ABSTRACT
The contacts between people that allowed art and artistic ideas to travel between the Byzantine east and European west took place at various social levels, and in various contexts. At the top of the social scale there were the ritual exchanges of gifts by ambassadors from one court to another, and the trousseau-dowries carried by princesses for whom politically expedient interdynastic marriages were arranged. The nature of such exchanges is usually documented only in very general terms: in his Chronicon, written sometime between 1013 and 1018, Thietmar of Merseburg says that when the Byzantine princess Theophano, a relative of the Byzantine emperor John I Tzimisces (r. 969-76), came to the west in 972 to marry Otto II (955-83), she arrived
with ‘a splendid entourage and magnificent gifts’.3 This description, though probably conventional, is likely to have covered secular luxury goods such as boxes made of ivory or gem-encrusted metalwork, embossed silver vessels and jewellery, and the fine silk textiles for which Constantinople was famous.4 In spite of the separation of Greek and Latin churches in 1054, wedding chests and diplomatic luggage probably also included items from the wide range of religious equipment common to all Christendom: liturgical vessels, reliquaries, portable icons and ornate book covers, although books themselves perhaps had a limited currency as gifts for western recipients, few of whom would have read Greek. It is well known that the Byzantine goods brought west by Theophano and her entourage had an impact on the art of her new residence, particularly evident in manuscript illuminations associated with the Ottonian court, some of which acquired gold backgrounds, elements of Byzantine iconography and Greek inscriptions.5 The practicalities of such transferences are undocumented and in any case likely to be as various as human behaviour: courtiers impressed by exotic foreign novelty (or eager to please their rulers) may have told the artists working for them to adopt Byzantinisms, and artists with access to court treasures would themselves have seized the opportunity to add new material to their model books – and it is probably by this route, rather than by courtly commissions, that some novelties might enter widespread use. It is likely, of course, that this process also operated in the other direction, with works by western artists and craftsmen producing similar responses in various Byzantine court circles, but material evidence of this is lacking.6
