two classrooms in china

S y m p o s i u m : I n T he Hu ma n i t ie s C l a s s ro o m , Pa r t 2

TWO CLASSROOMS IN CHINA Linda Safran and Adam S. Cohen

The authors of this contribution are medieval art historians, married to each other, who participated from 2014–17 in a “Connecting Art Histories” initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Foundation. Titled “Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History,” it involved exchange teaching and funded field trips with graduate students and faculty from the University of Toronto and the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA), in southern China. In the fall of 2015, Linda Safran taught two courses at GAFA: a large undergraduate survey of medieval art and architecture and a small MA-level seminar on medieval Sicily, in anticipation of a trip to Sicily in February 2016. In the fall of that year, Adam Cohen offered a graduate seminar on medieval manuscript illumination to many of the same students at GAFA. The authors were able to augment memories of their seminar meetings with audio recordings made by the students.

Linda Safran: I am very excited to be the first Toronto professor to teach at GAFA. With my husband Adam and another colleague, Jill Caskey, I had already made a weeklong trip to Guangzhou in May 2015 and met some of the students who would enroll in my graduate course. When I returned that October, Alex and Yuting came to meet me in Hong Kong to help me navigate the buses to Guangzhou. Given Common Knowledge 24:3 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-6939769 © 2018 by Duke University Press

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the paucity of signage, the drivers’ lack of English, and my own ignorance of Cantonese or Mandarin, I am not sure I would have made it without them. My dependency continues: I need students to take me to the grocery store the first time, to unveil the mysteries of the induction cooktop and the washing machine, to instruct me how to take the subway and the bus. The students expect to do things for their professors, but I vow not to take advantage of them. Still, I keep Wenwei’s cell phone number handy; with his idiomatic English, he has been appointed my coadjutant and guide. For my nine weeks in Guangzhou, I have a one-room apartment on the thirty-fourth floor of a hotel-apartment tower called, appropriately, Vertical City, only a short walk from the GAFA graduate campus, where I teach every Tuesday and Friday morning (I take a 45-minute shuttle to the enormous undergraduate campus on Mondays and Thursdays, returning by public bus; Wednesdays are reserved for Communist Party functions and faculty meetings). To get to the graduate class, I only have to wait for an elevator and cross two streets, but each of those has eight lanes of dense traffic—cars, overloaded two- and three-wheeled vehicles of every description, crowds of surging pedestrians. I often look down at this traffic from my window and marvel that, in over two months, I have seen no accidents. To cross the streets, I must be aggressive and cautious at the same time, but those few minutes of stress are relieved upon entrance into the 1950s campus, a leafy oasis in a busy, near-tropical city. My graduate seminar is supposed to be the same as the one Jill Caskey teaches in Toronto so that our students will be equally prepared when they meet in Sicily two months after the term’s end. But whereas she will teach a standard Canadian twelve-week term, I have only nine weeks, so our syllabi differ in length and, sometimes, in content. Jill’s students can read in Italian or German or French, but mine cannot. Because our classes are not in sync, Jill will send me her PowerPoints to serve as the basis for my own. The firewall that keeps me from accessing Google Images to supplement my PowerPoints is my biggest challenge in China. All but two of the nine graduate students in the class are required to take my course, because their advisor, Yudong Wang (PhD, Chicago), was the one who initiated the collaboration with Toronto in an effort to expose his students to “Western” approaches to medieval art. (Only in China am I, a Byzantinist, considered a “Western” art historian.) The students were vetted for their ability to communicate in English, but even though the language is a required subject in China, beginning in elementary school, not every master’s student has truly mastered it. I know I have to speak slowly and with shorter words than I normally use, but I do not want to dumb things down. The students consult dictionaries on their phones, and sometimes I ask Wenwei or Mary to translate a tricky term or concept into Chinese so that everyone understands.



