen, but theft has been minimal.
EG: So, could you tell us a little bit about the interaction with the House Collections with the Fellows and the scholars and if that's changed over time?
JNC: I don't know if it's changed over time in the sense of predating my arrival here, because I don't really know what happened vis-à-vis the Fellows and the House Collection. When I first came, we used to do an orientation for the Fellows, which is still done, but that orientation also included a tour through the house and especially the areas where there was significant architecture and interiors or significant House Collection objects that might be of interest to the Fellows. They also had a tour with the Byzantine curators of the Byzantine Collection and they had a tour with the Pre-Columbian curators of the Pre-Columbian Collection. The House Collection tour got dropped after five years or so, I don't quite remember, because the schedule of what the Fellows did upon arrival just became somewhat onerous and the House Collection was expendable. So, we've never done that again except by request. And certainly when we reopened, there were a number of requests that I take people through the house and show them what happened during the renovation, and this involved taking both the docents and the Fellows. Also, occasionally, Fellows are interested in House Collection objects, especially the western medieval ones, and so of course they come to my office and, like any reader, they sit and read the dossier files and look at the historic photographs and so forth, but that's somewhat unusual. And every now and then someone is interested in the Blisses so they come and ask questions.
EG: Is that also true of the Archives? – interest in the Archives?
JNC: I have a lot of interest in the Archives from the studies programs, especially the directors. They change fairly frequently, as you know, sometimes every five years, sometimes every ten years, so they often, depending on their interests and the way they want to define their ongoing or upcoming projects – they want to see what's happened. Sometimes they have that material in their offices, but frankly a lot of the historical material is in the Archives, so they check out what they need. Also, by chance, I have a number of scholarly files that relate to research or projects that were given to Dumbarton Oaks by, especially, Byzantine scholars, although in one case by a Pre-Columbian scholar, and when Fellows are working on similar topics, they come and use these materials. However, I've had about ten Fellows in the twenty years that I've been here do that, so that's not a huge number.
EG: Is there much relationship between the House Collection and the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections in terms of organization and exhibition?
JNC: Yes and no. The three Collections are all part of the same department, which is the Museum department. There's a little bit more of a sophisticated curatorial apparatus for the two primary collections, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian, less so for the House Collection, but we meet sort of on equal grounds otherwise. The exhibition space, so-called, for the House Collection is the Music Room, and it is by plan and tradition a different type of exhibition space than the gallery type of space that the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections use. We have decided to retain a kind of residential, Edwardian, Kunstkammer look for the Music Room – no wall labels, no vitrines. Yes there are spot lights and there are a few museum fittings, but they are meant to be discrete. The only – I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, that's why I said yes and no. So, let me end by saying the new thing that we've done recently since the Collections were reinstalled is to bring collecting at Dumbarton Oaks and the Museum Collections at Dumbarton Oaks into something of a unified focus. And the Bliss Gallery – which was inaugurated with that reinstallation – has a vitrine which, as of tomorrow, will have an inaugural exhibit of animal bronzes, which come from at least two of the Collections. We had wanted them to come from all three of the Collections and they could have, but the Pre-Columbians needed their very few animal bronze sculptures for the permanent installation. We will probably do a hard stone exhibition there at some time, which will be House Collection Asian, House Collection European, Byzantine, and Pre-Columbian, in order to show that the Blisses were interested in artworks made of hard stone from many cultures, and that way refocus attention on their collecting and collecting interests rather than on the cultural nature of the collection. And that certainly was true, as I said a moment ago, with the inaugural special exhibition – hallway exhibition – titled "Collector's Microbe," which put objects from all three Collections into the same vitrines and onto the same walls in order to show that this was a Dumbarton Oaks collection in the singular, our literal and legal title – we are the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute and Collection "singular," and I think that use of the singular was purposeful – I think that was by choice.
EG: Other than the creation of the Bliss Gallery, the House Collection has always been housed in the Music Room?
JNC: Housed, in a public sense, in the Music Room. Housed, in an institutional sense, throughout the building, so the paintings and furnishings that you see on the first floor – what we call the first floor gallery, the hallway between the museum wing and the Founders Room, for example – the paintings in the Founders Room and so forth, these are all House Collection items, including the Founders Room itself, the boiseries, the wall paneling of the Founders Room – these are all accessioned House Collection items. They are now actually on public display to a degree because we've just started running docent tours on Saturday by sign-up appointment, but that's a very new and historically unique moment in our public persona. But, we've always had House Collection objects used the way the Blisses wanted them to be seen and that is as beautiful things to delight, inspire perhaps, staff and Fellows and scholars. So, there's a public space and a private space, and there's a big storage space where a number of things don't see the light of day at the moment, because there's no room for them.
JNSL: Are you aware of any attempts either in the immediate past or the more distant past to take some of the stories associated with Dumbarton Oaks and its history and turn them into any kind of dramatic or sort of novelistic element? Has anyone ever shown an interest in doing that, because when I listen to these stories I think sometimes it sounds like it would make a great movie, or make a great play, or make a great story?
JNC: I've never heard of such a thing. I do think that a history of the institution needs to be written.
JNSL: That's something that several people whom I've interviewed have said.
JNC: And I think through the Oral History interview project and through the archival holdings, both the Bliss Papers at Harvard and the ones that we've now talked quite a bit about, it's all there. One might identify additional people to interview once one started writing a history, as always is the case with biographies or institutional histories. But easily eighty percent of it is already there, it just needs the time and the interest.
EG: So, have you noticed any significant changes over the time that you've been here since your undergraduate 'til the present, in terms of the academic or social or even physical setting here at Dumbarton Oaks?
