Uchiwa Gallery

On the street behind Rouen Cathedral, Rue St. Romain, named after the city’s holy bishop, an interesting shop opens. Uchiwa Gallery, a Japanese shop with Japanese prints, books about them, albums by Utamaro, Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Japanese souvenirs. It is very appropriate that precisely in the birthplace of the Impressionism there is such a shop for Japanese prints, which inspired the vision of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionist so much that it is considered a separate movement called “Japonisme”.

We are browsing between the objects, leafing through the books. The saleswoman offers to help us. We start talking about the selected objects.

“Why did you open a Japanese shop? Does it have anything to do with Japonisme?”

“I don’t think so. The owner, my friend, started this shop as a picture framer, and in the meantime she became interested in Japanese prints, so much so that they now form the profile of the shop.”

“Who is your audience, who buys Japanese prints here?”

“On the one hand, collectors from all over France. There are maybe only four such shops in the whole country, so anyone who is interested in them will come here again and again. On the other hand, a lot of young people. France is the homeland of comics, most comics are published here and in Belgium. And within that, manga, too. After Japan, most manga are published here. Manga is familiar to young people who read comics, and they quickly notice the Japanese prints that are related to them. After all, in Japan, manga and prints form a continuum. It is mainly the thirty- and forty-something generation who, having grown out of manga, can appreciate the original Japanese prints and come in and buy.”

“Do you also have Japanese visitors? What do they say? Do they buy?”

“Yes, Japanese tourists also come in, and they are very surprised, even touched. Japanese people do not know how popular Japanese prints are in the West, especially in France, and they are shocked that there is a special shop for them here. But they don’t buy. In Japan, classical prints don’t have such a large audience anymore. They still make modern paraphrases,” she points out a few, “but even that is rare, because the genre is too laborious, few people undertake it anymore.”

Salome’s dance

The façade of Rouen Cathedral in Normandy is familiar to most of us because Monet painted his famous series of thirty-three paintings of it between 1892 and 1894, showing how differently we see it at different times of the day and under different weather conditions, as if proving the basic principles of Impressionism through a scientific experiment.

The façade was built in the 13th century, starting with the left tower. The tympanum relief of its first completed St. John’s Gate was carved between 1270 and 1280. The relief depicts the death, that is, the heavenly birth of the two St. Johns. In the upper register, St. John the Evangelist, as described in the Golden Legend, descends into a tomb dug at the foot of an altar and then disappears into it amidst great brightness. In the lower register, Herod and his guests are seated at a banquet table, with Salome dancing beside them, then on the right, the executioner takes the head of Saint John the Baptist in prison, and finally, in the middle, Salome gives the head to her mother. As Matthew (14:6-11) and Mark (6:21-28) describe in unison:

“Now Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, for John had been saying to him: “It is not lawful for you to have her.” Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people, because they considered John a prophet. On Herod’s birthday the daughter of Herodias danced for the guests and pleased Herod so much that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.” The king was distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted and had John beheaded in the prison. His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl, who carried it to her mother.” (Mt 14,3-11)

Salome has entered the Gospels and the center of the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist just as Pilate entered the Credo. The Gospels do not even mention her name – we will learn it from Flavius Josephus –, they only refer to her as “the daughter of Herodias”, just as she was only a tool in her mother’s hand. Herodias was the granddaughter of King Herod the Great, whom he gave in marriage to his son and heir on the throne, Herod II, her half-uncle. When, however, Herod II – who, for some reason, is referred to in the Gospels as “Philip” – falls out of favor with his father in 4 BC, Herodias abandons him and marries his younger brother, Herod Antipas, the new heir to the throne. Saint John the Baptist objected to this, and Herodias was determined to silence him forever.

However, the Rouen depiction is unusual for us. This is not how Salome’s dance lives in our cultural memory. We imagine Salome as a beautiful young girl who charms the old goat, Herod Antipas, with her graceful dance. As we see it in Renaissance paintings, such as Filippo Lippi’s or Benozzo Gozzoli’s Martyrdoms of Saint John:

However, the Rouen Salome is not like this, but rather a rubber-bodied acrobat woman, such as those who entertain the people of the inns in Chinese historical films.

