Emperor in the Altar: An Iconoclastic Era Ciborium from Ulcinj (Montenegro)

Abstract

Taking into account the complex link between the text and image, this article examines the iconography and the meaning of the representation over the early medieval ciborium from Ulcinj preserved in two different states - Serbia and Montenegro. Dislocated, uncovered in multilayered urban localities over a period of almost half a century, lost and found again, kept today in museums of two different states, the fragments of the Ulcinj ciborium, even when they were defined as a whole, have mainly been analyzed in historiography based on a methodologically characteristic approach which could only have yielded formalistic and, in their contents, inadequately reliable assessments. Speaking more precisely, the text and the image have so far been observed as two separate entities. Judging by the Ulcinj ciborim, the idiom of the iconoclastic image remained fully within traditional framework while, at the same time, developing out of and being nurtured by the process of communication between Eastern Chistianity, Judaism and Islam. In what we call "art", all three monotheistic creeds turned away from their axioms, often turning to zoomorphic and floral motifs, with or without any particular meaning. This lay at the source of the note found in the vita of Saint Stephen the Younger on the iconoclasts as keepers of representations of animals and birds. Their era preserved the value and the meaning of those images.