Navigating Crafted Landscape

LIFE: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF AN EARLY CHRISTIAN UNIVERSE. By Catherine Michael Chin. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2024. Pp. viii + 246. Paperback, US$ 29.95. A photograph does not do justice to Anselm Kiefer's textured Nigredo that consumes the viewer in the barren, charred German landscape.1 By incorporating a variety of materials, starting with a photograph mounted on canvas, and overlaid with oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and straw, each selected as an emotional response to Kiefer's exploration of his war-torn homeland, the work both draws out a historical moment of destruction and extends that moment through an ongoing process of memory. It seems fitting to respond to Mike Chin's expansive work, Life, with an image that is, in Chin's own methodological words, “associative rather than illustrative, used to invite sensory engagement in the world” (vii). For Chin's rigorously researched work on the late antique universe as pulsing with life, not only from humans and animals, but through all its vastness, from plants, to stones, to landscape and stars, is peppered with contemporary art and poetry that broadens his argument. A thick web of interdisciplinary scholarship beyond the anticipated scope of a classicist extends the work's research, drawing on astrobiology, ecology, metallurgy, physics, climatology, anthropology, marine science, theater, and philosophy, among other fields of thought. Kiefer's scorched environment appears to mock Chin's definition of life in a late antique context as an unstoppable flow beyond human comprehension that reflects its divine source. Words, such as “rushing,” “outpouring,” “overflowing,” “proliferation,” and “profusion,” define this universe. Chin challenges us to experience the embodied experience of living in this reality of aliveness, asking, “What was it, then, to be a human rational being inside a universe full of living, nonhuman rational beings?” (8). This understanding of life as constantly swirling, formed by divine patterns, resonates with my work on late antique floor mosaics. Chin writes, “The humans that I have described felt themselves to live in a crowded, striving, laboring universe,” a world larger than their own individual lives (9). What objects better draw us into this active world than floor mosaics, whose surfaces formed the platforms of lived spaces, supporting gatherings for meals, study, prayer, and public meetings? The visual imagery on mosaic floors often reflects a world beyond the built space, impressing values about human life in a divinely ordained cosmos. Chin's approach opens new possibilities for exploring the immersive potential of late antique mosaic floors, particularly the Nile Festival Mosaic from fifth-century Sepphoris, an urban center in Lower Galilee.2 Standing in situ, within its architectural and urban context, a modern visitor walking through the excavated city can follow the ancient layout, encountering the floor as a late antique Galilean once might have experienced them. Entering the site, the visitor walks along the decumanus, the east–west colonnaded street of the lower city, and reaches the cardo, which stretches from north to south.3 These two colonnaded streets lie at the heart of the ancient city, built in the second-century CE to support a new, vibrant center at Sepphoris below the built-up summit and slopes. Turning left onto the cardo, the visitor arrives at the Nile Festival House, which the site's excavators, Zeev Weiss and Ehud Netzer, explain served as a public, secular building, most likely a municipal basilica for housing meetings, discussions, and lectures. The building's multiple wings, originally fully lined with mosaics, consist of a west side, including the main entrance, the Nile Festival mosaic, and a large basilica-shaped hall flanked by corridors on three sides, along with several rooms and courtyards. The east wing contained an inner courtyard along with more rooms of a range of sizes. The visual program within this crafted space emphasizes Chin's description of a living, thriving landscape. Consider, for example, the female figure at the top left of the Nile Festival mosaic, whose evocative posture suggests multiple possibilities of understanding. On the one hand, a lined mantle frames her exposed torso, forming a figure relaxing on a water bank. On the other hand, the Greek label above her left shoulder, “Egypt,” shifts female body to geographic site. The text beckons the viewer to notice further embodiments of produce-rich land. Stalks of wheat form a wreath adorning the woman's hair. Pomegranate breasts mirror the produce that sprouts in the background. An abundance of fruits overflows from the oversized basket that supports her right elbow and the cornucopia in her right hand. By both forming a figure through physique, dress, and hair and reorienting the image as land through text and visual details, the mosaic invites the viewer to look closely at the floor and