308 cecily j. hilsdale
origins of materials. The resulting vision is one of a diverse ecology of precious stone
quarried, transported, worked and installed as a resplendent sheath for Justinian’s
Great Church. With such a micro-ecology of materiality in mind, as suggested in the
introduction to this chapter, the monument takes on a wider Mediterranean reso-
nance. As more than a feat of Byzantine architectural engineering and more than a
sublime manifestation of the concept of heaven on earth—both of which indeed it
is—Hagia Sophia also becomes a summation of the natural world’s ecology and an
embodiment of Mediterranean materiality.
In thinking through material micro-ecologies so central to a Mediterranean optic
for visual culture, ivory and silk constitute especially rich areas of research. Both these
highly-specialized arts involve the mobilization of rare sumptuous raw materials,
highly-skilled laborers and technologies, and both were prized and produced in cent-
ers of carving throughout the Mediterranean. Cordoba, Constantinople, and Paris,
for example, all produced the finest quality of Islamic, Byzantine, and Gothic ivory
carving respectively, and all were dependent upon a complex mercantile network that
transported elephant tusks from Africa. Moreover, ivory trade routes were intertwined
with those of raw materials central to silk production, in particular alum, the color
fixative that was essential for the textile industry. Both raw ivory and alum were steered
by Genoese cargoes through the Straits of Gibraltar and the English Channel in the
thirteenth century (Guérin, 2010). The Parisian nature of Gothic ivory carving, when
viewed through a Mediterranean lens, thus looks decidedly different; it is dependent
on an intricate mercantile matrix of labor and materials and intertwined with other
trade and artisanal networks far exceeding the Île-de-France.
This is not to suggest that art history has traditionally neglected the material aspects
of its objects of analysis. On the contrary, the medium has long provided fertile ground
for art historians and connoisseurs. What is different here, I am suggesting, has to do
with incorporating sustained attention to the material realities of artistic production
(the micro-ecological level of interpretation) within a larger methodological frame-
work for analysis. Scholarly divisions within the study of silk and ivory point to the
need for a more integrated Mediterranean approach such as this. Generally, scholarship
on both these media tends to divide into three main areas of inquiry:
(1) the trade or mercantile aspects of the medium, such as the silk industry or ivory
trade routes;
(2) its facture from a technical point of view, as in silk weaves and embroidery tech-
niques or ivory carving practices; and
(3) social histories and iconographies of the final products.
To reassess silk and ivory through a Mediterranean optic would be to align these
different vantage points in order to provide a more holistic reading that takes into
account the local material realities and cross-cultural flows. A Mediterranean reading
of silk, for example, would need to attend to wider sericulture networks and tech-
nologies of facture as well as local and pan-Mediterranean visual traditions and social
codes of precedence across cultures.
A recognition of intense connectivity is in many ways the primary marker of the
Mediterranean approach. To read visual culture through the Mediterranean optic,
therefore, is to recognize the connective aspects of the objects of analysis and their