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Additional articles from new and past issues of the Institute Letter will continue to be posted over time and as they become available.
Christianity in Miniature: A Look Inside Medieval Reliquaries
By Julia M. H. Smith
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After presenting her lecture at the Institute, Julia Smith was introduced to Elena Petronio, a member of the Chairman’s Circle of the Friends of the Institute, who had brought with her some small silver display cases of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century date, in which carefully labeled relics had been sealed with an official ecclesiastical seal. Between them, the two containers contained the relics of three saints, each relic a speck of matter far smaller than the label that accompanied it. |
Reliquaries were designed as receptacles for tiny bundles of sacred stuff such as handfuls of dust, pebbles from Biblical sites in the Holy Land, tiny fragments of the hair, clothing, and even bone of those deemed to be saints and martyrs by the Christian church. Wrapped in cloth and carefully labeled, these paltry, nondescript objects were transformed into things of eye-catching beauty and great prestige by the containers crafted to house them—reliquaries. But, prior to about 1200 C.E., reliquaries did not make their contents visible to the viewer: instead, they were designed to conceal them. The specifics of the content were nevertheless important to medieval Christians, and hence their care to label and inventory their contents in minute detail.
Several medieval reliquaries, upon scientific investigation, have been shown to retain their original contents to this day. These collections of relics can be mapped to reveal the social and geographical networks of contacts that contributed to their formation. These anchored a church in its locality and region, but might also extend across much or all of Christendom. In this way, the items inside a reliquary represented the key events and notable places of the Christian story from the perspective of the particular patron who commissioned the craftsman to produce these stupendous works of art. The contents are as fascinating as the container; when we look inside a reliquary, we see “Christianity in miniature.”
The IAS Squeeze Collection: What are Squeezes and How are They Used?
By Stephen V. Tracy
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Due to the efforts of Benjamin D. Meritt, the first Professor in the Institute's School of Humanistic Studies (a precursor to the current School of Historical Studies), the Institute houses one of the world's largest collections of squeezes––impressions of inscriptions that allow scholars to more easily study them. This image shows a portion of a squeeze made from lettering inscribed on the base of a statue by the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles in about 375 B.C. |
We do not know who made the first paper squeeze of an inscription. The practice is quite old; large numbers of them were made by Richard Lepsius on an expedition to Egypt (1842–45) and by Philippe Le Bas in Greece (1843). The invention of the squeeze must stem from the desire to acquire an accurate copy of the text of an inscription. Rubbings constitute a simpler, more rudimentary way of doing this. Photographs more recently provide an easy means of recording inscriptions, but each photograph is taken in a certain light. That lighting may not do justice to the inscription, or it may actually be misleading at places where the stone is difficult to decipher. A well-made squeeze provides the best and most accurate record of the state of the inscribed surface of an inscription. In the future, digital images may come to match them.
The term squeeze itself is not very elegant; the French estampage is more descriptively accurate of what they are. They are sort of papier-mâché impressions of inscriptions. They are made using acid-free chemists’ filter paper. The paper is wetted thoroughly and placed on the inscribed surface; then it is beaten with a long-bristled, specially made brush from the center out so that any air bubbles trapped under the paper may be worked out to the edges and dispersed. (Air bubbles not removed cause soft spots, places where the letters are unclear.) The squeeze is then allowed to dry on the stone. When removed, it provides a very accurate image of what is preserved on the inscribed face. It must be read from the back, and so the image is in reverse. (Students of inscriptions become very adept at reading backward!)
The IAS Squeeze Collection: Origin and Development
By Christian Habicht
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Stephen Tracy (left) and Christian Habicht (right) examine a squeeze in the Institute’s collection. |
Soon after his appointment as a Professor at the Institute, Benjamin D. Meritt took the first steps to build a Repository of Squeezes, “which will be second only to that in Berlin,” as he wrote to the Director, Abraham Flexner, on September 8, 1935. He intended to begin with the Epigraphical Museum in Athens and to have squeezes made of all its inscriptions, more than 13,000 at the time. He expected this to be done within a year for a sum of about $500. He also planned to establish a Working Library for Greek Epigraphy with an initial outlay of $2,000, plus $200 annually to keep it up-to-date. Before the end of the year, the Director had allocated the requested sums for both projects. Meritt went to work. From December onward, three men were working in the Epigraphical Museum making squeezes, a fourth on the Acropolis, and a fifth at Eleusis, a large community with a famous sanctuary, and a fortress. Furthermore, Meritt contacted several museums that had large holdings of Greek inscriptions; he wanted them to contribute to the squeeze collection: the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Archaeological Museum at Izmir.
