Download PDF | Pal Kelemen - El Greco Revisited His Byzantine Heritage-Candia, Venice, Toledo-Macmillan (1961).

Download PDF | Pal Kelemen - El Greco Revisited His Byzantine Heritage-Candia, Venice, Toledo-Macmillan (1961).

314 Pages

PREFACE

In the first decade of our century, Europe appeared a civilized continent. In most of the world there was peace, and it seemed as if it would be a lasting condition. Exchanges between countries in science and the humanities were lively. No travel passport was necessary except for Spain and Russia. This was the period in which the idea of this book came first to my mind. Perhaps here some personal history might be in place.

Years before I graduated from Latin School, Impressionist painting had gained a wide following in my native Budapest; also, a considerable number of works by El Greco were accessible. El] Greco fascinated and puzzled me. I was drawn to his unconventional color combinations, his unusual composition, and was puzzled by a strange tenseness in his painting. I could not fit him entirely into either the Venetian or the Spanish school. Somewhat later, when I studied the beginnings of Christian art and got away from the routine chapters of art history, my perplexity gradually gave place to understanding. At that time I was writing and translating poetry and had published essays on music, literature, and the arts. One of my favorite pastimes was visiting the Magyar National Museum of Fine Arts, which was then barely a few years old and not only utilized modern exhibition techniques but even was equipped with a type of air conditioning. Though I had my favorite paintings, I made it a habit to walk slowly through the halls of Byzantine and Gothic art and so work my way up to the Italians. I liked to stand before an early panel and look beyond, into another room where the Venetian canvases glowed. I tried to identify them by learning their characteristics through my eye. The guards knew me and let me lean close to observe details. I still recall vividly some of those pictures, their composition and tonality, and I remember too the patterned or plain wall coverings in rooms where I sat long. Going home on the sunny side of a broad avenue, I had the feeling of coming from a banquet.

Scholarly interest and connoisseurship were oriented nearly exclusively toward Western art. The great civilizations of Asia, Africa, and America were little appreciated. Even that vast world, the Levant, where Christ was born and his teaching gained the first followers, was neglected. The biblical lands had belonged for centuries to the Ottoman Empire. They were not easily penetrated, and when explorers were able to visit one or another region they found the Christian monuments in ruins, mosaics and murals damaged or erased. The records of their voyages are mostly without clear illustrations.

The Hungarians do not belong either racially or linguistically to the great European families. The Latin saying Ex oriente lux (Light comes from the East) has not lost for them its deeper meaning, while in other countries of the Western world scholarship has overemphasized the arts of Italy and France and isolated itself from those inventive, vigorous, and sophisticated civilizations which gave Europe nearly all its humanistic values. Most of Western Europe has created a history for its self-justification and self-glorification. Faulty to a high degree, it shows now a tarnished glory, and the consequences of its philosophy are erupting in many parts of the globe. If an analogy can be offered, the spreading tree of the humanities has not received perceptive and balanced attention; no honest tree surgeon would treat, even pamper, a few upper branches of an oak without examining the trunk, the roots, and the soil upon which it feeds. Hungarians, being descendants of Mongol tribes, their relatives long submerged in the flood of Asian migration, had a curiosity and a will to understand the cultures of the Levant and even those that lay East of the broad belt of Mohammedanism.

World War I, which many in the Western world had believed impossible, commenced, and by August 1914 I was in uniform and beyond the Carpathian Mountains. There, where the fertile Polish plain meets the foliaged valleys of Moldavia, I saw wooden churches in archaic design, with graceful open towers on their peaked gables. The ominous tolling of their bells started a panic of flight, and people with sleepless eyes—in carriages and peasant carts piled high with bedding, packages, sewing machines, perambulators, bird cages—stared at us who rode in the opposite direction.

Later, under an arbor of shells flying across the Lower Danube, we floated one night in a broad barge to the Serbian shore near the fortress Semendria, built to defend Christianity against the Turks. The sky streaked with flame, the heaving stream, the angular outline of the citadel would have been inspiring to a colorist painter, except that the lethal yellow will-o-the-wisp flames leaping up, now here, now there on the other shore, meant that villages were burning and that the spectacle was war. The next day we began a long ride south in the valley of the Morava River, where fragrant fruit trees offered their harvest. The onion-domed small churches became familiar—another region of the Orthodox world. Built of carefully laid stones, their sturdy proportions gave them a winning aspect. The few narrow windows kept in perpetual dusk the painted interiors. From the heartland of Macedonia to the Bocche di Cattaro and Dalmatia was a stimulating change. Here the somber modulations of the Slavic hinterland were replaced by the smiling architecture of Italianate cities opening on the Adriatic Sea. Sturdiness was exchanged for subtlety of craftsmanship. The earthen terraces supported by stone walls, built up and repaired through generations, bespoke men who knew how to defend the handfuls of soil perched on the mountainsides not only against the torrential rains but also against the weapons of their enemies. Finally Friaul and the Veneto offered a vast open-air museum of Western art from pagan Roman remains to Rococo villas, their gardens bursting with the impact of spring.