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Class is scheduled from 9 a.m. to noon, with a short break in the middle, but it often goes later than noon and no one seems to mind, even though a toolate dismissal means the students will miss lunch in the canteen. On day one, I insist that the tables and chairs in the classroom be rearranged in a ∏ shape so everyone can see each other and the wall on which I project my PowerPoints. By the fifth class meeting, which I describe here, the students are used to this seating arrangement, but initially it surprised them; the professor-at-the-front-of-theroom model was the only one they knew. A less hierarchical setting for seminars breaks down barriers and facilitates discussion, which is my goal. So does sharing food and drink, and the students and I make sure there are always abundant snacks and plenty of tea. By the fifth class meeting, I have a very good rapport with the students: we joke often, and they have heard my strong opinions about Donald Trump. I know which students I can count on for input if discussion lags and which need to be called on directly or otherwise will not speak at all. I also know, and I acknowledge to them, how hard they have to work to prepare for each class meeting: forty or fifty assigned pages will have taken them more than a full day to read, and each class also has at least one student presentation based on additional readings. I have already crossed off a couple of readings on the syllabus, but I cannot eliminate too many or the students will be unprepared when we go to Sicily. I do not want “my” students to look bad! On October 30, I spend the first ten minutes of class trying to reassure the students about their applications, which are due soon, for the Sicily field trip. They all seem depressed about the task, embarrassed about their English writing skills. I tell them that the whole point of the Getty project is to get the students in Guangzhou together with their colleagues from Toronto, and, because there are so few of the former, everyone’s participation is all but certain. (Jill Caskey will have a harder time selecting from a much larger class.) We then review matters covered in the previous class session, during which I introduced the Islamic conquest and rule of Sicily between the ninth and eleventh centuries. We talked about Sicily’s shifting political and geographical affiliations, from the Aghlabids (ruling from Kairouan on behalf of the Sunni caliph in Baghdad) to the Kalbids (ruling on behalf of the Shia Fatimids based in Cairo). We addressed whether those shifts registered in the visual and material record, and I also raised the thorny problem of lacunae in the monumental arts of Sicily. I explained how scholars had had recourse to proxy monuments in North Africa in order to fill the gaps. Already in the first two weeks of the course, the students have struggled with unfamiliar concepts (Judaism, Christianity, typology) and types of evidence; the coins, jewelry, and architecture I incorporate are not part of the art history curriculum in China, nor have the students had much exposure to primary sources. Now I show more slides of coins, which, unlike ancient and


Byzantine coins from Sicily, are decorated not with figures but with texts that confirm the Shia caliph’s link to Allah, Muhammad, and Ali. Shia and Sunni Muslims are in the news, and the students are eager to talk about ISIS, Islamic fundamentalism, and jihad. This last, at least, is relevant to the primary source we will discuss today—an excerpt from Ibn Hawqal’s tenth-century S.u¯rat al-Ard. (Portrait of the World), in an English translation by William Granara.1 I say, “I hope we can have fun with this text,” our first extensive primary source, which includes a rich description of Ibn Hawqal’s visit to Palermo. I solicit a definition: “What is a primary source?” Yuting says, “It’s firsthand.” “What does that mean?,” I counter: “Does a primary source have to be contemporary with the events it describes?” Wenwei says the source should be close in time, which is correct. I introduce a comparison: “What are the primary sources for Christianity?” Kai knows that the answer is the Gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul. Even though none of them was written at the time of Christ, they are the closest textual sources we have. “But so what?,” I ask, “does that mean that a source is factual? That it’s truthful?” The students consider the question. Then Wenwei says, “Not necessarily.” “Why?,” I respond. “Give me some examples.” And he comes to the heart of the matter: “People who recorded things have their own interests.” “Absolutely,” I say. “Everyone who writes has a slant, a bias, an opinion. There is no such thing as objective history. For a document to survive at all, it probably was on the side of the winners, and the winners write the histories. We are lucky when we have the losing side’s point of view. Every author has an agenda.” I ask, “What were the agendas of the Gospel writers?” Kai replies that that the goal was “to let the people know the message of Jesus.” “Just to let them know?,” I ask. Kai and I agree that their aim was more than informative: the Evangelists wanted their audiences to follow the new faith. I reiterate that there is no unbiased history; in every case, we need to ask what the author of our source is trying to do. Ibn Hawqal’s writing is full of juicy content, but we do not have much context for it. “Who is he?,” I ask, and the students repeat what the translator has told them: “A merchant.” “Does he sound like a merchant? What is he interested in?” Yuting says, “He is a strict Muslim.” “What kind?,” I ask. “Is he a Sunni or a Shia?” Silence. “Who is he, and who is he writing for?” I put additional prepared questions up on the screen and raise the issue of whether Ibn Hawqal really went to Sicily. Perhaps he was an armchair traveler (the term needs defining) reliant on others’ texts? I suggest to the students that, if they did good research, they could write convincingly about Beijing even if they have never been there. We agree that Ibn Hawqal probably did go; he is familiar with the topography and geography of Palermo, at least, and he tends to admit when he has not been someplace

