Ioli, you have a long association with Dumbarton Oaks and an affection for the place. Can you talk perhaps about your first impression of Dumbarton Oaks? Is it a very different place now from when you arrived as a Junior Fellow in 1974–75?

I was a graduate student at Berkeley when I applied for a junior fellowship. I had no hopes of receiving one, since at that time D.O. was thought to be a place where Harvard students in the Byzantine field came to write their dissertations, and fellowships were very hard to get. I was clearly thrilled to receive a fellowship and even more surprised when I arrived to see where I had landed.

Looking back at those years I can say that being at D.O. gave me a whole new perception of educational institutions in the United States, but also the opportunity to do research at this extraordinary library. I came here at the beginning stages of my dissertation and I believe that having from the start of one’s research such great resources gives one a better footing early on in academia. In addition the scholarly interchange that I encountered in my field --and it is true for all fellows-- opened up new horizons in rethinking my own research.

I always think that I owe D.O. the career I ended up having, when I look back at the first steps of a shy person, learning to discuss my work with others, and gaining a secure footing for what came afterwards. I was also lucky enough to have my fellowship renewed for an additional year, which secured the completion of the dissertation. While in residence this fall, I enjoy the broader intellectual community.

You are an art historian, a practitioner in a discipline which has changed a great deal over that time as well.

Yes, but I started as a classicist/archaeologist. Soon I realized that art history at that time offered a wider scope for interpretation. For example, renaissance art historians were working on topics like patronage (which didn’t happen in Byzantine Studies until the 1980s). After my studies in Germany I went to Berkeley to work with David Wright. Byzantine art history then still focused on iconography and style and not many other tools. Reading what the Byzantines themselves wrote was not encouraged when I was a student. When I began teaching I realized that context was essential to an understanding of the art of a period. Of course we began increasingly to ask different questions, to look at types of objects that had not been given much attention before (steatites rather than ivories in my case). Things which had never been exhibited became part, for example, of the exhibition I organized at Harvard on Byzantine women. As soon as you begin to look outside that narrow visuality into contextual studies, interdisciplinarity makes a library like Dumbarton Oaks essential.

I think of you as someone for whom teaching is very important. Is this what you tell your students?

Undergraduates come with very little grasp of what Byzantium entails, either the period or the art, and my aim is to present fresh challenges, capturing their interest by discussing intriguing and impressive images almost like puzzles to be solved, and we do it together. Graduate students are another matter, and there I need to make sure that they have a broad education and that they have all the languages they need, especially Greek. I encourage them to read the texts (and there are great texts!) and learn from all the disciplines which can be brought to bear on Byzantium. I enjoy having graduate students around me, I like their enthusiasm, and I enjoy working with them as we did for example for the Women exhibition where we had a great collaboration.

But this is a semester without teaching. How are you spending this precious time?

I have returned to an old interest of mine. My master’s thesis was on imperial art, and I published some of it in Dumbarton Oaks Papers. I have continued to work from time to time on the subject, on the imperial mosaics of Hagia Sophia, on relics at the court, and imperial psalters, and the role of personifications in suggesting imperial qualities. More recently I’ve been looking at assemblages of court art (the Khakouli triptych, the Pala Doro) and in them the figure of Alexander the Great. From another angle I’ve looked at pearls and the way they define empire.

You’re going to be talking about heliocentrism in your public lecture on November 15. Is this a continuous feature of Byzantine thinking about the emperor? We tend to think of it as a Hellenistic trait above all.

Well, it is very strong in Constantinian art and then again in the sixth and seventh centuries, with Corippus in particular, and then it becomes prominent again with the Macedonians, I suspect with Basil I at the end of the ninth century. In fact I would suggest that it is after Iconoclasm in the mid-ninth century that the emperor was seen again as a new Constantine and parallel to the sun. I shall trace the story into the twelfth century when we have a range of writings, (acclamations and panegyrics), which touch on the theme—and are visualized in the roundel in the Dumbarton Oaks museum.

Can you describe the concept behind the exhibit?

Exhibition-making starts with an idea around selected objects rather than with a fixed display plan. In the case of All Sides Considered, which was developed with the intention to highlight and exemplify the research of objects in our Maya collection, we were interested in exploring the many layers of each selected object or case study – the material specifics and cultural signifiers studied by archaeologists, art historians, scientists, and anthropologists. To bring the scholarly and scientific analyses into the display, expansive label text was of the essence; yet, so as not to distract from the aesthetic value of the objects, a display setting had to be created that would be able to bring these two sides into play and keep them in balance.