Today, the total number of squeezes from the Epigraphical Museum amounts to 8,532 pieces in the IAS collection. It is rivaled only by those from the Athenian Agora. American excavations had begun there in 1931. Meritt was put in charge of dealing with the inscriptions, which soon ran into the thousands. Copies of their file cards, photographs, and squeezes, as well as Meritt’s transcriptions of their texts, came to the Institute, by August 1940 already amounting to six thousand. By August 1974, the number had risen to 7,184, of which the Institute has 7,135, plus 7,047 copies of their texts by Meritt. After Homer Thompson, another Institute Professor, retired as Field Director at the Agora and was replaced by Leslie Shear Jr. of Princeton University, the new materials went to Princeton University. After that, only a few dozen squeezes reached the Institute from the Agora, the one with the highest number in the inventory being 7,642.
Sixty Years of Scholarship in the History of Art
By Oleg Grabar
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Oleg Grabar (back row, second from right) with the 1969 staff of his archaeological team in Syria excavating a site known as Qasr al-Hayr |
It has been nearly sixty years that I have been engaged in an active scholarly life. My first article came out fifty-eight years ago, and there are still now two or three studies in the process of being printed or ready to appear on the Internet. In between lie some twenty books, several of which were translated into at least seven languages, and over one hundred and twenty more or less significant articles.
This considerable production can easily be divided into three groups, whose chronology raises interesting conclusions about the path of research traveled by a historian of the arts of the Islamic world who came into academic existence in the middle of the twentieth century. Whether this path is unique or typical is for others to decide.
The first group consists of traditional research based on the publication of documents, the excavation of new documents, and the significance of these documents within relatively strict chronological and spatial limits. Scholarship of this type is for the most part restricted in its interest and usefulness to other scholars of the same vintage, and it dominates the first half of my creative years. The number of works of this type that would have been initiated by me has clearly diminished with time, even though their scientific quality (or weakness) tends to remain steady over the years.
The Fundamental Lemma: From Minor Irritant to Central Problem
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The simplest case of the fundamental lemma counts points with alternating signs at various distances from the center of a certain tree-like structure. As depicted in the above image by former Member Bill Casselman, it counts 1, 1–3=–2, 1–3+6=4, 1–3+6–12=–8, etc. But this case is deceptively simple, and Bao Châu Ngô’s final proof required a huge range of sophisticated mathematical tools. |
The proof of the fundamental lemma by Bao Châu Ngô that was confirmed last fall is based on the work of many mathematicians associated with the Institute for Advanced Study over the past thirty years. The fundamental lemma, a technical device that links automorphic representations of different groups, was formulated by Robert Langlands, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics, and came out of a set of overarching and interconnected conjectures that link number theory and representation theory, collectively known as the Langlands program. The proof of the fundamental lemma, which resisted all attempts for nearly three decades, firmly establishes many theorems that had assumed it and paves the way for progress in understanding underlying mathematical structures and possible connections to physics.
The simplest case of the fundamental lemma counts points with alternating signs at various distances from the center of a certain tree-like structure. As depicted in the above image by former Member Bill Casselman, it counts 1, 1–3=–2, 1–3+6=4, 1–3+6–12=–8, etc. But this case is deceptively simple, and Ngô’s final proof required a huge range of sophisticated mathematical tools.
The story of the fundamental lemma, its proof, and the deep insights it provides into diverse fields from number theory and algebraic geometry to theoretical physics is a striking example of how mathematicians work at the Institute and demonstrates a belief in the unity of mathematics that extends back to Hermann Weyl, one of the first Professors at the Institute. This interdisciplinary tradition has changed the course of the subject, leading to profound discoveries in many different mathematical fields, and forms the basis of the School’s interaction with the School of Natural Sciences, which has led to the use of ideas from physics, such as gauge fields and strings, in solving problems in geometry and topology and the use of ideas from algebraic and differential geometry in theoretical physics.