1. Granara, “Ibn Hawqal in Sicily.”


What, I ask, would we need to know to determine if Ibn Hawqal’s account is accurate? Mary responds that we could find out where Aristotle actually died (answer: Chalcis, north of Athens), but I say that even knowing this datum for the fourth century BCE would not tell us where the body was in the tenth century CE, because bodies are easily moved. Wenwei’s alternative (“if someone else talked about that box”) is once again key. If the source can be corroborated (I define the word), that would support its veracity, although conceivably there could be a widespread effort—a propaganda campaign—to circulate a false claim. This possibility resonates for the students. I tell them that, actually, Ibn Hawqal is alone in communicating this story; it has no corroboration. What should we do with it? Presumably, Ibn Hawqal, new to Palermo, did not make up such a bizarre tale; someone, we may assume, told it to him. What happens when a story gets repeated many times?, I ask. The students have not heard of the game of “telephone,” but we play it now. I am confident that a statement whispered in English at one end of our table will come out quite differently at the other end. Giggling ensues as students make faces that betray incomprehension. The whispering takes about three minutes: “I ate five hamburgers at Burger King yesterday” becomes, as expected, something unintelligible; only the “five” comes through clearly. This is a silly experiment, I say, but if a short statement did not make it even once around the classroom accurately, 2. Granara, “Ibn Hawqal in Sicily,” 95.



heard certain logicians say that the Greek philosopher Aristotle is buried in a wooden box suspended in the sanctuary. The Christians used to venerate him and pray to him for rain. . . . It was said that the reason for suspending the body in mid-air was so that the people could go and see it there, in order to pray for rain or seek cures for all sorts of calamities that befell them, be they natural disasters, death or civil strife. I myself saw a great big box which suggests that the tomb may actually be there. 2

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(for instance, Cordoba) and is relying on hearsay. He states that the island of Sicily is seven days long and four days wide—an unfamiliar way for us to think about distance and scale. How long would it take to walk across Guangzhou?, I wonder. Nobody knows. I ask whether Ibn Hawqal emphasizes some things more than others, in pursuit of a clue about his interests or those of his intended readers. We start to work through the text systematically, matching up Ibn Hawqal’s words with a map of Palermo on the screen. He begins by noting a stone wall and the wealthy merchants inside it but then switches to the city’s Friday mosque, which, he says, was once a Christian church. Indeed, the mosque was a converted cathedral, itself a former pagan temple, a not uncommon sequence in Sicily. Ibn Hawqal says nothing about Muslim practice in the mosque, however. Instead he tells us that he

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then Ibn Hawqal’s story is not likely to have reached us in its original form. Why might he have been interested in this tale and by what the former users of the mosque used to do in the presence of the mysterious box? I point out that it makes no sense for Christians to pray to Aristotle, given that they did not consider him a holy person. What seems likely to me, and I share this idea with the class, is that the box contained Christian relics. Someone asks the spelling of relics, and I make sure that everyone understands the term by soliciting a Chinese translation (there are Buddhist relics). I define relics as pieces of bone or other body parts, or anything that has touched a holy person; they were required in church altars after 787. Veneration of relics was considered by medieval Christians to be an effective means of access to a saint, who would pray on one’s behalf in heaven. The Aristotle-ina-box story likely reflects local memory of an unknown saint; he or she may have had a similar-sounding name, or merely one beginning with A. Whether or not Aristotle ever visited Sicily, the story must have originated in a relic-venerating Christian milieu. Ibn Hawqal does not connect the tale with the veneration of relics in Islam, however. I tell the students that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all pray at the tombs of special individuals and that I have been to a mosque in Akko that claims to possess a hair from the beard of Muhammad. Mary’s face expresses disbelief. I agree that I do not personally believe in the utility of relics as a means of getting close to God, but what is important is that many Christians, and certainly most medieval Christians, did and do. Much of medieval art was produced in an effort to come close to the divine. But I bring this digression, important as it was, back to Ibn Hawqal: some story got muddled, and in the absence of corroborating texts we cannot say whether our author’s tale is “true.” We return to the text and the city plan. Ibn Hawqal tells us that the sultan and his entourage reside in the fortified Khalisa, noting both the absence of markets and places to stay and the presence of a mosque, prison, arsenal, and public baths. “Is this the kind of information a merchant would record? Who might want this information?,” I ask again. Someone suggests it is there on behalf of other travelers; of what sort?, I respond. “Rich ones,” says Kai. “Would a rich visitor be interested in the prison and arsenal and administrative offices?,” I ask. Someone proposes “armchair travelers,” which makes me smile, even if the suggestion is incorrect; these students learn so quickly. Yuting proposes “imperial classes,” and I run with that: “Maybe,” I say, “he is writing for the Fatimids back home.” (We know from other sources that Ibn Hawqal was in the Fatimids’ employ.) “Maybe . . . he’s a Fatimid spy!” Everybody understands the word spy, which make me a bit nervous (do they think I am a spy? Is someone at GAFA a spy?). “What if the Fatimids sent Ibn Hawqal to Sicily to check on the situation there?,” I ask—“That would explain why he is telling us about the borders, walls, gates, and water sources.” Some students nod in agreement.