consider Egypt as an embodied presence in a Galilean urban center. The aliveness of the landscape continues in the gray-haired male figure of the Nile River sitting among stalks of reeds across from Egypt. He rests on a jar streaming with water that merges with the flow from the large beast below him, while his blue robe mirrors the water's ripples, especially by the folds above his left elbow and knee. The viewer is once again asked to look closely at the representation of the physical environment, not through imitating its geographic features, but through the presentation of the body. Chin's work on earth, air, and water, as beating pulses in the Late Antique world, shifting, evolving, aging, expands our appreciation for why land and water may be depicted through figural bodies in this fifth-century mosaic. Yet Chin's work does not simply insert landscape into human terminology but expands our understanding of life, pushing us to consider how it extends beyond the human experience. In chapter three, Chin reframes the Gothic movement into Italy through the drama of landscape and migration, arguing, “landscape forces are, like horizons, invitations- sometimes violent ones- for us to enter larger-than-human scales of being ... Flows and inundations were divine motions; rivers and winds were divine beings ...” (80). In the Nile Mosaic, scale and expression underscore the divine nature of these landscape bodies. Egypt's eyes gaze upward in transcendent contemplation, while her enormous body stands in contrast to the fisherman in the water below. Egypt and the Nile, land and water, form complementary sources of divine bounty. These figures stand in contrast to the built representation of landscape below. The mosaic's middle register presents the architectural space of late antique Alexandria, shown through its urban gate, identified with the Greek word “Alexandria,” and standing next to the Pharos, its lighthouse, along with the third-century misnamed Column of Pompey.4 The placement of the divine figures in the upper register presiding over the urban scene in the middle register and the wild animals in the lower one sets a hierarchical direction between realms, from divine to human to animal. The flow of the Nile's waters from the mouth of the hippopotamus into the lower levels reinforces these distinct categories while also connecting them. On the one hand, the source of water on the human and animal levels derives from the divine plane, while on the other hand, the movement of water throughout the registers creates a sense of fluidity between these categories. The swaying of flowers and lively gestures of animals throughout the registers underscores this interconnection and creates a sense of movement, and the viewer's gaze shifts through the image to articulate an environment simultaneously divided and connected. The interdependence of the registers visualizes Chin's description of human objects as “figures, miniatures, metonyms for larger things just over the horizon. In a world made from likenesses, a person trained to look past the horizon can look at a patch of ground and see paradise, past and future, because it is all there, now” (89). This interpretive lens of the visual imagery as directing the viewer through the vitality of the landscape provides a different lens than the typical scholarly approach of interpreting Nilotic imagery by matching textual sources with visual meaning. Henry Maguire lines up texts and images to show possibilities of interpretation of Nilotic imagery in Byzantine churches, such as topographical, to allegorical, to propitious (1999, 179–84). Similarly, Zeev Weiss and Rina Talgam offer a range of possible meanings of the Nile scene at Sepphoris based on contemporary textual connections to fertility, abundance, and prosperity (2002, 72–73). These helpful contributions to the role of the Nile in text and art often bypass the specific Nilotic composition within its lived, spatial context, falling into the issue that Chin raises of solely relying on texts to reconstruct the past, rather than incorporating literary works into what he describes as an embodied understanding of “knowing,” marked by “experience, encounter, duration, perception, and proprioception,” that “requires us to confront the limits of the verbal proposition as a medium of knowledge communication” (138). At Sepphoris, this kinesthetic, sensory knowledge takes place through framing the images as part of a journey of learning that begins at the moment the visitor enters the space. An eight-line metrical inscription greets the visitor turning up the walkway from the cardo to the western side of the building, the main entrance to the Nile Festival House.5 Chin describes knowledge as a physical conversation between maker and matter as a preparation for moments of encounter in a shared space. Here, maker, matter, and visitor fold into an experience that begins at the entrance of a building in Sepphoris, leads to the Nilotic banks of Alexandria, and back to the present moment. Beginning with the direct