The solution we came up with was this: approaching the gallery from the museum entrance, the visitor perceives mainly the colorful accentuated pedestals carrying the highlighted objects. Text and further interpretative material comes into sight only after the interested viewer has entered the area. In general, our interest in experimenting with settings is a crucial aspect of the museum’s exhibition program to activate the relationship between art, art scholarship, and visitors.

It was important to place the objects in prime locations within the narrow gallery. Set in cases that are positioned perpendicular to the walls, the artifacts are accessible from all sides. At the same time, the placement prescribes a passageway through the display; the visitor walks right up to the artifacts and then is gently forced to ‘slalom’ around them.

Each case study is equipped with a stool that resembles not unintentionally a lab stool. It invites the visitor to linger and engage with each object and the rather text-heavy information, which includes ‘hands-on’ items, slide shows, and a movie clip.

Hillary Olcott, Museum Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator

What are some new elements that you incorporated into the display?

One of the novel things about All Sides Considered is the interactive nature of the displays. Incorporating the interactive elements into the labels presented several challenges to the museum team. The most difficult elements to incorporate were the iPads. The challenge arose during the design phase of exhibition planning. We needed to come up with a way to incorporate seamlessly the iPads into the labels so that visitors would feel as though they were interacting with the exhibition itself, not with iPads. It was also imperative that the design allowed visitors to use the touchscreens without access to any of the buttons. While we did not want visitors turning the iPads on and off, we needed a display that allowed the museum staff to do so. Similarly, we needed a design that securely held the iPads but made it easy to remove them when maintenance was needed. After many hours of brainstorming and several prototypes, we came up with a successful design. However, it was not until the displays were installed, the labels applied, and the iPads running that we all breathed a collective sigh of relief and stepped back to admire our work. Although the iPads require some maintenance, they are an absolute success. They allow visitors to touch, hear, and explore the Dumbarton Oaks Collection like never before. I look forward to dreaming up new ways to use this exciting technology!

Miriam Doutriaux, Pre-Columbian Collection Exhibition Associate

How does the exhibit reflect the current state of/trends in Maya scholarship?

The exhibit showcases several exceptional Maya objects from the Dumbarton Oaks collection that were carefully reexamined by experts over the past three years. It focuses on the objects and the science behind the recent Dumbarton Oaks publication Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks. Six case-studies outline recent findings about the Maya, and illustrate some of the epistemological underpinnings of current Maya research.

Much knowledge about the Maya is derived from iconographic analyses, as evidenced in the comparative dating of 2,000-year-old etchings on a greenstone pendant. Careful observation and informed comparison with other objects often leads to new findings, including the discovery that four carved spheres in the Dumbarton Oaks collection are the earliest known Maya bone bells.

For example, experts in the fields of geology, mineralogy, conchology, biology, and physical anthropology contributed scientific opinions and analyses – from radiocarbon dating to X-ray diffraction analysis – to the study of a Maya mosaic mask. New technologies are also helping scholars to better visualize and experience the objects they study. A 3-D digital model revealed subtly carved features on a Maya stela, and X-rays exposed the production process of a rattle bowl with a hollow base.

Mayanists also rely on experimental archaeology to refine their understanding of ancient practices and production techniques. A carving station in the exhibit allows visitors to experiment with tool types used by ancient Maya carvers.

The exhibit is about the scholarly research process – the slow, painstaking work that underlies groundbreaking discoveries about the Maya. As museum visitors listen to a rattle bowl, flip through x-ray images, examine a 3-D digital model, and compare images or specimens, they are taking a scholar’s approach – and perhaps gaining a new appreciation of the thrills of Maya scholarship.

Chris Harrison, Senior Exhibitions Technician

Watch this video, in which Chris describes the workstation designed to allow visitors to experiment with tool types used by ancient Maya carvers.

Our age, in which computers have taken over all forms of textual production and promise to give new meaning to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century concepts of “automatic writing,” has witnessed a widespread nostalgia for, or at least sympathetic interest in, older, more personalized forms of writing, such as calligraphy, glyphs, and graffiti. The relationship between word and image has long been a staple of scholarship. Of these, ut pictura poesis is only the most familiar. Ekphrasis is another. Variations on the text-image paradigm include oppositions between oral and written, hearing and seeing, and, in the medieval West, Latin and the vernaculars -- a hierarchy of languages, both spoken and written, that varies in its relationship to visual forms of expression. Whereas semiotics insisted on the linguistic nature of all systems of representation, and Derrida’s deconstruction, building on Saussurian linguistics, emphasized the logocentricity of Western thought, the anthropological turn in the Humanities has redirected attention to the ways in which images and imagistic modes of presentation augment and enhance the primacy, presence, and power of speech. The symposium sought to tap into and interrogate the newfound interest in presence, or in the production of effects of presence; in issues of agency -- the agency, not only of human actors, but also of objects; and in the role of materiality in the production of meaning.

