Matthew Westermeyer, Cornell University
On the peak of Mt. Nebo (near Khirbet el-Mukhayyat, Jordan), amidst a desert landscape, people were baptized amongst mosaics of flowers, hunting scenes, and grafted trees (Piccirillo, 1998). The floors of this 6th-century baptistry parallels the region’s tendency for a profusion of so-called natural imagery (Kitzinger, 1976; Britt, 2011). Scholars use Nebo as a case-study in the trends of late antique art, as an example of changing styles from classical to Byzantine periods (Maguire 1987, 2012). From this vantage point, this space is a rare instance of plant portrayal prior to iconoclasm. Others posit that these fruit trees were “references” to Edenic paradise (Roberts, 1989; Jensen, 2010). But are these trees merely natural subjects (Davies, 1988; Onians, 1980)? What exactly is nature on Mt. Nebo? If we open up the concept, and let the space—with its logics, flows of images and colors—define the ever elusive idea, we will find that these grafted trees are not simply decorative, or referential of Edenic paradise. They qualify and illuminate the charged spaces of Byzantine ritual practice, or rather how baptismal practice is dynamically related to the cultural and natural work of arboricultural practice (Lowe, 2010). Thus I argue that the grafted tree adorned the baptistry in part because of its theorization of nature modified and refined. The graft was the model of the interventive act par excellence that sought to secure salvation—a feature that is on display in late antique baptismal discourse (de Bruyn, 2006). Furthermore, these mosaics not only comment on baptism per se, but they also illuminate a curious understanding of the natural world, of which the graft mediates. The entire floor depicts a kind of nature that is forcedly entangled, from the spears in the lion's neck, to the ropes tied around bulls. With respect to artistic construction, the mosaicist’s act of joining individual tesserae in order to depict Nebo’s nature is also an act of mixture that culminates before a baptismal font—one of late antiquity’s privileged spaces for the practice of intervention, or rather the mixture of divine and human agency (Frank, 2023). Until now, this mosaic floor has been read piecemeal (Decker 2009), as scholars look to individual elements apart from the whole. The grafted tree, however, is vital to understanding the entire room, as well as what occurred within that room (Pigeaud, 1988). Thus my paper looks to the medial (and arboreal) qualities of the graft, and its relationship to both the spaces in which it appeared, as well as the activities that were performed therein. It becomes impossible to distinguish nature and culture in this artistic, natural, and ritual convergence (Arentzen, Burrus, Peers, 2021). The graft’s medial work perhaps goes unnoticed in scholarship due to the marvelous convergence that it helped produce. By turning our attention back onto the practice and its powerful effects, we can imagine how the grafted tree celebrates the (asymmetric) human entanglement with the arboreal in late antique art and ritual.