This is probably the exact effect that this depiction was intended to produce. For medieval spectators, accustomed to couple and circle dances, the solitary dance basically meant the performances of acrobats and jugglers at fairs and inns.

But this is not the only reason. After all, the earliest depiction of Salome’s dance, in a Chartres Gospel from the early 9th century, we see not an acrobatic, but an “ordinary” dance. Something happened later, because from the 12th century onwards Salome is depicted almost everywhere as an acrobatic dancer.

The medieval church deeply condemned public entertainments – and indeed dance in general – just as it did Salome, and by linking them, the two mutually dishonored each other. As Saint John Chrysostom states in his homily on Matthew 14, Herod’s supper (PG 58:485-486):

Ὅπου γὰρ χοροί, ἐκεῖ καὶ δαίμονες· ὅπου δὲ πολλὴ κρότος, ἐκεῖ καὶ τὰ πονηρὰ πνεύματα· ὅπου δὲ αὐλοὶ καὶ κιθάραι, ἐκεῖ χοροὶ τῶν ἀκαθάρτων δαιμόνων.

“For where there is dancing, there are demons; where there is loud noise and clapping, there are evil spirits; where there are pipes and zithers, there is a choir of unclean demons.”

Καίτοιγε οὐ παρεῖσα τὴν τοῦ Ἡρῳδιάδος θυγατέρα, ἀλλ’ ὁ διάβολος, ὁ τότε δι’ ἐκείνης ὀρχούμενος, καὶ νῦν δι’ αὐτῶν τοὺς χοροὺς ἄγει.

“Even if the daughter of Herodias is not present, the devil who then danced in her person still leads the choirs through them.”

So the devil himself danced in the person of Salome. This is why she must be depicted in contorted, unnatural poses, as if possessed by a devil. As in many manuscripts, for example in this Amiens Missal from around 1323 (Royal Library of the Hague 78 D 40, fol. 108r):

or on this capital from the Abbey of St. George de Bascherville near Rouen, on which some crowned musicians are playing like in the scenes of the Apocalypse, but the woman dancing on her hands is considered by the literature to be Salome:

or on this extremely simplified and therefore very powerful depiction of the bronze gate of San Zeno in Verona:

Salome’s great era, however, came at the end of the 19th century. Oscar Wilde in literature, Gustave Moreau in painting, and Richard Strauss in music elevated her to a pedestal as the femme fatale, the archetype of the amoral woman who irresistibly seduces with her sensual dance. Which, after all, means just as much being possessed by the devil, only differently conceived and evaluated.

Gustave Moreau: Salome, two out of the three versions, 1876

Franz von Stuck: Salome, 1906, apparently the sister of Lilith, her contemporary

In the last decades of the 19th century and the first ones of the 20th century, thousands of Salomes were born in pictures and writings. Each one was a femme fatale who seduces Herod and the viewer/reader with her sophisticatedly lustful dance. But there is a notable exception, Flaubert, who in his short story Herodias describes Salome’s dance in a different way:

“Next she began to whirl frantically around the table where Antipas the tetrarch was seated. He leaned towards the flying figure, and in a voice half choked with the voluptuous sighs of a mad desire, he sighed: “Come to me! Come!” But she whirled on, while the music of dulcimers swelled louder and the excited spectators roared their applause.

The tetrarch called again, louder than before: “Come to me! Come! Thou shalt have Capernaum, the plains of Tiberias! my citadels! yea, the half of my kingdom!”

Again the dancer paused; then, like a flash, she threw herself upon the palms of her hands, while her feet rose straight up into the air. In this bizarre pose she moved about upon the floor like a gigantic beetle; then stood motionless.