3. Granara, “Ibn Hawqal in Sicily,” 97.



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Following a break, in which students again express concern about their Sicily program applications, I spend another ten minutes pointing out how much their comprehension of English has improved after only five class meetings. Many say that they now understand about 80 percent of what I say. I offer them additional opportunities to work on English, exhorting them to spend social time with me (“you’re my only friends in China!”) and promising to devote some class time to editing their English work as a group. Ibn Hawqal is interested in oddities and practicalities, but, I point out, he is also very critical of the Sicilians themselves. In addition to the excessive number of mosques, he disparages the coastline ribats, “full of freeloaders, scoundrels and renegades. These people would pretend to perform their prostrations, standing in order to steal money given to a charity, or to defame honorable women. Most of them were pimps and perverts . . . low-life and rabble.”3 I have to define pimps, but I have already demonstrated the postures of Islamic prayer (“prostrations”). What kind of structure is a ribat? I will get to that topic soon, though there are no surviving ribats in Sicily. I will use as my example the ribat in Sousse (in Ifriqiya), from which the Muslim conquest of Sicily originated. I make sure to reiterate, however, the methodological weakness of doing so: artists traveled, ideas migrated, and our “postglobal” perspective demands that we question the assumption that Sicilian monuments routinely looked like ones in Fatimid Ifriqiya. We move on to Ibn Hawqal’s opinion of the locals, in the penultimate paragraph of our excerpt. The “fact” that they eat onions “day in and day out,” he says, “has thwarted their imaginations, impaired their minds, numbed their senses, altered their thinking, clouded their understanding and even ruined their facial features. It has, in fact, changed their dispositions so much that they do not always see things as they actually are.” I remark that there is no scientific evidence that eating onions makes you crude or dull or ugly. Most North American graduate students reading this passage would laugh out loud (as the Toronto cohort did). The Chinese graduate students have never learned to question written sources, however, so they understand the passage quite literally: the Sicilians ate a lot of onions, to their detriment. “What is Ibn Hawqal’s opinion of Sicily under the Kalbids?,” I ask. “Very negative,” Alethea says: Ibn Hawqal “feels superior to them.” I agree, connecting Ibn Hawqal’s criticism of the Sicilians to more recent attitudes, evident in our historiographic readings, and go on to suggest that our tenth-century author considers Sicily provincial, in a pejorative sense, much as authors have done since the decline of the island’s power and prestige in the late Middle Ages. Strange food habits and religious customs, dullness and ignorance: “Aren’t these the sorts


of things that city folk always say about provincials? Don’t contemporary Chinese urbanites criticize the rural peasants and the less developed provinces in much the same ways?,” I ask. All of this discussion has revealed something the students did not expect—that a primary source is not straightforward and reliable reportage but, rather, a complicated entity that demands careful scrutiny of its author’s motivations. The GAFA students have never been asked to scrutinize a text, and they have a hard time doing so. I have had to ask leading questions repeatedly. As one of the students wrote to me later, “maybe you know, our culture do[es] not encourage us to doubt. At least we cannot ask too many ‘improper’ questions in courses that may make teachers [feel] awkward, no matter in ancient China or nowadays. The most safe way is that students just quietly remember what teachers tell them”—which is exactly what I do not want them to do. I have aggressively interrogated Ibn Hawqal to show them how a “Western” scholar deals with sources. The rest of the class session is devoted to an excerpt from Edward Said’s Orientalism and an article by Avinoam Shalem, “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Islamic Art’?: A Plea for a Critical Rewriting of the History of the Arts of Islam.”4 These texts generate a lengthy discussion about such terms as East and West, Chinese, and Islamic. By the end of three hours, we are all exhausted, and I do not sum up. I will save my summation for the opening of the next class meeting. But this particular session stays with me for a long time. Things that I took for granted—graduate students questioning what they read—turn out not to be true in China. By inviting my students to question what they read, I have, in a sense, enabled them to question their elders, and I wonder if this first step toward critical thinking might contribute to larger changes. I feel a frisson of excitement. I have taught these students something important that may stay with them well past this course and after they have returned from Sicily to China.

