Hanging with Hestia Polyolbus

The irregularly shaped fragment depicts a central, haloed female figure, who sits on a gem-encrusted throne upon a plush pink cushion. A wreath with fruits resembling pomegranates is perched above her dark hair. The figure wears a richly draped but unadorned tunic in pale blue, which is accessorized with extensive jewelry, including pearl earrings, a pearl- and gemstone-studded collar, and pairs of gold bracelets over her pearl-covered cuffs. A dark purple-colored area at the center of her lap is difficult to read due to the deterioration of the fabric. Above her head, woven into the blue background color in white, is an inscription identifying her as Εστια ΠολΥολβος (Hestia, Full of Blessings). The ground around Hestia, woven in a dark blue, is filled with pink flowers on vine-like green stems.

Hestia is symmetrically flanked by a total of six small nude boys—resembling putti or genii— who seem to walk briskly toward her. The boys are nearly identical to one another, with curly blonde hair and pink floral wreaths crowning their heads. Each holds a disk resembling a round platter or tray in their outstretched hands. Though the Greek letters on their disks have partially degraded, it is possible to discern and reconstruct inscriptions that name specific gifts or attributes. Starting at top left, going down, the inscriptions read: Πλουτος (wealth, riches), [Ε]υφρο[συν]η (mirth, cheerfulness), Ευλο[για] (praise, fair, fame, good report), Ευωχ[ι]α (festivity, entertainment, abundance), Αρετη (excellence, virtue, merit), and Προκοπη (progress, improvement).The terms are listed and translated in P. Friedländer, Documents of Dying Paganism: Textiles of Late Antiquity in Washington, New York, and Leningrad (Berkeley, 1945), 7. These attributes make it possible to identify the small boys as genii, or allegorical figures associated with the attributes they offer. Hestia, while facing the viewer frontally, reaches both her arms outward and grasps the two middle disks.

Flanking this central depiction and immediately adjacent to the rigidly stacked genii, two full-length haloed figures, one male and one female, turn toward Hestia. At left, a male figure with short brown hair and an elaborate headdress resembling a wreath with red fruits is only partially preserved. The top of his mantle and tunic are visible, as is his left foot. At right, a female figure stands similarly facing toward the center, though her body’s position is turned more frontally. Her hair style is similar to Hestia’s rich and wavy dark hair, though her pink headdress is different and her jewelry is less lavish, with pendant earrings that feature not four but only two strands or chains. Both these framing figures hold unidentifiable rectangular objects—we may identify them as gray boxes or trays—inscribed with Greek letters, though only the right one preserves enough detail to identify the word Φως (light).

This textile counts as one of the Dumbarton Oaks collection’s most iconic works. It was acquired in June 1929 from the dealer Dikran Kelekian, who claimed that it had been found in Sohag, Egypt. Correspondence between Royall Tyler and Mildred Bliss suggests that the textile hanging was in high demand at the time of its purchase,“I saw Kelekian again before leaving Paris. I had already told him that no name must be mentioned in connexion with the Copt. tapestry. The last time I saw him, last Friday, he told me that Mrs. Arthur Sachs had been to see him to enquire about the tapestry, and had said that her husband, who had just arrived in Paris, was very much interested. K. told her that the tapestry was sold (mentioning no name), whereupon, according to K., Mrs. Sachs said, with some warmth, that it served her husband right.” Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss, June, 17, 1929. https://www.doaks.org/resources/bliss-tyler-correspondence/1928-1933/17jun1929. probably thanks to the publicity drummed up a few years prior in an Art News article penned by the well-known Persian art historian and textile specialist Phyllis Ackerman.P. Ackerman, “An Unique VIth or VIIth Century Coptic Tapestry,” The Art News, November 13, 1926. In this earliest publication, Ackerman situated the fabric with Hestia in the art historical discussions of the time, which were broadly concerned with the distinctions between Eastern and Western styles of art.The discussion is rooted in art historical debates about the “Oriental” or “Western” origins and stylistic features of art produced in the late antique and early medieval period, which can be traced to Josef Strzygowski’s Orient oder Rom (Leipzig, 1901). For a historiographical discussion, see J. Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25, no. 3 (2005): 358–79. Ackerman posited that the tapestry was a representative of a “lost” style of Hellenistic art believed current in late antique Alexandria. She also presented the textile as a precursor to the great tapestries of Gothic Europe.“This piece is of great interest as an historical document, not only because it is a significant social record of the period and a striking example of the East Mediterranean art that derived directly from the late Hellenistic tradition, but also because it is this style of tapestry that was the direct forerunner of the Gothic tapestry of Europe and this piece fills in an essential link in the chain of its derivation, the next link consisting of the head of St. Theodore from the collection of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., now on exhibition in the Fine Arts Building of the Sesquicentennial Exposition.” Ackerman, “Coptic Tapestry.”. The Theodore piece is now held in the Harvard Art Museums, 1939.112.1, https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/art/213118.