The nape of her neck formed a right angle with her vertebrae. The full silken skirts of pale hues that enveloped her limbs when she stood erect, now fell to her shoulders and surrounded her face like a rainbow. Her lips were tinted a deep crimson, her arched eyebrows were black as jet, her glowing eyes had an almost terrible radiance; and the tiny drops of perspiration on her forehead looked like dew upon white marble.”

Although we know from Flaubert’s notes that he had seen Moreau’s famous painting at the Salon of 1876, that was not the model of this Salome. It was rather the depiction seen by Flaubert, who was born and raised in Rouen, throughout his childhood and youth, and which must have been the archetype of Salome for him. The dancing girl at the St. John’s Gate of Rouen Cathedral.

The Lagami Church of Transfiguration in Svaneti

“When was the last time you were here?” the lean, gray-haired man asks as he opens the church door. “Five years ago… no, it was Covid then. Six years ago.” He nods approvingly. After all this time, he still remembered me, that half-hour visit, and he’s had quite a few visitors since then.

Rezo Khojeliani is the owner, restorer and key-keeper of one of the oldest and most interesting churches in Svaneti. The small medieval churches of Svaneti were owned by clans, which is why a small village can have as many as eight or ten medieval churches, most of them rich in frescoes and icons. The village of Lagami is today part of the city of Mestia, but the church bears the village’s name: the Lagami Church of the Transfiguration.

The upper church was built in the 14th century by a local landowner, Shalva Kirkishliani, and what is rare is that he himself painted it – just like the Church of St. George in Svipi –, and even painted himself on the right side of the sanctuary (to us, on the left side), in the usual place of the ktētor, the founder.

However, the Kirkishliani family died out without any descendants, and the care of the church was taken over by the Khojeliani, whose members made up the majority of the monks of the monastery still existing at that time. Thus, the caretakership passed to Rezo. And since he graduated as a restorer in Tbilisi, he considered it his duty to restore the frescoes of the family church. And when you find the church closed, you can call him to open it at +995 595691439, which is also written on the gate. And when he opens it, he also gives you a detailed tour in Georgian or Russian about the history of the church and of the frescoes.

The church is a squat rectangular building. It rises suddenly in front of us on a man-sized substructure, as the winding, narrow streets of the village finally open up to it. This tower-like structure is unusual for a church here in Svaneti, where the medieval family churches are small house-like buildings. But then we also see the reason for the unusual shape, which makes the building even more unusual. Namely, that it is a two-story church. The lower level, built in the 10th century, is a small building similar to other medieval churches in Svaneti. On the top of it, the aforementioned Shalva Kirkishliani built a second church in the 14th century.

On the external façade above the entrance, we see the trees of the Garden of Eden lined up like a frieze, one more beautiful and more fruitful than the other. Somewhere in the middle we also see Adam and Eve, as the angel drives them out.

In the double church, three layers of frescoes, representing three different iconographic concepts, follow each other:

• The first one in the lower church is from the end of the 10th century, when Svaneti, after the 7th-century Arab conquest, was isolated from the occupied central parts of Georgia. In fact, only this region and the southwestern Tao-Klarjeti – which now belongs to Turkey – remained Christian. The central church hierarchy ceased to exist here, and the organization of the church in Svaneti continued in clan churches. The iconography also reflects the pagan world view that was still dominant at that time: the Pantocrator enthroned in the apse is the equivalent of the pagan supreme god Morige, and the walls were filled with warrior saints and archangels, the equivalents of the pagan khati, protective spirits. This same time, the end of the 10th century is the period when the Georgian monasticism that emerged in Tao-Klarjeti, in the reform monasteries of St. Gregory of Khandzta, sends missions back to Georgian land, including to Svaneti. It is at this time that the monastery of Lagami is also founded, whose painters gave an Orthodox visual form to the locally dominant warrior saint and archangel cult.

• The second layer, also in the lower church, was created in the 12th century, after King David IV the Builder unified the country and brought Svaneti back into the country’s blood circulation. Svan soldiers played an important role in the armies of David and his successors, Demetrios, George III and Tamar. And the central church again sent priests and artists to the northern Georgian valleys, who transplanted there the architectural and pictorial iconography that had developed in the center. In the lower church, this phase is reflected in the second layer of frescoes, which overpaint the large archangel figures on the side walls with the cycle of great feasts that had already become established in Orthodox iconography.

