Download PDF | The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453: Sources and Documents, by Cyril Mango , University of Toronto Press 1986.
292 Pages
Preface
The compilation of this anthology has proved a difficult task for two principal reasons. First, no book of this scope has ever been attempted before. It is true that there exist two rather old publications, identically but misleadingly entitled Quellen der byzantinischen Kunstgeschichte, the first by F. W. Unger (1878), the second by J. P. Richter (1897) . Both of them, however, are concerned almost exclusively with the monumental history of Constantinople. A more recent collection of sources made by the Greek scholar K. D. Kalokyrés has not proved particularly helpful.
Certain periods covered by this book, such as those of the early Church Fathers, of Justinian, of Iconoclasm, as well as certain special topics, such as the iconography of Christ, have been surveyed with reference to texts bearing on the history of art. Other periods, however, and in particular the Middle and Late Byzantine ones have not been properly explored from this point of view. I have had, therefore, to rely to some extent on the accidents of my own reading and the helpful indications of colleagues,
The second difficulty has been caused by the language of the texts, a difficulty that can be fully understood only by those who have read Byzantine authors in the original. At one extreme of the scale we have the rhetorical texts—insufferably long-winded, precious, obscure, and 1mprecise. At the other extreme are certain humble documents, such as inventories, whose technical vocabulary cannot be fully elucidated with the help of any existing lexicon. In my own renderings I have attempted to be as accurate as possible at the expense of elegance. The format of this book did not allow me, however, to annotate at length all the passages of doubtful meaning. Serious students will wish, in any case, to go directly to the originals.
The translations from Greek, Latin and Slavic sources are my Own. In the case of the last (as in several other respects) I have, however, benefited from the help of my colleague, Professor Ihor Sevéenko. For the few passages drawn from Syriac and Arabic sources I have had to rely on previous translations into modern European languages, but the renderings given here have been checked by Dr. Joseph Ghanem and Professor Irfan Shahid. When, for the sake of clarity, I have had to add words that are not in the originals, I have placed them in square brackets.
In transliterating Greek words—I am here referring to the italicized words placed within parentheses—I have rendered eta by é, upsilon by u, and omega by 6. With proper names and titles of works I have not aimed at complete consistency. Whenever there is a familiar English form, I have retained it: thus John Chrysostom rather than Ioannes (or Johannes) Chrysostomos; Andronicus Comnenus rather than Andronikos Komnenos. Unfamiliar names I have transliterated: thus Ioannes Diakrinomenos rather than John the Dissenter. Even this distinction, however, leaves many undecided cases. Are we to refer to John the Lydian, John Lydus or Ioannes Lydus? To Paul the Silentiary or Paulus Silentiarius? All I can say is that I have followed my instinct or my habit. Titles of works are usually given in their conventional Latin forms: thus De aedificits (rather than Buildings), Pratum spirituale (rather than Spiritual Meadow), Vita S. Stephani iunioris (rather than Life of St. Stephen the Younger).
In addition to the gentlemen already named, I have received various kinds of help from the following: Mr. Michael Ballance, Professor Hans Belting, Mr. Alan Cameron, Mr. James Fitzgerald, Professor André Guillou, Miss Ann Moffatt, Mr. R. L. Van Nice, Mr. John Wiita. I should like to extend my thanks to all of them.
I am also grateful to the American Schools of Oriental Research for permission to reproduce, with a few changes, the translation by the Reverend D. J. Chitty of a passage from the Testamentum Domini; and to the Harvard University Press for permission to reprint some passages of my own translation of the Homilies of Photius.
Introduction
TYPES OF DOCUMENTS AND SOURCES
To the extent that a distinction can be drawn between documents and sources, it should be noted that the first category is very poorly represented in the written records of Byzantine art. It includes a number of imperial and ecclesiastical enactments as well as a few inventories, mostly monastic. Other types of documents, such as are familiar to us in Western Europe, e.g. the registers of guilds, financial accounts, contracts, letters of recommendation, artists’ wills,! are totally lacking.