Contributors explored ways in various cultural traditions have organized the relationship between image and letter, whether in terms of equivalency, complementarity, or polarity. Papers explored those situations in which letter and image were fused, forming hybrid signs that had no vocal equivalent and were not necessarily bound to any specific language. It emerged that while imagistic scripts work on the visible, troubling representation, they also challenge the legible in terms of linguistic signification. The incorporation of figures, objects, colors, even events, within the letter insists on the material dimension of the sign. As the iconicity of the letter transforms reading into gazing, the script-like character of the image compels consideration of the co-signification of sign forms. In mediating each other into altered formats, the script-image disrupts a-priori models and ideas and thus redefines both text and image in terms of their signifying and representational processes. The disruptive effect of imagistic script inheres in a suspension of meaning that defamiliarizes the system of representation and signification in which it was produced and circulated.

Looking at the material and visual dimensions of script, including pictographic, ideographic and logographic writing systems, as well as alphabetic scripts, the contributors offered a variety of ways to consider this entire nexus of issues. Are the visual dimensions of script essential or extraneous? Do they merely shape expression or are they constitutive of meaning? Such questions go to the heart of the relationship between representation and reality.

Participants pictured above are (back row) Irvin Cemil Schick, Ivan Drpić, Cynthia Hahn, Didier Méhu, Ghislain Brunel, Elizabeth Boone, Tom Cummins, Anne-Marie Christin, Beatrice Fraenkel, Antony Eastmond, Vincent Debiais, Herbert Kessler, Irene Winter, (front row) Katrin Kogman-Appel, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, and Jeffrey Hamburger.

Emma Langham Brown

Emma is a junior at Harvard University concentrating in Medieval History and Literature and pursuing a secondary field in French Language and Literature. She is particularly interested in medieval materiality, and in conjunction with her department is currently designing a course called Taking Place: Medieval/Material/Culture that has an accompanying blog. Emma writes:

I am honored to have had the opportunity to travel to Washington, D.C in mid-October for "Sign and Design." I'm fairly certain I was the only undergraduate student there, and I felt a little nervous in the presence of such an array of scholars. But as it turned out, my questions were welcomed. All of the brilliant scholars I met at Dumbarton Oaks were more than happy to talk about medieval scholarship with me, despite my 20-year-old novice-ness. I came away from the conference with 12 pages full of notes, a head full of ideas, some wonderful new friends, and a thesis idea. I was so inspired by the last segment of the conference, "Instrumental Images," in which Ghislain Brunel of the Archives Nationales in Paris and Beatrice Fraenkel of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales gave brilliant papers that both played on the idea of the signature or the logo in medieval texts, that I would like to consider medieval insignia in tandem with the modern logo for my thesis next year. I am thankful for such a mind-opening experience.

Denva Jackson

Denva is a third-year PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.

While at Dumbarton Oak’s "Sign and Design" symposium this weekend, I was reminded of the reverence given to the word in the medieval and early modern period. Christ was the word made flesh and even though we and theologians of the Middle Ages turn to his representation time and time again, it is actually the word that preceded everything.

Yet, how can we as art historians talk about words? Should we not leave this to our friends in the study of history and literature? I am reminded of the talks given by Katrin Kogman-Appel and Irvin Cemil Schick on Jewish and Islamic art in which words are not only used as signifiers to create meaning but also, through their careful rendering, are meant to be seen in the same light as images. They illustrate reverence; they presence the sacred. We also see that texts can be frames or storehouses for images. Cynthia Hahn in her talk on the Gellone Sacramentary showed us that not only do images punctuate the text, they stand as markers for our attention, focusing our gaze and centering us in the moment.

It has been suggested by scientists that we use the right side of our brain to process images and our left to process text. What, then, should we make of this slippery collision of two different forms of signification? Must we tease them apart as our brain does or can we see them as constantly referring to each other in a sort of dance? I believe the scholars at the "Sign and Design" symposium would suggest the latter and I think those who took part in the creation of the objects wouldn’t disagree.

Erika Loic

Erika is a fourth-year PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture. Her dissertation research is on medieval manuscript illumination, monasticism, and Bibles in medieval Spain.

Prior to October’s "Sign and Design" symposium, I had visited Dumbarton Oaks on two occasions. Each of these prior visits had been organized as a full-day session for a group of students looking at some particular part of the collection, in one instance Byzantine ivories and in another a whole variety of objects from the Pre-Columbian Collection. These sessions were focused, intense, and very much object-based. They also benefited from the participation of fellows, who led us through discussions of objects they knew particularly well.