By the end of the year 1918 it became evident that the Golden Age was an illusion—it was the twilight of an irretrievable epoch. Hate, revenge, and ignorance carved up Europe, creating the vacuum into which first Hitler and later Stalin marched. But my lucky star, which had brought me through more than four years of war, was still over me. I could go on studying and traveling. I even visited Spain—then anything but fashionable—more than ten years before their civil war began. With an excitement as for no other journey, I prepared myself. I read everything I could put my hands on about Spanish art, especially El Greco. I learned the lan-guage. In manifold ways the Spanish experience was unsurpassed. The king still sat on his throne. In Madrid one Sunday afternoon I stood all alone on the vast square of the Puerta del Sol. It looked as if the city had suddenly died. But it was only a great day for the bullfight. Even all the streetcars were at the arena, out of town. In the sunny city of Seville, beside the splendors of art, we tasted a variety of wines nightly in the bodegas, where cask rested beside cask, decorated with labels that read like romantic poetry. The Granada Palace Hotel in its unsurpassable location was nearly empty; in the mezzanine the faded green tables stood abandoned, and the roulette wheels with which unfortunate Alfonso XIII tried to lure moneyed tourists to the country were still and dusty. Cordoba’s more than uncomfortable hotel drove me out into the streets. I found a compensation in the cool interior of the cathedral, once the grand mosque. There I witnessed a great musical High Mass in all its pomp. I was dazzled by the velvets, laces and silks, the silver, gold, and jewels among which the priests moved, somnambulant, unreal as oversized wax effigies. In the streets was dismal poverty and in the houses utter squalor.

Not much later, in the Dolomites, on a trip which was planned to bring me once more to Venice, I met an American girl living in Europe with her parents to study music. We were married in Florence and took up residence there—a fitting vantage point from which to observe how from Byzantine, Romanesque, and regional elements, Western Europe created—late—its national styles. Here I began writing a study of El Greco that had been occupying me for some time. However, a number of other books were to precede it.

In October 1932 we came to the United States for what was planned to be a six months’ visit. After weeks spent in the museums and libraries in New York, we rented an apartment in Boston where I continued my work, in the Fine Arts Museum. In their transplanted murals of a Catalan chapel I felt an indeterminable relationship to El Greco. While visiting across the Charles River, one late autumn Sunday, I saw the art of America before Columbus exhibited on several floors in the Peabody Museum. The pieces lay on gray-painted bare shelves in more than Puritanical presentation which was not conducive to bringing out their strange, powerful beauty. Nevertheless it was for me the opening of a fascinating chapter in the history of art, about which little was known either here or abroad. The next day I went around again, this time with the director of the museum. I urged my host to have a comprehensive illustrated survey written of the architecture, sculpture, weaving, metalwork, and other accomplishments of this sunken world; and I was persuaded to carry out myself the project that I had proposed for an American scholar. In April 1933 we were in Yucatan and later in Mexico. What I saw there strengthened my conviction of the unique importance of pre-Columbian art. In a short interlude, having just visited Maya temples, I returned for a time to El] Greco—to the magnificent exhibition of the Cretan’s work gathered by the Art Institute of Chicago for the World’s Fair of 1933. In subsequent travels from Mexico to Bolivia, the Baroque and Rococo of Latin America unfolded another splendid subject which clamored for publicity and more understanding. Long before all this, the initially reluctant visitor had become of his own choice a contented citizen.

Nearly twenty-five years passed before I returned to my project on El Greco. Lecturing and other assignments took me to Europe repeatedly, and from Spain to Turkey I could follow at leisure the path of my interest.

Byzantine art, long misrepresented, if not ignored, in Roman Catholic and Protestant countries as an example of degenerate Christianity, shines each year more radiant through the reexamination made possible partly by a more enlightened attitude and partly by better facilities for travel and photography. From the fairy-tale naiveté of Ethiopian religious panels to the complexity of Russian icons with their tight-lipped saints, from the domed basilicas of Constantinople, with modern traffic swirling round them, to the inspiring, peaceful monasteries of Sinai, Athos, and their sister houses, not only a religious expression but also a spiritual experience can be drawn. But the enrichment comes all too belatedly for the Western world to benefit from it fully, because of the deluge of different religions and philosophies of the peoples of Asia and Africa, in which all white nations and the entire Christian community are in danger of becoming a muffled minority.