The bulk of our material may be loosely called literary and is drawn from a variety of sources: histories, chronicles, saints’ lives, theological treatises as well as the accounts of foreign travellers. Of particular importance is a genre called the ekphrasts, i.e., the rhetorical description of a work of art. This is usually in prose, but may also be in verse (in epic hexameter in the case of Paul the Silentiary, in iambics in the case of Constantine the Rhodian); it may form an independent opuscule or be part of a larger work such as a book of history or even a sermon.’ Procopius’s famous work on the buildings of the emperor Justinian (De aedificiis) consists of a whole string of ekphraseis.
In dealing with this genre, it should be borne in mind that it came into vogue in the Imperial Roman period and that it was governed by a set of conventions applicable to the standards of a naturalistic pagan art and understandable to an audience versed in the lore of Greek mythology. When it was pressed into the service of Christian subject-matter (and it continued to be practiced from the 4th century until the 15th), its language, its imagery and its clichés were not substantially modified. This resulted in a painful artificiality further aggravated by the reluctance to call anything by its ‘‘vulgar’ technical name.
A church could not be called a church (ekklésza): it had to be a temple or a fane (naos or, even better neds), unless it was rendered by the poetic word for a house or a hall (melathron); a bishop (episkopos) became an archimustés or musttpolos, as if he presided over the Eleusinian mysteries; a barrel vault, ‘a cylinder cleft in twain,” and so forth. ‘This phenomenon was not peculiar to the ekphrasis: indeed, it was shared by all “highbrow” Byzantine literature which was written in classical, preferably Attic, Greek, 1.e., a language that no one spoke at the time.
One consequence of this trend has to be noted here, namely the imprecision of vocabulary. In medieval Greek a dome was called troullos; but in sophisticated literature it may appear as a sphere or a hemisphere, a circle, a crown, a peak, crest or a helmet; an arch, which was called e:léma by the vulgar folk, is usually rendered by apsis, but sometimes by antux, which is the Homeric word for the rim of a round shield and which was also used for a variety of other curved elements; the term stoa could stand for half a dozen different things.
Alongside the ekphrasis there flourished the epigram, also a classical genre governed by its own rules. Since the epigram was usually a short poem intended to be inscribed on the base of a statue, the entablature of a building, the frame of an icon or the side of a sarcophagus, it rarely contains a description of the object it was meant to accompany. Its value to the art-historian often lies in the lémma, i.e., its title containing the attribution to this or that monument.
In selecting the contents of this anthology, I have tried to strike a balance between different kinds of sources since, for reasons of space, no one genre could be represented exhaustively. I have included much that’ is familiar, but also a certain amount of material that may be new even to specialists. I could not, however, avoid the “bunching” of testimony around given geographical centers, such as Constantinople or Gaza, certain famous monuments, such as St. Sophia or the church of the Holy Apostles, and certain periods, such as the reigns of Constantine the Great, Justinian or Basil I.
To my regret, I have had to exclude altogether a number of sources which, at first sight, might have claimed a place in a collection such as this. Among them I may cite the Book of Ceremonies (De cerimoniis) of Constantine Porphyrogenitus which is undoubtedly a document of exceptional importance for the study of the monuments of Constantinople, especially those of the Imperial Palace. Unfortunately, however, it does not readily lend itself to excerpting: the information it provides has to be inferred and built up from separate accounts of various processions and receptions.
For example, it does not offer us a description of the famous Golden Hall (Chrysotriklinos) of the palace: it tells us, incidentally and in different passages, that it had eight arches and a conch turned to the east, a dome pierced by sixteen windows, a cornice, a silver door, etc.3 I have also left out the entire category of artists’ manuals: those of medieval date are of western origin, even if they contain material traceable to Byzantine sources (such as the Compositiones Lucenses, the Mappae clavicula, the Schedula of ‘Theophilus and the De coloribus of Heraclius); the earliest Slavic manual, which goes under the name of bishop Nectarius, is of the end of the 16th century;* while the famous Painter’s Guide (Herméneia) by Dionysios of Fourna is a work of the 18th century.5
I am aware of the fact that the latter, both in its technical and iconographic sections, often perpetuates genuine Byzantine practice; but to separate the Byzantine elements from later accretions is a task of considerable complexity.
GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGE
The central tradition of Byzantine art is undoubtedly to be located at Constantinople, but to define its outer periphery is a matter of considerable delicacy. In this book I have, by and large, neglected the West for the reason that it has been covered in the companion volume on Early Medieval Art. I have, however, made an exception for Ravenna in the 6th and 7th centuries, since that city maintained close ties with the eastern capital, and its monuments are of crucial importance to every student of Byzantine art. The activity of Byzantine artists in western Europe, a highly complex problem,® has been left out.
Another area I have not attempted to cover, except for Eusebius’ description of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is that of the Holy Land. There exists, of course, a vast body of material—mostly pilgrims’ accounts*—relating to the Palestinian shrines, and I do not wish to deny that these monuments may have played an important part in the development of Byzantine art. A representative selection of this material, however, would have required more space than I could give it; little purpose would have been served by presenting a few snippets from Aetheria or Arculf.
With regard to the geographical extension of our source material there is a conspicuous difference between the period of the Christian Roman Empire (i.e., up to the middle of the 7th century) and the subsequent Byzantine period proper. The first is marked by a considerable number of urban centers that produced literature or are otherwise documented. Thus, some of our most interesting texts relate to Gaza; we know a good deal about the monuments of Antioch, and we have descriptions of churches at Tyre, Nazianzus, Nyssa, Edessa, etc. Surprisingly little, incidentally, is recorded of the Christian monuments of Alexandria. In the period after the 7th century and until the fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire in 1204 the situation changed radically: there was only one “city of culture,” namely Constantinople, and practically all literary production was concentrated within its walls. The same applied to the reading public. As a result, our textual information is limited almost entirely to the monuments of Constantinople; we know next to nothing about the provinces.
BYZANTINE ART CRITICISM
Contemporary scholars have expressed some subtle views concerning the aesthetic values of Byzantine art: these, it is claimed, were influenced by philosophical, particularly neo-Platonic doctrines, which account for such phenomena as reverse perspective, radiating composition, disregard for scale and depth, etc.8 Whatever value there may be in such theories, it is only fair to say that they receive little support from the texts. The “‘anagogical argument” (namely, that images serve to elevate our minds to immaterial realities), an argument derived from neoPlatonism via the pseudo-Dionysian writings, does, in fact, appear from time to time, but it is the exception rather than the rule. The prevailing view of Byzantine authors is that their art was highly true to nature. A perusal of the texts collected here will confirm this statement. The work of painters is constantly praised for being lifelike: images are all but devoid of breath, they are suffused with natural color, they are on the point of opening their lips in speech.
There is an aspect of this phenomenon that is deserving of notice, namely the presumed resemblance not only between image and model, but also between image and supernatural vision. This provided a double verification. An image of, say, St. John the Evangelist was a true image because it followed the accepted iconographic type and bore an inscription identifying it as being St. John’s. Furthermore, whenever St. John chose to appear in a vision to a saintly man, he looked exactly like his image, and was, in fact, recognized by virtue of this resemblance. We encounter this motif as early as the 5th century (see p. 40).
To us, such views appear rather perplexing, for we regard Byzantine art as being abstract rather than naturalistic, and we expect to find in the written sources some reflection of our judgment. We might think, furthermore, that Byzantine authors would have made some distinction between their own art and that of the Graeco-Roman period which they had before them. Yet this is not the case. Except for the difference in subject-matter (pagan in one case, Christian in the other), their aesthetic appreciation of both kinds of art is identical.®
We may attempt to explain this apparent lack of perception by saying that the Byzantines inherited from the ancient world their literary genres together with all the conventions that were, so to speak, built in. This in itself is undeniably true, as we have already remarked with respect to the ekphrasis and the epigram. To reproduce the artistic judgments of the classical authors was considered to be a mark of culture. It is also true that Byzantine authors did not write their ekphraseis and epigrams for nothing.
They wrote them either as school exercises (in which case their aim was to follow their ancient models as closely as possible), or they wrote them for a patron, usually the person who had commissioned a given building or work of art. This last consideration may account for the total lack of adverse criticism. Every new church was the most beautiful that had ever been built, and it surpassed all previous churches; every painting, every icon was utterly lifelike, and expressed the very essence of its subject. |
If the reader is not satisfied with such explanations, I can only add that we should not impose on Byzantine authors categories of thought and awareness that they did not possess.
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