Adam Cohen: Because I know all but one of the Chinese students in my seminar—I traveled to Guangzhou once before, for a week, then to Sicily and the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang with the graduate students—we already have a nice rapport. Unlike the two field trips, however, in which I participated as a friendly though supplemental art historian, in the classroom I am “in charge,” so one of my challenges in Guangzhou will be to establish a somewhat more formal relationship. I am especially eager to have my course continue to build on the experiences of the previous year, with regard both to its subject matter and to its pedagogical aims. 4. Shalem, “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Islamic Art’?”


5. Spier, Picturing the Bible, 141–68.


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I have set myself two primary goals: to survey the subject of manuscript illumination in medieval Europe and Byzantium and to focus on the ways that scholarly articles work—to “get under the hood of the car,” as I like to put it. My hope is that by reading both an introductory text (Christopher de Hamel’s engaging and magisterial A History of Illuminated Manuscripts) and selected articles on focused topics, the students will see the process by which different scholars make specific arguments and assertions and also how these serve, in turn, as the building blocks of what becomes “received wisdom.” In our first meeting, I have explained this two-pronged approach to the course and introduced the subject as a whole. In the history of China, including its so-called Middle Ages (usually reckoned as the fifth through fourteenth centuries CE), there is no tradition of illustrated books, whether on parchment, paper, or wood, so it is an entire medium with which the students are unfamiliar. (They encountered only one manuscript in Linda’s course.) I spend a fair bit of time just talking about the physical structure of the book, contrasting it to the late-antique scroll format and demonstrating, with books (like the de Hamel) lying on the table, the endurance of the book structure for over 1500 years. To make the medium come more alive, I have brought and passed around my little tool kit of medieval manuscript illumination: pieces of papyrus and parchment, pens made of feather or wood, and some of the ingredients necessary for making ink and dyes. I also have a facsimile of a fifteenth-century book of hours, which is the best I can do to let the students handle an illuminated manuscript. I trot out these tangible items regularly when I teach such courses in Toronto, but I had never seen such wonder, delight, and appreciation come from initiating an entirely new concept to a group of budding art historians wholly unfamiliar with such things. As part of this first week, we also read “The Word Made Flesh in Early Decorated Bibles,” an essay by Herbert Kessler, who happens to have been my own PhD supervisor.5 The essay not only introduces the students to early Christian book illumination—a topic not covered in the de Hamel survey—but also helps to demystify the world of academia by reminding them that scholars are real people with attendant stories and interrelationships, not merely names on a photocopy or PDF. Intellectually, the essay is a rich overview that, the students admit, overwhelms them with myriad names: biblical episodes (Samuel Slaying Agag, the Annunciation to Zachariah); early Christian poets and other authors, including theologians (Publius Optatianus Porphyrius, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, Sedulius); unfamiliar types of books (lectionaries, epistles); individual manuscript designations and nicknames (the Abba Garima Gospels, the Ashburnham Pentateuch—also known as “Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. nouv.