address “You see” formed in the singular second person, the words invite the individual visitor to “see” the visual material of the “dusky youth,” a description of the Nile due to the mixing of mud with water during the summer flood that left its complexion “black as soot.” The message continues by revealing that the mosaic program served a personal goal, calling attention to the beauty of the maker, Procopius's homeland. Through the inscription, we learn that geography is not simply the visual design of a mosaic floor, but threads craftsmanship, personal history, and visitors into a celebration of Egypt's vast bounty. Crossing over the opening, the visitor enters a small, stone-paved courtyard. The flow of the geometric corridor offers a pathway to follow the visual program to the various rooms, demonstrating Chin's discussion of knowledge as taking place through navigation. Zeev Weiss and Ehud Netzer describe the figurative mosaics as “traffic signals,” indicating a change in direction or marking the entrance to an important space (Weiss and Netzer 1995, 170). Beyond guiding movement, the panels impress an integrated visual program upon the viewer that expands on the Nile Festival Mosaic's messages of place and abundance. Movement throughout the building invites the viewer to expand the prosperity shown in the Nile Festival Mosaic by imagining a much wider network, stretching from Alexandria to the periphery of geographic place. Chin describes the late antique world as telling a story of “water flowing from places we cannot see to places we cannot understand” (88). The Amazons, as figures believed to “dwell on the edge of the known world,” exemplify this emphasis on journeying through known and unknown places. The central corridor leads to a cluster of rooms, one of which contains a mosaic with a number of Amazons. In the upper register, two Amazons, or an Amazon and her male companion, sit under a canopy stretched between trees while their horses rest. Below, a group of Amazons dance. The viewer leaves the Nile Festival room to encounter a range of scenes that extend the bounty of the Nile to marking the abundance of food, from the practical connection to Egypt to those encountering prosperity on the edges of society, all folded into the experience of terrestrial vitality for those navigating a fifth-century building in Sepphoris. Chin's final chapter on death as a transition to a new knowledge journey, where “when we die, we are at the very beginning of the future,” demonstrates that life sparks in spaces where it seemingly ends (111). The significance of the title of Kiefer's work, Nigredo, painted in the upper left corner of the canvas, captures a moment when life seems most stagnant as an invitation toward further movement. For Nigredo does not simply derive from the Latin word for blackness, but from the alchemical process, the moment of decay and burning that precedes the emergence of light. Kiefer captures a shifting landscape, a country in ruins on the verge of a more luminous state. The artist related to painting as a living thing, evolving over time. In an interview with art critic Martin Gayford, he reflects, “Paintings change in two ways. They change naturally, with time, and they change intellectually, because the artist is only half of the process, the other half is the spectator, and every spectator creates his own painting” (Gayford 2014, 57). It is this interactive, shifting process that makes it so difficult to recover the past. Chin's challenge to know the past from the inside, by “using our own intimate bodily selves . . . as instruments for understanding what the past is for us, and for understanding some part of what the past might have been for those beings who touch us from far away inside it” offers a new path forward (154). We are left, then, to tell the stories of the past with a starting point of aliveness. Late antique floor mosaics carry multiple layers of storytelling: the images on the floor, the lives of those who traveled through the space, and the interaction between visitor and visual program. Crafted stone, landscape, and myth shape the experience of the Nile Festival Mosaic, inviting us to physically touch the past to navigate the aliveness that flowed from human-constructed space to the periphery of knowledge in the late antique world

Geography · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Literature and Cultural Memory · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

• Response to L. Di Segni , JRA Suppl. 49, 91-97 The mosaic inscription in the Nile Festival Building at Sepphoris

  Open Access•G W Bowersock•Journal of Roman Archaeology•2004

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• The mosaic inscription in the Nile Festival Building at Sepphoris

  Open Access•Leah Di Segni•Journal of Roman Archaeology•2005

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• Alexandria Rediscovered

  J H Sibal, Jean-Yves Empereur•Journal of the American Research…•2000

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