I hope that no harm came to my book because of my delay in concluding it. Wherever I traveled, I encountered numberless expatriates, exiles, immigrants, émigrés, refugees who for one reason or another had left their native lands and had to make a living among strangers whose language was different from their mother tongues and whose customs were alien to their upbringing. In 1909, when I stood before my first E] Greco, the movement of peoples by the tens of thousands was highly unusual and their behavior—one may say their psychology —little observed. Fifty years later, many a reader has merely to look across his corridor or his lawn to see a human being who was bom and reared thousands of miles away. Fifty years added maturity to me and wider knowledge to my subject. The answers to some of the questions that I posed in my youth came to me in the intervening years.

This book, originally the dream of a very young man, is then the result of a long period of gestation. For me a book is still much what it was fifty years ago when I began to browse in bookstores. Many such stores had a hushed, devotional atmosphere, where something of a communion took place with great authors who knew their craft and honored it. The printed page carried the dignity and prestige of a responsible human being and bespoke the spark that was divine.

It was in itself a visual and spiritual enrichment to be able to visit so many places—some repeatedly—that are mentioned and reproduced here, and to exchange ideas with scholars, connoisseurs, and just people. Alas, some of them are no longer among us: Bernard Berenson, whose interest in my work and hospitality I enjoyed from the time that I was myself a resident of Florence; Hans and Erica Tietze—although for years in America, their generous human comprehension remained in the best Austrian tradition; Nicholas G. Lély, Greek diplomat, witty conversationalist, first civilian governor of the community of Mount Athos; Gregorio Marafion, enthusiastic and erudite Spanish historian of Toledo and El Greco.

Because space does not permit individual mention of all the officials of various governments, universities, museums, and libraries, as well as the many ecclesiastics, archivists, photographers, and connoisseurs in many countries who facilitated my work, I express my gratitude to them in summary.

There is another group whose assistance was of such measure that individual credit is due them: in England I benefited from the supreme knowledge of Arab art and architecture of K. A. C. Creswell (formerly of the Egyptian University, Cairo) who furnished also some rare photographs. Geoffrey Webb (Royal Commission on Historical Monuments), authority on Romanesque and Gothic architecture, clarified problems in this field. With Jocelyn Toynbee (Cambridge University), expert in biblical archaeology, I discussed the entirely inconclusive findings of the excavations under the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome. Natalie Jiménez Cossio (Oxford), daughter of the author whose monograph first brought El Greco into the right focus, offered pertinent information from her late father’s unpublished notes and her own valuable observations.

In Istanbul: Clio Papadopulo and Mazhar Sevket Ipsiroglu (National University) provided, respectively, the Greek and the Turkish historical backgrounds of that unique city. Paul A. Underwood, E. J. W. Hawkins, Carroll Wales, and Laurence Majewski, all of the Byzantine Institute, accorded us admission during the restoration of Kariye Cami and have been generous in furnishing data.

In Athens: Demetrios Sicilianos (former Ambassador to the United States), a discerning connoisseur, shared some of his experiences with us and facilitated our work in closed private collections. Manolis Chatzidakis (Benaki Museum) and Anne Hadjinicolaou (Byzantine Museum ) were helpful in many ways in their important institutions. To Helen Stathatos and A. D. Loverdos my thanks for permitting us to work and photograph in their exquisite collections, and to Angelo G. Procopiou (Polytechnic Institute) my gratitude for valuable assistance.

In Crete: Konstantinos D. Kalokyris (Archaeological Museum, Heraklion ) reviewed the whole field of restoration of murals on the island and gave us all relevant publications. Nicholas Stavrinidis (Municipal Library) shared with us his vast knowledge of Venetian, Turkish, and Cretan archives, often far beyond his official hours, during our two weeks’ stay. In Macedonia: Stylianos Pelekanidis (Department of Byzantine Monuments) with devoted and indefatigable energy guided and advised us. Michael Papamanzaris (Mayor of Kastoria) opened the city and its history to us. Eleanor and Henry Hope Reed (American Farm School) were gracious hosts and offered the use of their jeep and an expert guide to the Peninsula of Athos. Joyce Loch, benefactress of the village of Prosforion on the confines of the Holy Mountain, provided comfort and wise council.

For a number of years Helly Hohenemser, Rome; Hanna Schramm, Paris; and Rudolf Bed6, Budapest, assisted us with dependable research material. Helen Pandelakis, New York, besides, acted as our interpreter in Crete and Macedonia. Gratitude is due staff members of the United States State Department and Information Service in various cities abroad, especially Maro Holeva, Cultural Assistant, who was constantly in touch with us from Athens. Fern Rusk Shapley (the National Gallery of Art) and Marvin Ross (Dumbarton Oaks, Washington) have shown helpful interest in the preparation of this volume. In New York, personnel of the Library and Photographic Divisions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Reference Library, The Hispanic Society of America, and particularly the staff of the Arts and Prints Departments of the New York Public Library, were most accommodating.