JNC: Let me start with the physical setting. The physical setting was in need of renovation by the time that Giles Constable became director. He pointed that out in the interview that I did with him, and he wrote about it in his biannual report several times. He points out that well-made buildings are not like the buildings that he or I, as he put it in his interview, might buy because we can't afford to buy better-made buildings. We have to replace the roof every twenty years, whereas roofs on better-made buildings last for fifty years in all respects. But when he came to Dumbarton Oaks, the fifty year time bomb was about to explode. And it was absolutely true – the infrastructure of the physical real estate of Dumbarton Oaks was in dire need of renovation. And he was the one that reinforced the third floor – the attic floor, which is now used for the publications office space – in order to house shelving for the Byzantine library, and in Thomson's tenure, the courtyard gallery was built and all of that space underneath which had been just dirt was excavated to form a connection between the basement of the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian Collection and underneath the Music Room, which allowed for offices and shelving and storage space and so forth. So, the physical plant improved fairly steadily. Air conditioning was added in the Constable era, and the physical plant continued to improve steadily in the years that I knew the institution. It improved dramatically in the '90s and at the turn of the century with the acquisition of new real estate: the director's house and the apartment building La Quercia, which took a certain amount of pressure off of the existing real estate, including some questionable legal pressures: the old director's house, now the Refectory, probably could not have housed a family of more than two people because using the upper floor as a bedroom space might have been considered illegal from a life-safety aspect. There were reasons to move on and certainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the decade we're in, the building of considerable new physical space – the library, the gardeners' court – and the renovation of the existing physical spaces was a remarkable change. That's the easy answer. Socially, I don't know. I was in my twenties when I was a Junior Fellow, and the parties and the swimming pools activities and going into Georgetown for impromptu, on-the-cheap dinners and beers was great fun. Do Fellows still do this today? Probably. I think when you interview some of the younger Fellows or staff, that's an interesting question to ask. I see Fellows being very serious here. They're very nice and when I interact with them on a social level I always enjoy that, but I see them being very serious, and I have a feeling that was always the case. That hasn't changed, but possibly the pressures of the world and the paucity of job openings in academic humanistic professions and just the need to spend your money wisely and move on and get your research and your dissertation done or your next book done and so forth leaves you little time to have a beer and a pizza. I don't know. You had a third prong on that question?
EG: Academically.
JNC: Academically. Oh, the standards here have always been very high, remarkably high I think, in everything – the choice of people that come. I know that sounds slightly self-serving, so forgive me. But the publications, the programs and projects that the institution has sponsored – I mean, Dumbarton Oaks has a stellar record, and I don't say that because I'm "in-house." I think I could write a critical review if I had to, but you know, you look at the history of what this institution has done in the world and here in its self-appointed research areas or interest areas, and it's just remarkable, it's remarkable.
AS: Has the evolution of the faculty to speak of here at Dumbarton Oaks changed the academics?
JNC: The Blisses and the early administrators wanted some kind of faculty presence, a kind of senior mentorship, I believe from what I've read. Let me back up to say that I think the Blisses initially just wanted senior research people here. When more junior people came and were given a kind of task working half day on their dissertations and half day on putting together a census of Byzantine objects in America or, if they were text people, looking at textual references for objects. (If you haven't read David Wright's paper on the early years of the institution, I highly recommend it to you.) I think the Blisses and the administration realized that there needed to be a kind of mentorship program for the more junior people who came – that this was something that would be very valuable. And because of the Harvard association, a kind of academic model was first chosen where there would be professors. But, it didn't make a great deal of sense because they didn't have students and they didn't give classes, per se. I mean, they might offer seminars maybe or give occasional lectures, but they didn't – it just wasn't a good model. And if they became tenured – initially a few of them did – what did they see their role to be? Did they see their role to be tenured faculty who fortunately didn't have to teach so they could spend one hundred percent of their time doing research, or just what? And so it was hard, it was a very hard model to keep going, and I think they were right in doing away with it, and in providing academic leadership and academic mentorship in other ways through having a coterie of like beings of all stages of life physically in one space. As is true now with the symposia and catalogue projects and the coin and seal seminars that are run in the summer, people with similar interests can come from different institutions and talk together, talk to senior members, talk to junior members. Dumbarton Oaks facilitates that, makes the bread and butter of that happen. It would only happen otherwise through email or through something much less interactive.
EG: So, sort of in closing, could you talk a little how you see the role of the Archives and the House Collection in the future?
JNC: The Archives should be exactly what it is today, only better. It should have every significant bit of Dumbarton Oaks institutional, intellectual history that's pertinent to the institution, housed there. It should be user-friendly, it should be – in a conservation sense – secure and well maintained. If we ever enter into an economic period and a digital period where things like that can be more easily accessible through digital technology, then that should happen. It happens obviously to a degree because everything you're doing will eventually become, if it hasn't already, part of the Archives and this comes in digital format, so the transition is underway. The House Collection should also carry on as it is, should maintain its course, ensuring that its role in both the Blisses' lives and in the institutional life of Dumbarton Oaks should not be forgotten. Its status should be maintained and honored because many of the art objects – by no means all, but a good many – are museum, world-class pieces that show a great level of connoisseurship and interest by the founders of this institution. Maintenance of this Collection should be insured, because it isn't inexpensive to maintain an art collection. But Dumbarton Oaks has and, I hope, will continue to do so. And I think that it should. In bad economic times, or when the world has moved on, one has to make choices, and it's possible that things will change, but for the moment I think we should stay the course for both the Archives and the House Collection.
JNSL: Thank you very much.
JNC: Thank you very much.
JNSL: It's been wonderful.]]>
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.]]>
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.]]>

subset: commoncrawl