Faces of David: Late Antique and Medieval David Cycles in East and West Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

This project explores the story of the Biblical King David as told in visual narrative. The meaning of the David story shifts according to who is telling it, and who is the intended audience. This study looks at four examples of that shifting meaning of the David narrative: the frescoes of the Coptic monastery of Bawit in Egypt; the silver plates of the Cyprus treasure, buried in advance of the Arab conquest in the seventh century; the ivory covers of the Melisende Psalter of Jerusalem; and the illuminated pages of the twelfth-century St. Albans Psalter. These examples span the Coptic, Byzantine, Crusader, and western medieval worlds. David’s moral ambiguity lies at the heart of this exploration, as well as what it means to embrace a figure of David’s equivocal moral stature as a spiritual and political exemplar. In the earliest Christian images of David, he is depicted as shepherd and warrior, but rarely king, and both of the earlier examples discussed in this project – the frescoes of Bawit and the Cyprus plates – emphasize a younger David at the height of his strength, battling both Goliath and the machinations of Saul’s court. Portraying David as king comes later, and is inextricably bound up with depictions of David’s sin with Bathsheba and his public penitence. David as sinner is thus visually connected to David as monarch, and as both the eastern and western territories of the former Empire grappled with notions of kingship, public accountability, and private sin, images of David gained new resonance and complexities. David evolves into the image of repentance par excellence, the model for Christian contrition in a way that is absent from the earliest imagery of David and in a way that reshapes the very idea of repentance – and thus the meaning of sin – in both east and west.

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Chapter One: The Cyprus Plates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Chapter Two.: The Frescoes of Bawit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Chapter Three: The Melisende Psalter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125

Chapter Four: The St. Albans Psalter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .273

Figures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	History
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	History, Medieval Religion, History of Art History
Palavra-chave	Cyprus plates Bawit parchment King David Melisende Psalter illumination fresco St. Albans Psalter silver ivory
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Elizabeth Pastan, Emory University Judith Evans-Grubbs, Emory University
Committee Members	Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Emory University James Morey, Emory University

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