Various authorities kindly consented to look over different parts of the manuscript. Chapter I was read by David Talbot Rice (University of Edinburgh), widely known Byzantologist and coauthor of a book that appeared decades ago, pointing to the locale of the birth of Western painting; Chapter II, by Pandelis Prévélakis (Superior College of Fine Arts, Athens), inspired poet of his native Crete and author of two books on his famous sixteenth century compatriot; Chapter III, by A. Hyatt Mayor (the Metropolitan Museum of Art), whose vast knowledge of various periods of art is imparted, whether in word or writing, always with grace; Chapter IV, by Beatrice Gilman Proske (the Hispanic Society of America), expert on the plastic arts and general cultural values of the Hispanic world. The second part of the book was read by the following: Chapter V, James A. Notopoulos (Trinity College, Hartford), distinguished teacher of the classics and recorder of the oral tradition of his ancestral land; Chapters VI and VIII, Elizabeth du Gué Trapier (the Hispanic Society of America), a renowned lifelong scholar of Spanish painting, with several outstanding contributions also on El Greco; Chapter VII, Julius M. Moravesik ( University of Michigan), promising third-generation representative of a family of biblical and Byzantine scholars. Although many of their suggestions were gratefully followed, the responsibility for the text of this work rests entirely with the author.

David Rogers made the artistic layout of the illustrations. Florence M. Morrow, with painstaking attention, carried out the typing of the complex manuscript, and Helen B. Hartman, for the third occasion, has compiled my Bibliography and Index and given editorial help.

There is still one person whose unfailing help and cooperation throughout the decades has made this work possible. Her name appears on a separate page of this book.

PAL KELEMEN Norfolk, Connecticut August, 1961

BYZANTIUM WAS A WORLD

Two continents on two tongues of land face each other across the Bosporus, where the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea form a narrows. Six centuries before Christ, Greek colonists settled there under a leader named Byzaz and called the place Byzantion—now more familiar as Byzantium. It developed into an important harbor for the shipment of wheat from the Black Sea to Athens and beyond. In a.p. 330 the Emperor Constantine removed his capital there from Rome, and created a city which for more than a thousand years stood as a center not only of commerce but also of Christian culture.

Constantine was born in the Balkans. As a general of the Roman Empire, he fought in Gaul and Britain. In a military campaign in the spring of 312, Constantine had a vision. The Chi Rho, the Greek monogram of Christ, appeared in the sky, accompanied by the admonition in Greek, “By this conquer.” Thereafter he favored the Christian religion, and the sign became his personal device.

To Constantine, the site of Byzantium, surrounded by the lands of early Christianity, may well have seemed more propitious for his capital than Rome, where the pagan gods had still a large following. In Constantinople the Hellenic heritage that was preserved in Syria and Egypt came to flower. The Greeks have always been a nation of mariners. Greek was the common tongue of the Mediterranean world, though Latin remained for some time the official language of the administration. Many colonies of pagan Rome whence valued trade flowed lay in the eastern Mediterranean and never spoke Latin. At least up to the end of the second century of the Christian era, the inscriptions in the catacombs even of Rome—pagan or Christian, and those of the large Jewish colony there—were largely in Greek. When Christianity began to spread, the Gospel was translated from the original Aramaic, a Jewish dialect, into Greek. Thus language was a major factor in disseminating the teachings of Christ through the known world, while at the same time Greek philosophy aided in formulating the new religion.

The emperor gathered at Constantinople all talent to make the new capital supreme. In Constantinople the great engineering and architectural achievements of the fabulous East were utilized. The city set the patterns of taste also in jewelry, ivory- and enamel-work, and other crafts. Manuscripts of ancient and modern authors were carefully copied and multiplied. Constantinople was known as “the City” not only throughout the empire but also throughout the medieval world. Istanbul, as the Turks renamed it, means also “the City.” And when Greeks today use the word “polis,” they mean Constantinople.

The western part of the ancient Roman Empire—from Britannia to Dacia, from Germania to Hispania—weakened through the disintegration of a centralized administration, staggered under the various waves of barbarian invasion. In the Byzantine Empire, since the time that Constantine established his capital up to its fall to the Turks, uninterrupted contact was maintained with those lands beyond the eastern borders of Christianity, already famed as fabulous, sophisticated in more than one way. In the Byzantine Empire, Christianity achieved body and character. The expression “Dark Ages,” if justified at all, applies only to the westward lands of Europe.

The Byzantine emperors embodied the supreme authority of both state and church. Approval of appointments to the rank of patriarch (bishop) depended upon the emperor—including the choice of the Bishop of Rome. From this early power date the “apostolic rights” of later sovereigns, of which more will be said later. From Byzantium also stems the custom of bestowing medals on those who had proved themselves especially worthy of commendation. These were usually crosses of silver, with the head of Christ on one side and an expression of the appreciation of the emperor on the other; distributed at religious festivals, they are forerunners of the Victoria Cross, the Leopold Cross, and many others.

