A Critical Approach to the Byzantine Art in the First Half of 19th Century. The case of Ch. F.-M. Texier

The paper aims at investigating the role of those aesthetic theories that are at the origin of the historical studies on Byzantine art and architecture at the beginning of 19th century. Particularly, through the analysis of textual and graphic sources dating from the first decades of 19th century – when the opening of ottoman frontiers favored an international and more scientific-minded exploration of the byzantine artistic remains – it will be discussed the rising of a new critical interest, springing from the convergence of different disciplines: archeology, history, art history, literary history and philology. A critical attitude that progressively resulted in the birth of the modern Byzantine studies during the 19th century. The paper will concentrate above all on the site of Constantinople, a symbolic place often evoked in the journey reports of a lot of modern voyagers, though yet scarcely known from a scientific and archaeological point of view at the beginning of the century. The possibility of a close examination of the ancient remains and the direct survey of Byzantine monuments called for a more accurate definition of a properly Byzantine artistic style. Indeed, the systematic cataloguing of the works yielded a too inclusive corpus of Byzantine records, often confused, according to the classic encyclopedic periodization, with Early Christian artistic production. So the study of the monuments of the city allowed scholars to better define a specific Byzantine style and to fix the memory of an urban landscape that was soon to undergo a radical modernization, inspired by the models of western capitals. Between 1830 and 1840, thanks to the ideological open-mindedness of the ottoman court – then ratified by the reforms of the so-called Tanzimat – some bold pioneers of the discipline, like the Russian scholar Nikolai Iasimof (1799-1855), the French archaeologist Charles Texier (1802-1871), the German architect Wilhelm Salzenberg (1803-1887) or the Swiss brothers Gaspare (1809-1883) and Giuseppe (1822-1891) Fossati, arrived at a clearer understanding of the nature of Byzantine art and architecture, as well as at the characterization of their typical anti-naturalistic and decorative features. Our historical gaze on the ancient Byzantium is inevitably affected by the cultural perspective of those forerunners, so that our position – like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants – seems to prove something like a historicity of the eye, a much debated topic in the field of humanities today. However, it will be argued that just the possibility for us to make sense of the historicity of art-historical readings of 19th century shows as much our capabilities to draw the distinction between different historical an cultural perspectives