acq. lat. 2334”); and terms (Sancta sanctorum, “synoptic” Gospels). Even this small sample may suggest how bewildered anyone new to the subject would be, but especially students who come from an entirely different cultural background. I make a mental note to remember this lesson in globalization for when I return to Toronto with its own multicultural student body. More immediately, I acknowledge, sympathetically, how hard the Kessler reading must have been for the students and how overwhelmed they must feel by the details. I do not want them to leave class feeling discouraged, so I conclude by asking each of them to take a deep breath, pull back from all the details, and simply tell us something, anything, one “big picture” thing that could be learned from the essay. Some responses: “Kessler shows that even though Christianity triumphs over paganism, there is continuity with the past”; “We see the beginning of traditions that would continue later in the Middle Ages”; “The books have precious covers in gold and silver, which shows how important these books were.” Some answers come quickly and others have to be encouraged, but it is satisfying to finish with some basic conclusions. I tell the students that, among the things I learned from Kessler, when I was his student, was never to hesitate or neglect to notice and state the obvious. The obvious is almost certainly correct and is usually important. I decide to use the avalanche of information in the previous week’s reading as the connection to the methodological lesson I want to convey in our second meeting, when we will roll up our sleeves and dissect a short, analytical article one step at a time. “The Echternach Lion: A Leap of Faith,” by Carol Neuman de Vegvar, offers an interpretation of an image in a Gospel book of about the year 700, which the author justifiably calls “one of the most compelling works of Insular [Hiberno-Saxon] art” (Figure 1).6 I start by asking the students to tell me what problem Neuman de Vegvar is trying to solve. Alex begins: “What is the iconography of the pose of the lion?” Wenwei jumps in, “And the color”—and then Kai rounds off with, “What is the relationship between the lion and the frame?” These replies give us more than enough to get started, so I ask about possible interpretations of the lion’s pose. Alex immediately wants to provide Neuman de Vegvar’s answer, but I cut him off and insist that we list the different options before jumping to a single conclusion. After we review those, I ask the students to tell me how, methodologically, Neuman de Vegvar goes about answering the question of which interpretive option will be preferable. “She compares the picture to others,” Alethea says, which I agree is a fundamental first step. So we review some of the comparisons that the students mention, drawing out the similarities and differences between the Echternach Lion and the Book of Durrow or the Lichfield Gospels, all of which suggest that the Echternach artist has

6. Karkov, Ryan, and Farrell, Insular Tradition, 167–88.


made very particular choices. Wenwei also reminds us that a comparison can be made between the lion and the other Evangelists’ symbols in the Echternach Gospels, and I underscore how important it is to treat the manuscript as an integrated whole and to avoid cherry-picking select details to construct an argument. I tell the students that I sometimes encounter this misstep even in the work of senior scholars. Now I challenge the students with a form of a question that Kai had asked the previous week and that I had put off for this moment: “How do we know that the pose of the lion and its relationship to the frame have meaning? Maybe it’s just a picture of a lion!” At this point the students start tossing out bits of information plucked from the article, but it seems that they are simply throwing things against the wall to see what will stick, rather than thinking about why a particular piece of information might help resolve the question. I hear various things about the Athanasian Creed and Jesus being the substance of the Father, and how Jesus is beyond space and time. I urge the students to focus on the lion, specifically. Kai suggests that, because the picture of the lion is in a Gospel book, it has to have meaning and make the viewer think of Christ. I press him to articulate more precisely how we would know so. “Texts?,” he offers tentatively; and, when I ask which text, Wenwei jumps in with the Homilies of Gregory the Great, cited by Neuman de Vegvar: “Gregory says God is outside time and the flesh bound by time, which coincides with the relationship between the lion and the frame. His paws are partially confined by the frame—look also at the tail and nose.” Once


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Figure 1. The Lion of St. Mark, from the Echternach Gospels, probably made in Lindisfarne about 700, now in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 9389, fol. 75v (photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France)


again, I detect a desire to get to Neuman de Vegvar’s conclusion without processing the individual steps, so I adopt a tone of mock exasperation: “You’re all trying to be too sophisticated. Remember what I’ve said: state the obvious, start with the simple and direct. Don’t begin with the frame: tell me something about Jesus and the stupid lion!” Yuting says, “Here is a text: ‘You are the Word from the heart of God, the Way, the Truth, You are called the rod of Jesse, we call you the Lion.” I am so happy that I practically roar: “Yes! ‘We call you the lion’!” Wenwei cannot find the passage and asks where it is, so Yuting points him to page 187, note 50. After Wenwei finds it and nods, I direct everyone to footnote 47 and ask Yuting to read it out loud: For the only-born Son of God was himself truly made man, and himself considered it worthy to die as a calf for our redemption, and himself rose up as a lion by virtue of his strength. The lion is also said to sleep with its eyes open; thus, in the same death in which through his humanity our Redeemer was able to sleep, he was awake through being infused with his immortal divinity.