The bishops or patriarchs at the head of the council represented Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome. When voting in council among the ecclesiastics, the Bishop of Rome cast the first vote. This privilege became a prerogative, and in later centuries, when schism developed, it was a ground for claims. At the start of the controversy, the Orthodox part of the Christian world was the larger in territory, more numerous in believers, and more influential. Not only the geographical situation of the four bishops residing in the East but also the different mentality represented made the Bishop of Rome the rallying point of opposition.

Meanwhile, from the Arabian Peninsula, the standard-bearers of another religion and another civilization rode forward victoriously. The rise of the Mohammedan Arabs in the seventh century also shook the Byzantine Empire, which lost Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Under a centralized rule, the Arabs developed impressive knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and medicine. They absorbed much of classical Greek and Jewish culture; Moslem and later Byzantine profited mutually from each other’s architectural achievements. All this the Arabs were to transmit directly into Spain, Portugal, Sicily, in succeeding centuries, and indirectly into France and more northern lands—reviving the interest of Western Europe in the almost forgotten civilization of the Greeks.

Though the Byzantine Empire did not suffer so much as Europe from the migration of the peoples, it had to wage long wars to maintain its position. The emperors came to depend for their armies on the feudal lords, who grew into a powerful caste. At the same time the Orthodox monasteries, in possession of “miraculous” icons (from eikon, image) that drew masses of pilgrims, extended their influence over the common people and gained immense power which could be turned against the emperor. Beginning with the early eighth century, for more than a hundred years iconoclastic edicts forbade the worship of images and decreed their destruction, in an attempt to deprive the religious authorities of their most effective means of propaganda. In the end, however, the position of the monasteries may have been strengthened by the resistance centered in them. The popes of this time never accepted iconoclastic decrees, and always defended the cult of images, thus increasing the incentives of schism. Continually growing differences between the Orthodox and Roman denominations over matters of dogma harassed the once “Universal Church.”

When Charlemagne (ca. 742-814) established his empire in Western Europe, though he greatly increased the authority of the Roman Church, the relationship between Eastern and Western empires remained on the whole amicable. Contact with Constantinople contributed greatly to the revival of arts and letters in his realm. Gold-, ivory-, and metal-work, as well as book illumination, achieved a high standard. The Palatine Chapel at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle ) was adorned with columns and bronzes, Byzantine in style, looted from Rome and Ravenna during Charlemagne’s campaigns in Italy.

Between mid-ninth and mid-eleventh centuries, the Byzantine Empire reached another of its several cultural peaks. The Bulgars and Moravian Slavs were evangelized; Kiev attained metropolitan brilliance. In Constantinople the arts came to a new flowering upon the revocation of iconoclasm. New buildings went up. The university, founded in the fifth century, was reconstituted. Trade throve. Special quarters were assigned to various foreign commercial groups—the Syrians, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Bulgarians, and the representatives of Italian cities such as Amalfi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa. From them, the influences of Byzantine art radiated throughout East and West.

Nations balanced precariously between the two powerful spheres of influence tried to keep on good terms with both. The youthful Kingdom of Hungary, recently Christianized, was important because of its dominating position in the Danubian Valley. Pope Sylvester (reigned 999-1003) sent a crown to its first ruler, St. Stephan of Hungary. A second crown came from Constantinople as a gift from the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII, who ruled from 1071-1078. The Hungarians, conscious of their need for the friendship of both powers, blended the gift into a single crown which has as its solid lower half the piece from Constantinople, upon which as a second tier the peaked elements of the papal gift are soldered. Important is the fact that both the pope’s gift and that of the emperor are so similar in spirit that experts were long puzzled in solving which part came from where. For the West had not yet found its own style.

Pilgrims from all parts of the world had sought the Holy Land, since St. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, went in search of the sacred relics in 321. By mid-seventh century, Jerusalem was in Moslem hands, but for some centuries, through negotiations, pilgrims were let in. Then, in a new surge of Moslem power, the Temple of the Holy Sepulcher was destroyed. Clamor arose throughout the Christian world, and in the late eleventh century the First Crusade began its cumbersome course. The participants wore a cross as badge on their helmets, armor, shirts, sometimes even on their horse trappings—and from the Latin crux, crucis, the word “crusade” was coined.

Constantinople was the rallying point. Many thought the occasion propitious for the healing of the schism between the two branches of Christianity. It was also the first time that masses of people coming from Western and Central Europe stood face to face with the wonders of Byzantium.

While the motive of the crusades was noble, economic interest and human rivalry all too soon became predominant. The establishment of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1100 marked a turning point in the balance of power in the Mediterranean. The Franks now controlled the heartland of Mediterranean trade as well as the Holy City. The various religious orders—best known among them the Templars and the Hospitalers—who backed the crusades, had to finance armies and navies. They came to possess banks, land, and finally grew into commercial companies.

