It is an honor to offer some prefatory remarks on this volume of work by the late Dr. Nira Stone. The essays here display the great range of Dr. Stone’s interests and expertise. In them, she presents new discoveries, and sheds new light on neglected artistic traditions. A wide knowledge of textual traditions complements a commitment to visual analysis; together producing new insights and raising questions for future scholars to address. To read the following studies is to encounter an erudite, insightful, and deeply curious scholar.
Three of the essays, which are written together with Professor Michael Stone, introduce readers to previously unpublished material for the study of Armenian art. A patriarchal bull (gontak) of 1666, issued by the See of St. James in Jerusalem, is discussed with attention to its incipit decoration and iconography. The originality of this document is thrown into relief by comparison with a 1645 bull from Isfahan. In her study of a gospel leaf in a private collection in Switzerland, Dr. Stone provides a thorough description and comparative analysis, and contributes to a strong case for the leaf’s production in seventeenth-century Isfahan. The same sensitivity and skill is brought to a study of a seventeenth-century illuminated gospel in the National and University Library of Jerusalem. In each of these cases, Dr. Stone guides the reader carefully and thoughtfully through various material, artistic, and historical aspects of her subject. In so doing, she provides a critical basis upon which to continue scholarly investigation.
Dr. Stone’s studies of Armenian scenes of the Baptism, of Adam and Eve, and of the Transfiguration demonstrate a keen eye for divergences from iconographic convention, and their potential relation to non-biblical textual traditions. Concerning an image of the Entry into Jerusalem in a fourteenth-century manuscript from Siwnik‛, she notes the unusual presence of youths ringing a bell in the tower of the city: a motif that she successfully connects with Armenian folk tradition. Her essay entitled “The Illumination of Non-Biblical Armenian Manuscripts” is a veritable treasure for doctoral dissertation topic seekers, drawing attention to many lesser-known pictorial cycles to be found in the Armenian artistic repertoire. One will note, for instance, her report of illustrations to Eremia Chelebi Kömürjian’s poem the Jewish Bride, which she noticed in an Armenian manuscript held at the New York City Public Library.
Another feature of Dr. Stone’s work is her interest in the often complex relations between text and image. Considering the fascinating case of the hair-covered Mary of Egypt, for example, she asks: how does one depict a naked female body in a medieval religious text? In another essay, contained within a volume on Byzantine narrative, Dr. Stone notes the various ways that medieval manuscript painters expressed episodic sequences, considering phenomena such as continuous narrative and the use of multiple pages for a series of episodes. Dr. Stone brings to this problem her vast knowledge of medieval art, including not only Armenian, but also Byzantine and western European traditions.
Stylistic analysis was an abiding concern for Dr. Stone, and the power of this kind of work is shown clearly in a number of the essays. In a study of the sixth-century Shellal mosaic and related pavements, she challenges the view of a monolithic workshop based in Gaza. Describing and analyzing the composition and figural treatments of various mosaics of the supposed “Gaza school”, Dr. Stone reveals important distinctions among them. This meticulous visual work forms a central aspect to her oeuvre; style is not pushed to the background of, but rather advances, her argument.
In this way, Dr. Stone shows clearly the unique value that visual culture holds for the study of history. In her seminal studies of the Kaffa Lives of the Desert Fathers (Jerusalem St. James MS. 285), for example, she noted the conspicuous use of white in the pictorial cycle. This point could have been made in passing, as an isolated oddity of the painterly palette. Instead, we find a brilliant argument for the symbolic importance of the color in the context of monastic spirituality, drawing from contemporary historical and religious texts. In her essay on the iconography of the Transfiguration, Dr. Stone presents an equally interesting art-historical problem: how does one visualize the change from human to divine? The answers she explores show keen sensitivity to exigencies of manuscript design and production, to the impact of neighboring visual conventions, and also to the possibility of individual artistic agency and originality.
The following essays, thus, reveal Dr. Stone as an agile scholar who was equally able in tackling broad and narrowly focused problems. She was not afraid to cast her net wide and yet clearly relished close concentration on individual images. Her work also demonstrates a self-consciousness about the practice of art history. With regard to the Kaffa Lives of the Desert Fathers, for example, she reflects on the way in which unique images, with no clear visual precedent, typically compel us to seek out sources and influences. Both intellectually important and historically and visually rich, Dr. Stone’s work forms a major contribution to the history of Armenian art, the point of departure for future study, and an essential bibliography with which to teach.
A final word should be said about Dr. Stone as a colleague. I met her for the first time in Louvain-la-Neuve, at the 1996 conference of the Association internationale des études arméniennes (AIEA). I was then an anxious graduate student delivering my first paper. I distinctly remember her laugh echoing through the halls of the conference building, and suddenly felt myself among friends. Her sense of humor was infectious and sometimes irreverent; perhaps a hint of it appears in her essay on Judith, in which she writes that decapitation of a male by female hands “should not be viewed as excessive cruelty but as an efficient, technical means of overcoming an enemy who is physically stronger.” Whether meeting at conferences or at her home with her husband Michael in Jerusalem, I always felt her warmth, kindness, and generosity. Dr. Stone has left to scholarship an immensely rich intellectual legacy, yet the world is smaller and colder for her absence.