I bring up these previous visits to give a sense of the great variety of my experiences at Dumbarton Oaks. In contrast to these single-day sessions, the "Sign and Design" symposium offered me something of a very different nature. The speakers who presented papers during these two and a half days were selected meticulously and with an eye to fruitful discussions between scholars in different disciplines. Shared themes emerged elegantly in talks that were—at least superficially—very different. The potential for interdisciplinarity is inherent in the nature and mission of Dumbarton Oaks, but this was the first time that I had been able to participate in it so fully.

My participation in this symposium had almost immediate effects on my teaching and my own studies. Within a week, I was already incorporating some of the images and discussions from "Sign and Design" into the course I am teaching currently, “Picturing the Bible, 300–1300.” In particular, talks by Herbert Kessler and Katrin Kogman-Appel helped me to widen the scope of what I had been teaching.

My one-on-one interactions with the symposium speakers during lunches and evening receptions were also wonderfully and unexpectedly beneficial. I will relate but one single example out of many: although Irene Winter is a Professor Emerita in my own department, I had never had the chance to speak to her until this symposium. Although I am not working in her specific field, she was amazingly generous with her time, offering me some very thoughtful advice on starting (and ultimately finishing!) a dissertation.

I am filled with gratitude toward Dumbarton Oaks for hosting such a rewarding event and for making my visit possible through the Bliss Award. If "Sign and Design" is any indication of what one can expect of a Dumbarton Oaks symposium, then I look forward to many more years of symposium attendance.

Natasha Roule

Natasha is a second-year graduate PhD student in Historical Musicology. Natasha is also pursuing a secondary field degree in Medieval Studies. Her research interests include troubadour music and its reception history, as well as modern interpretations of Early Music.

The rich and sensuous spectacle offered by the gardens, the Music Room, and the presentation slides emphasized one of the symposium’s conclusions: to question the meaning of signs, designs, words, and symbols to engage all the senses. As a student of historical musicology—and in particular of the music and culture of medieval troubadours—this conclusion is especially meaningful to me. Auditory entities, particularly when inscribed and ornamented on the page of a manuscript, also function as signs that provide meaning unique and immediate to their cultures. While presentations recognized that symbols and signs are crystallized in the surface onto which they were inscribed, discussion returned these signs to their human creators and to their original status as objects deeply imbedded with immediate meaning.

I am deeply appreciative that I had the opportunity to participate in the "Sign and Design" symposium, and will forever remember the unique feeling of interdisciplinary, scholarly, and humanistic community that it fostered.

More images of the Gardens after Sandy are available on the garden blog.

A beautiful eighteenth-century writing desk by David Roentgen from the Dumbarton Oaks Museum’s House Collection is presently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens (October 30, 2012–January 27, 2013). This ingenious desk (seen at right) can be used either in a seated or standing position and with the top surface either flat or at a slant, as seen in the images below. The acquisition of the desk was somewhat unusual, and the correspondence documenting its purchase from the Munich dealer Julius Böhler is retained in the Dumbarton Oaks Archives. In 1962, then Dumbarton Oaks director, John S. Thacher, wanted to acquire the desk for his personal collection and had it sent to Dumbarton Oaks from Germany. However, on September 18 he wrote the following to Böhler: “Yesterday I returned from a brief trip to Ireland and to my great pleasure discovered that the Roentgen writing desk had arrived safely at Dumbarton Oaks. As you will notice, the enclosed check is from Dumbarton Oaks and not from me personally, because when I showed the desk to Mrs. Bliss she decided that she simply had to have it. Therefore it will be part of the permanent collections here. I shall of course miss not having it in my house, but I am happy to think that it has a permanent home.”

Roentgen Writing Desk, Elevated Top. Dumbarton Oaks House Collection, HC.F.1962.390.(CF)

Roentgen Writing Desk, Writing Slide. Dumbarton Oaks House Collection, HC.F.1962.390.(CF)

Roentgen Writing Desk, Drawer Open. Dumbarton Oaks House Collection, HC.F.1962.390.(CF)

Roentgen Writing Desk, Right Side. Dumbarton Oaks House Collection, HC.F.1962.390.(CF)

Roentgen Writing Desk, Back. Dumbarton Oaks House Collection, HC.F.1962.390.(CF)

Roentgen Writing Desk, Left Side. Dumbarton Oaks House Collection, HC.F.1962.390.(CF)

Roentgen Writing Desk, Top. Dumbarton Oaks House Collection, HC.F.1962.390.(CF)