The great centers of Levantine trade were Acre in Galilee (now in Israel) and Famagusta on the island of Cyprus. From there the spices, sugar, oils, fruits, silks, rugs, and velvets poured into Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, on Italian ships, by-passing the controls of Constantinople, to be dispersed throughout Europe. One of the most frequented trade routes led from Venice over the Brenner Pass, down the Rhine as far as Bruges; and prosperous cities still mark this route.

Rivalries arose among the participating nations; newcomers were unwelcome, as the feudal lords jockeyed for power. Christians confessing the same faith fought one another in the foreign land, sometimes causing more casualties in the Christian camp than the Moslems. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Constantinople looked upon the liberated territory as part of her lost empire and its European lords as her vassals.

At this time the Seljuk Turks, possessing great military skill, had brought a new energy and vigor to the Moslem world and had begun to penetrate into Asia Minor. They defeated the Byzantines decisively in 1071 and recaptured Jerusalem in 1197. Two new crusades were unsuccessful in liberating it.

A fourth crusade was organized to proceed from Venice against the Moslems in Egypt, attacking Jerusalem from the south. Although the pope hoped to direct the struggle again into spiritual channels, the feudal leaders prevailed and the force of the crusading armies was diverted against Constantinople, which by that time had shown too plainly its disdain of the West. The city was captured in 1204 and mercilessly plundered of its treasure. A northerner, Baldwin of Flanders, became the first Latin emperor of that Orthodox Greek world. Venice had its reward when the Venetian Morosini became the patriarch, with allegiance to Rome. It is as if a Protestant bishop had been placed in the chair of the cardinal at Notre Dame (for the Roman Church regards the Orthodox as schismatic, but the Orthodox looks upon the Roman as heretical). The Doge of Venice added a salient part of the Byzantine Empire to his domain, including the island of Crete.

In art and architecture, much that Europe now takes for granted as its own originated in the Near East. After fifteen hundred years certain buildings are still extant to bear testimony. In Persia, Egypt, and Syria, where working in brick and stone had ancestral tradition, the arch had early taken on a pointed form. Pointed arches constructed in mud brick occur in buildings in Egypt as early as mid-fourth century after Christ. Brick was easier to handle than stone, and many daring forms could be created with the aid of wooden supports that were removed when the mass had solidified. By the eighth century, cities such as Baghdad, Palmyra, Samarra, Ankara, all had buildings with pointed arches.’ Similarly, the transverse vault is found in a fourth century building, and the ribbed ogival vault was not uncommon by the ninth.**

To keep the historical continuity, the illustrations will be discussed later in this chapter.

Byzantine architecture itself borrowed from a number of styles of the Near East. By the end of the sixth century it had achieved a highly individual blend of Greek and oriental elements. In the regions of the Byzantine Empire, basilicas (from the Greek basilic, kingly ) rose, rectangular buildings divided into nave with side aisles. Other typical Byzantine ground plans were based on the dome. Though the Romans—after thorough contact with the Near East—constructed domes, they were never successful in placing a dome on a square or polygonal base. 

This must be declared a Syrian invention.* The expanse of the Byzantine dome on pendentives, with its many windows to lighten the structure and illuminate the interior, has never been duplicated.

The greatest of the Byzantine domes, that of the church of St. Sophia in Constantinople, which will be discussed somewhat later in detail, was consecrated in its present form in 561. The church of St. Sophia in Thessaloniki, built probably in early seventh century (the mosaics were put up in mid-ninth), was one of the earliest buildings to use pendentives in the construction of a dome at the crossing. St. Mark’s in Venice, begun in 1063, was modeled strictly on Byzantine precepts, and exerted a great influence on the architecture of Western Europe. The much-eulogized dome of the cathedral of Florence, commenced by Brunelleschi, was not completed until] 1431 and not furnished with its lantern until 1471 after the first cupola had collapsed in building; at that, it is not a true dome but a vast octagonal cloistered vault.

It was a Syrian-Arabian custom to inscribe a building with the names of the architect and those who contributed to its erection, as well as with the date. The great freedom in the treatment of moldings, the trifoil and the cinquefoil derive from the brick and stucco which the Levantines used with virtuosity. The style we know as “Venetian Gothic” was first practiced in buildings of the Arabic Near East.

The Romanesque style was developing in Europe when throughout the Byzantine Empire— from Cairo to Damascus, from Constantinople to Thessaloniki, and even in some Italian towns —splendid buildings stood, tall and crowned with shining domes. Influences from Byzantium helped the West greatly to ennoble its cumbersome architecture. It was the ambitious and technically advanced Romanesque which prepared the ground for the next epoch. Such characteristics of the Gothic as the ribbed vault, the groined vault, can be found in Romanesque architecture; even the flying buttress was present in those centuries, though kept neatly under the roof.

