Resumen de Within a budding grove: dancers, gardens and the enamel cup from Chungul Kurgan
An enameled cup from an early thirteenth-century nomad’s grave in Ukraine, published here in full for the first time, invites a reassessment of a group of enamels featuring allegedly “un-Byzantine” motifs and techniques. The cup, attributed to twelfth-century Constantinople, bears figures of dancing women among trees, an image paralleled in the period’s secular literature. This literary context, in turn, helps clarify the iconography of works such as the Crown of Constantine Monomachos and the Innsbruck bowl. The cup from the Chungul Kurgan thus helps to correct mistaken generalizations about the sources of secular imagery in Middle Byzantine art.