To make sure that everyone fully understands this crucial passage from Gregory the Great, I ask Wenwei, who originally wanted to cite Gregory, to translate it into Chinese as everyone else looks at the Echternach Lion page projected on the screen. After he does, I affirm that it is a pretty good translation—the students, of course, know that I have no Chinese and, as I hoped, laugh. Kai points out that the eye of the lion seems very big and thereby gives me the opportunity to pull everything together by showing how the visual elements relate to basic Christian theology. “When,” I ask, “are the eyes open in the Gregory passage?” Yuting says, “When he is asleep and awake,” and Andrea adds, “When he is dead.” I seize the opening: “What’s that, Andrea? His eyes are open when he is dead? Really?” My sudden, sharp question, asked in a tone of disbelief, catches her by surprise, and she sits silently, stunned to have been called on (she is the only undergraduate in the class; Linda had taught her in her undergraduate course and recommended her for this one). “Really?,” I repeat. “I don’t know,” she responds, in a classic student about-face that I almost could have predicted. I have learned from Linda’s experience that the Chinese students are especially wary about expressing their ideas and, even more so, about challenging authority. “Yes, you do know!,” I respond: “you just read it! When are Jesus’ eyes open, Andrea?” “When he is dead,” she states less tentatively, and I give her a broad smile. “Exactly. Don’t be fooled by a trick question or be afraid to stick to your position.” I go on to sketch out how eyes-open-while-asleep is one of several ways to assert how the unique status of Jesus allows him to resolve normal contradictions: simultaneously human and God, dead and alive, asleep and




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awake. Now, finally, Wenwei gets his satisfaction: “And the frame shows that he is confined and not confined.” I nod with my own satisfaction and explain why I held him back from talking about the frame earlier—I wanted to make sure they first understood the theology, as expressed in texts, before connecting it to the picture. It is time to communicate the overriding methodological lesson I have had in mind all along. As sympathetically as I can, I underscore that it is difficult, and often not much fun, to take the time and trouble to look at footnotes, especially for art historians, who might well prefer to look at pictures rather than hunt down texts. But many arguments stand or fall in the notes, and in the bibliography if there is one. These represent the evidence for a scholarly interpretation, and it is up to us, the readers, to check these references and determine if they stand up to scrutiny and reason. “Remember all those citations in the Kessler article? They were overwhelming, but why do you think they are there?” Kai, remembering our discussion from the previous week, says, “It shows the shared cultural knowledge of that time.” Yuting then adds, building on Kai’s point: “And these are the texts—Gregory the Great and so on—that the monks making the manuscripts would have been reading.” “But what if we did not have any corroborating texts and were forced to look solely at images?,” I then ask. “The figure of the lion is frozen in the frame,” Alex says. He cites Meyer Schapiro, one of the great art historians of the twentieth century, who was particularly sensitive to the kinds of formalist questions that interest Alex. We spend some more time looking at all the pictures in the Echternach Gospels, and those in some other early medieval manuscripts, to test what we might be able to say about the potential meaning of the frames. I see that, after almost three hours of seminar, the students are exhausted from working in the overlapping foreign idioms of English, academic writing, and early Christian theology. I am almost ready to release them from their travails, but there is one final lesson—a recapitulation of what I did the previous week with the Kessler article. “Okay, what did you take away from the Neuman de Vegvar article? What lesson did you learn?” To my dismay, they all start to look at the article’s final paragraph, but I force them to look up from the page and say something in their own words. Each student does so, and I praise them for their hard work and insights. They are all free to go except Alex, whose week it is to have dinner with me after class. I planned these dinners as an opportunity to get to know each individual student better. This week, however, after our exhausting seminar, he and I will spend another several hours debating the potential, limits, and relationship of iconography and formalism in art history.


References Granara, William. “Ibn Hawqal in Sicily,” in “The Self and the Other,” special issue, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 3 (1983): 94 – 99. Karkov, Catherine, Michael Ryan, and Robert T. Farrell, eds. The Insular Tradition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Shalem, Avinoam. “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Islamic Art’?: A Plea for a Critical Rewriting of the History of the Arts of Islam,” in “Islamic Art Historiography,” ed. Moya Carey and Margaret S. Graves, special issue, Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): arthistoriography.wordpress.com/number-6 – june -2012 – 2/. Spier, Jeffrey, ed. Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Kimbell Art Museum, 2007.