Charlemagne’s builders at Aachen drew on the Lombard skill, which in turn leamed much from Constantinople and the Byzantine of Ravenna, at one time in close touch with “the City.” St. Mark’s in Venice has a ground plan derived from the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Also, in France, Saint-Front at Périgueux follows the same five-domed plan. Over an even greater distance, the eleventh century west front of Lincoln Cathedral in England, with its entrance portals recessed in three tall archways, appears to have been modeled on the contemporary facade of St. Mark, just then in building, which in turn is closely connected with the Koimesis church in Nicaea ?—destroyed in the Greco-Turkish War about 1922.

Little attention has been paid to the influence of that area of North Italy where the long fingers of the lakes reach from Lombardy into the French, Swiss, Austrian, and Slavic-speaking lands. The cathederal of Como, for instance, is a stunning document in stone of the various changes in architecture from Romanesque to Gothic to early Renaissance, and contains elements that came from the Byzantine and went by way of Venice to the West. The three-aisled church of Sant’ Abbondio, also in Como, manifests still more the great but little-publicized contribution which this region made in transmitting styles.

The early religious orders in Europe employed master masons, frequently laymen, who by mid-eleventh century were constructing imposing buildings. The maestri comacini, the master masons of Como, learned their craft in colleges and corporations, and their work can be traced as early as mid-seventh century. They were itinerant masons, and through their journeying carried the high achievements of their homeland in a broad swath from France to the Balkans— so powerful that the Lombard style is often identified as comacine. Their activities continue into the Gothic epoch when other regions also began to exert powerful influences.™

Even less known than Como are its neighbors—Morcote, Lugano, Locamo, and across the Alpine valleys—for their role in handing on the achievements of these artists and craftsmen into Central and Westen Europe. An amazing wealth of architecture, sculpture, and mural painting can be seen behind the remnants tucked away in local museums, which a handful of dedicated persons have rescued in bits or caught in pictures from the wholesale destruction of nineteenth century “advance.” This was no provincial school or cultural backwater, but a firmly established center, which on the channels of growing commerce could and did spread far into transalpine lands.® The tradition is preserved in various later examples. A great figure of Christ in Majesty, the Pantocrator, fills the apse ceiling of a number of churches, as in the Byzantine world.

The crusaders came to the Levant in full force in late eleventh century, when Near Eastern technical achievements had become architectural tradition and were applied more generally over the vast area than appears today. With the crusading armies came their military engineers, their armorers, as well as scribes and draftsmen who recorded in word and picture what was of interest and value to Western Europeans.

To separate clinically one epoch of architecture from what existed before and came into being afterwards is a sterile pastime. People built, not to express spiritually lofty ideas but because they needed bigger and better buildings. The development of an architectural style is a slow process—of outside influences, of experimentation, adaptation, and of change.

In the Gothic, the structural solidity of former periods was relieved through a more highly developed use of the pointed arch and through ribbed vaulting. The flying buttress, placed outside the building to counterbalance stress, served to relieve the walls of weight and permitted better illumination—a practical constructional element which the nineteenth century sentimentalized with all other particulars of the style.

While the Romanesque was in considerable part spread through the work of the Benedictines, in a number of countries the Cistercian order is closely related to the development of the Gothic.” This order, which was not founded until mid-twelfth century, gathered power from the prosperity of its agricultural enterprises, its animal husbandry. The order spread into various lands, coinciding with the maturing of the Gothic style. But this architectural development could become a reality only by benefiting from all that went before.

Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis in France (ca. 1081-1151) has left an account of the rebuilding and enlargement of the church in his care and its treasures. It is a eulogy to his own great feats. In circles where the cult of the French Gothic still reigns unabated, Abbot Suger is given disproportionate importance in the history of this style. It is characteristic, however, that an Italian Roman Catholic encyclopedia mentions him only as a cleric who scrisse qualche opera e molte lettere—wrote some works and many letters. . . .1 An objective reading of Suger’s paragraphs will reveal that he inquired repeatedly of travelers who came from Constantinople whether his church was as beautiful as, and whether his treasures compared with, those of the Eastern metropolis.1° The mere idea shows baffling provinciality—that his one building could compete with the vast complex of churches and the immeasurable riches of the Byzantine capital. By early twelfth century the Near East had become a meeting place of Western European nations who sent home their wounded and sick; contact went on for decades through reinforce-ments which contained also numerous civilian observers. Whatever this abbot gathered in the twenty-nine years or so of his rule was infinitesimal compared to the splendor of the imperial city, where two-thirds of the world’s wealth was concentrated.** Long before any of the crusades, a treasure-trove was amassed in Constantinople which could be plundered by fellow Christians for centuries and each time still yield further riches. Considering that the coming and going of the crusaders was continuous, at Abbot Suger’s time the exchange was more than a century under way to the abundant profit of the hesitant art and architecture of Western Europe.