• The third concept is seen in the upper church, built and painted in the 14th century in the last, most sophisticated style of the Byzantine court, the Palaiologos Renaissance. Almost the entire cycle of the 12 great feasts is depicted on the walls, with images of warrior saints and great martyr women inserted between them. Svaneti caught up with the forefront of Byzantine art, before the Ottoman and Persian occupation of the country would again isolate the northern valleys from the rest of the country and its political, religious, cultural and artistic development for centuries

The lower level is a very small room, barely a few square meters, with walls built of irregular broken stone. Its frescoes were made in two periods, in two layers. The first layer dates from the late 10th century, the second from the 12th century. The fragments of the former were revealed when some patches of the latter fell off.

The apse, where we see a huge Deesis scene, that is, Mary and St. John the Baptist praying to the enthroned Pantocrator, may originally have had a Pantocrator seated on a throne, whose right foot is revealed from under the 12th-century plaster.

An Annunciation was painted on the entrance wall in the 10th century. From this, only Gabriel’s foot and the inscription “Here is Gabriel” survive. The wall is now filled with the faded remains of a huge Nativity scene from the 12th century.

The north and south parts of the nave vault were originally decorated with a large archangel and an apostle on each side. On the south, the beautiful head of the archangel remains, with the name of St. Paul next to it. On the north, only small spots are visible under the 12th-century Crucifixion, and here the name of St. Peter can be read.

In the lower register of the south wall, half-length figures of warrior saints from the end of the 10th century have survived: Saint Theodore, Saint Artemios and Saint George. As the register turns over to the west wall, it depicts Saint Barbara – the patron saints of miners and metalworkers, a very important saint in the Svan highland making a living from this –, and Saint Catherine, also in half-length.

The 14th-century frescoes of the upper church depict the great feasts, from the Annunciation to the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, as well as the warrior saints in the two ribs of the vault, and the great martyr women in the lowest register of the walls. The scheme and order of the images can be seen in the sketch below, where I display the walls spread out, like a cut-out and foldable house.

In the apse, the constant theme of the Orthodox sanctuary, the Deesis, is visible (1): on the right and left of Christ Pantocrator – the King of the Universe – seated on the throne, are his two closest human relatives, the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist, begging him to be merciful to humanity.

On both sides of the apse, above the sanctuary chancel screen, are the busts of the two apostles who founded the Roman, and therefore also the Byzantine, church, Saint Paul (2) and Saint Peter, who also served as a visual abbreviation for the church hierarchy.

The chancel screen (3) was the solution of the Georgian (and some other early) churches to what the later Byzantine and Russian churches had the iconostasis, the Armenian church the curtain, or the Catholic church the whispered canon text. Namely, that the most sacred part of the Mass, the liturgy of the Eucharist, should be kept as far away from profane eyes and ears as possible, by retreating to the sanctuary and blocking it off with pictures or a curtain, or at least whispering the sacred text in a barely audible voice.

The Georgian chancel screen is a beam supported by three arches, on top of which icons are lined up, and the three arches are also covered with large icons hanging from the beam. Here, two archangels stand guard with drawn swords on the façade of the chancel, and instead of the suspended images, candlesticks hang, but on the lower ledge of the chancel precious icons hammered out of silver are lined up. The icon of the Virgin is mentioned as dating from the 12th-13th centuries in Chubinashvili’s great monograph on medieval Georgian metal art. The church also has an icon of Saint George from the same period, but not the one that stands here, because it, together with the icon of the Pantocrator, looks much more like it dates from the 15th-16th centuries.

To the right of the chancel, that is, to our left, on the wall, we can see the portrait (or even self-portrait) of the founder, Shalva Kirkishliani (4).

