ABSTRACT
I am offering this chapter on çintamani to honor my friend and colleague, Annemarie Weyl Carr, in this volume because the history of its appearance and reappearance seem to me to parallel, in certain ways, her findings about the afterlife of forms in icons, in particular with regard to the icon of the Virgin of Kykkos. Çintamani is, of course, in one aspect, an ornamental design and therefore very different from an icon representing the likeness of the Virgin and Child. But çintamani also seems to have begun as religious imagery, even though its shape and meaning changed and developed over its long and interesting history. I will examine aspects of çintamani as ornament over an extended period of time, mainly from the sixth to the sixteenth century. But I hasten to say that my presentation is selective, and by no means do I wish to suggest that the examples seen in the thirteenth or the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries are the only examples; nor is 1600 the end of its existence as a viable ornamental or religious form. What I would like to present here are simply some remarks on the origins and development of çintamani as ornament and three of its “afterlife” manifestations, among many others. In doing this I hope, first, to honor my colleague Annemarie, and, second, to draw attention to a significant ornamental motif long neglected in the study of Western artor at least in the study of Western art to about 1600.