Hestia traveled from the United States to Paris only two years later for the first blockbuster exhibition on Byzantine art, the Exposition internationale d’art byzantin, held in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in May 1931.Exposition internationale d’art byzantin, 28 mai–9 juillet 1931 (Paris, 1931), no. 190 bis, p. 92, plate VII. Because the Hestia was shipped independently from the United States to Paris, it was the single most expensive loan in the show, a point which set off a flurry of correspondence among the French organizers. Documentation related to the loan of Hestia to the Exposition internationale d’art byzantin are housed in the archives of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Élise Barzun was instrumental in facilitating research visits by Elizabeth Dospěl Williams. This exhibition proved formative for the field of Byzantine art history as it came to be defined in both Europe and the United States; many of the works featured in the show appeared in Hayford Peirce and Royall Tyler’s encyclopedic book L’Art Byzantin, including Hestia.H. Peirce and R. Tyler, L’Art Byzantin (Paris, 1932), 2:83–84, plates 153–54. In these early publications, Hestia is seen as representing the summit of early Byzantine textile arts, as well as a testimony to the long life of the classical past preserved in the arts of Constantinople.

Scholarly attention has equally focused on the textile’s peculiar iconography and inscriptions. Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, is not frequently depicted in late antique art, or even in ancient art more generally. The composition on the Dumbarton Oaks hanging is unique.Important is the fragment of a tapestry-woven roundel in the Brooklyn Museum (49.19, ca. 20 × 20 cm) that bears striking compositional similarities, though on a much smaller scale; see D. Thompson, Coptic Textiles in the Brooklyn Museum (New York, 1971), 38–40, no. 14. Thompson’s identification of the centrally enthroned female as a Byzantine empress is not convincing, and the overall deteriorated state of preservation does not allow further conclusions at that point. In an unpublished 1940 catalogue entry, the renowned textile scholar Frances Morris takes pains to outline the Greek and Egyptian sources for the textile’s technique and iconography, paying special attention to parallels with painting and mosaics.F. Morris, “Catalogue of Textile Fabrics, The Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection” (unpublished catalogue, Washington, DC, 1940), 203. Morris draws parallels with imperial and religious art, from wall paintings in Bawit to the mosaics of Ravenna, all in an effort to situate Hestia in both time and place.

While the art historians Ackerman, Tyler, Peirce, and Morris focused on iconographic and stylistic parallels, the classical philologist Paul Friedländer took a more literary approach to the textile in his 1945 book Documents of Dying Paganism.Friedländer, Documents of Dying Paganism, 1–26. Friedländer turned his attention to the inscriptions, noting that Hestia’s unusual epithet “Full of Blessings” has a long life in ancient Greek literature, particularly in the Orphic hymns. He also considered the “blessings” inscribed on the disks in the putti’s hands, as well as the representation of the two adult flanking figures, and linked them to Neoplatonic and other philosophical ideals. All in all, Friedländer saw the Hestia textile as representing a pivotal cultural moment when the ancient world transitioned to the medieval one.

In her essay on this work, Sabine Schrenk revisits the question of the textile’s iconography, and argues against previous interpretations of the two standing figures as donors. She reads the depiction as a visualization of the majestic and varied powers of the goddess Hestia, and interprets those surrounding her as followers of equal stature to her. Schrenk seeks the iconographic roots of the Hestia hanging in late antique imperial art on the one hand, and religious depictions on the other.Cleveland Museum of Art, 1967.144, http://www.clevelandart.org/art/1967.144.

Another complicating aspect of the textile hanging concerns the fragment’s arched shape, which is evident even in the earliest surviving archival photographs of the piece. This peculiar feature led Frances Morris in her unpublished catalogue of 1940 to suggest that the piece was created in this shape in order to hang in a niche.Morris, “Catalogue,” 203. In his 1945 publication, Paul Friedländer, unaware of Morris’s work, similarly concluded that “it was designed to fit into an architectural frame, the whole being in the shape of a horizontal rectangle with an arched upper edge.”Friedländer, Documents of Dying Paganism, 1–2. Deborah Thompson, in an unpublished 1976 catalogue, came to a similar conclusion, which she bases on her interpretation of the technical structure of the curved area of the piece. According to her, “the wefts of the rounded sides give every sign of having been cut in antiquity . . . the hanging was designed to fit into a curved architectural space such as a lunette or niche.”D. Thompson, “Catalogue of the Textiles in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection,” (unpublished catalogue, Washington, DC, 1976), 345, no. 47. As Kathrin Colburn’s technical analysis elaborates, there are both continuous weft threads along the upper edge, immediately above the Hestia inscription, and cut weft threads along the two curved sides. This technical evidence demonstrates that the textile in its current state does not represent the selvage of the hanging, but rather was more likely a border between color fields, which was later partially cut to its current shape. These observations make clear without doubt that we can firmly put to rest the idea that this hanging was a customized architectural furnishing made to fit the outline of a lunette. Instead, the hanging’s original shape was very likely rectangular and thus not different from most hangings known and preserved in late antique and early Byzantine Egypt.

—Gudrun Bühl and Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, May 2019

Paris, Musée des arts décoratifs, Exposition internationale d’art byzantin, May 28–July 9, 1931.

Worcester, MA, Worcester Art Museum, Art of the Dark Ages, February 20–March 21, 1937.

Washington, DC, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Woven Interiors: Furnishing Early Medieval Egypt, August 31, 2019—January 5, 2020.