The series of great feasts begins on the vault closest to the right (to us, left) side of the chancel, and then, going around the other three vault sections and then the foud middle wall sections, descends in a spiral line to the same side of the chancel. The first feast is the Annunciation (5), the last one the Dormition of the Virgin (15). Of the twelve great feasts, only the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is missing:

(5) Annunciation. Above the image, in the middle of the vault, the remains of a former Christ medallion can be seen. There was a similiar one on the second vault section, too, with the image of God the Father (or, more precisely, the Ancient of Days from Daniel 7:9). Similar medallions can be seen in several Georgian churches of the same period, e.g. in the Svipi Church of St George in Pari in Svaneti, which was painted by the same donor, or in the church of Ubisi in Imereti, painted in a similar style.

(6) The Birth of Christ, with the remains of the Christ medallion above it

(7) Presentation in the Temple

(8) The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan

(9) After the four vault sections, the cycle continues in the lunette above the door with the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor, which is the give-naming main feast of the church of Lagami

(10) The Raising of Lazarus. In the lower part of the image, Lazarus’ two sisters, Mary and Martha, fall to their knees at the signt of the miracle. Next to them, a person holding his nose illustrates Martha’s statement: “But Lord, by now he smells!”

(11) Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. Above, children climb a tree to see Him better, others spread their clothes before him

(12) The Crucifixion. The skull under the cross refers to Adam, whose sin Christ is washing away with His own blood. According to tradition, Adam was buried in the same place – on the Hill of Skulls – where the cross was erected. Rezo also presents his own theological twist: “This image shows that God and man are closely connected. Just as man would be nothing without God, so God would be nothing without man who believes in Him.”

(13) The women at the empty tomb. An angel sits on the empty tomb of Christ, telling them that the one they are looking for is no longer there, because He has risen. In the tomb is Christ’s shroud, and in front of the tomb the sleeping Roman soldiers

(14) Christ’s Descent into Hell, in the three days between His death and resurrection. From here He brings out the believers and forefathers who had died without serious sin, but were not allowed into heaven until the Redeption, starting with the completely white-haired Adam and Eve with her adoring gaze. Behind Christ, Kings David and Solomon, particularly popular in Georgian art, await their turn. In this scene, Christ usually stomps on the gates of hell, but here He tramples Satan with a cross, surrounded by the broken ironwork of the gate.

(15) The Dormition of the Virgin, that is, her death and the assumption of her soul into heaven

On the rib separating the two vault sections are the figures of two warrior saints, Saint Demetrios (16) and, opposite him, Saint George (18), with two prophets above them (17, 19).

Below the festive row, on the plinth are half-length images of holy women (20-25): Thecla, Catherine, Barbara, Helene, Julitta.

Saint Julitta is particularly important here in Svaneti. She and her son, Saint Quiricus, were Roman martyrs, and their cult was widespread there. However, as the boy’s name resembled the name of Kviria, the chief spirit of the pagan Georgian pantheon, so the latter and his shrines were renamed after Quiricus, in the line of pagan spirits that were made acceptable and continue to live with Christian names. Their church in Kala – probably on the site of a former Kviria sanctuary – is still the most important Svan festival on July 28, where thousands of Svans come even from abroad to participate in a Christian and a pagan ceremony celebrated parallelly inside and outside the church, which we will write about later.

And on the lunette of the door, where in Georgia there is usually the image of Christ not made by human hands, or the Holy Cross, here, curiously, we see two goats facing each other.

We leave the church under the goats. We say goodbye to Rezo, who thanks me especially for coming again to his church. And we thank him for taking such good care of this treasure. We have seen enough ruined medieval churches in Svaneti to know that it is thanks to such local guardian angels that about a hundred of them have survived intact.

Shalva Kirkishliani must have been such a guardian angel in his time. He not only enlarged the church that somehow came into his care, and not only painted it in the most modern style of the time, but at the same time he also painted another church in Svaneti, which, as far as we know, did not even belong to him. This church is the Svipi St. George in the village of Pari, at the entrance to the valley of Svaneti. So we are going to visit it next.