One of the rare surviving architectural manuals—alleged by some to be the only one before the fifteenth century—is the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt dated between 1225 and 1250. Even this appears to be fragmentary. It consists of random pages, 6% by 10/2 inches, containing sketches of figures, religious scenes, architectural details, studies of persons in movement. Villard seems to have been present at the construction or enlargement of various French churches. Among the drawings there axe also details which do not refer to France—for example, the picture of a round window of a church in Lausanne. Further, to one of his sketches he adds: “Once I was in Hungary, where I remained for a long time; I saw the paving of a church made with this design.” His trip to Hungary must have been a matter of importance because a different hand added to the sketchbook in the fifteenth century, “This is the man who was in Hungary.” ¥

At that time Hungary was a great kingdom, not only militarily powerful but also leading in the arts and humanities. The first reconstruction of the metropolitan church of Cambrai in France, important in the history of French Gothic, was made possible by a donation from St. Elisabeth of Hungary. She belonged to the Arpad dynasty, founders of that kingdom which stretched from the Polish plains to the Dalmatian shores on the Adriatic. Elisabeth was most religious, and after her marriage to a Landgrave of Thuringia in Germany, she spent much of their fortune on good deeds. Both her father and her husband participated in crusades. Here again is a direct connection with the Near East—by way of Hungary and Germany, to France.

Modern investigation is bringing about a revaluation in the history of art, as in other humanistic disciplines. The civilizations of the Near and Far East are only now beginning to come into focus, and the nineteenth century misunderstanding of the Gothic is in process of being cleared up. The word Gothic is derived from the Goths, barbarians from the North, and up to midnineteenth century it implied something uncouth, in bad taste. Travel books from eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries use the word exclusively in a deprecatory sense. In the Italian language it has that meaning even today. Around 1860 the many early French churches were full of additions from the Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassic, and early Victorian periods, presenting living documents of centuries through which the buildings had stood—witnesses to the variety of taste. Under the influence of a group of powerful nationalistic architects and critics, seeking in the intellectual past of their nation compensation for military defeat, the “restoration” of these cathedrals began. Most of what was created in the intermediate four hundred years was ripped from the interiors—side altars, pulpits, organ screens, confessionals; and similarly the exteriors were “restored” according to what Viollet-le-Duc and his group thought a thirteenth century Gothic cathedral ought to look like. Although opposition arose, and many dignified writers and personalities, among them Anatole France, protested against this falsification, the work went on. It is now slowly being realized that those “reconstructed” buildings show a style which is synthetic and unreal.

In 1261, when Constantinople was retaken from the Franks by the Byzantines, it was evident that between the two religious denominations an almost unhealable rift existed. The Greek Church had remained throughout the Middle Ages true to its ancient character. When the Orthodox faith became established in various Slavic and other countries, the language of the service remained Greek for a time only, and then the texts were translated into the respective tongues. Thus the Russian, Macedonian, Serbian, Romanian—to mention only a few—could follow the liturgy better than the illiterate French or Bavarian peasant who understood no Latin. In the West, as early as the thirteenth century, the peasantry in various countries showed signs of restlessness. The corruption of the feudal masters—whether baron or bishop—produced such movements as the Waldensian and the Hussite long before the Reformation.

In the face of Moslem advance, now spurred by the virile and aggressive Ottoman Turks, various attempts were made toward a rapprochement and mutual defense. Between the years 1369 and 1439, three Byzantine emperors visited the West. In 1439 the Council of Florence was convened, attended by both Orthodox and Roman plenipotentiaries. The Byzantine emperor John VII Palaeologos came with a large group of important personages, including the Patriarch of Constantinople. But the discussions did not serve the Christian cause; the Orthodox patriarchs refused to ratify the concessions demanded by the West in return for a united crusade. The most valuable record of this heated bargaining is the murals painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi of Florence some twenty years later. Here, in the guise of the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, the conclave of the emperor, the patriarch, and young Lorenzo de’ Medici is portrayed with jewel-like clarity and unique storytelling charm.

The history of the arts of Western civilization still works with opinions that were formed when the Byzantine Empire was under Turkish rule and when research in Near and Far East could not be more than sporadic and sketchy. Most historians, informed by overwhelming Westoriented sources, speak with deprecation of a decaying Byzantine Empire. An empire which, despite having to fight enemies from all sides, including their own Christian brothers, remained a military power to be reckoned with until its fall, and nevertheless enriched the Western world for more than a thousand years with its spiritual, intellectual, and artistic achievements, providing the spark for the Renaissance—what “decadence,” what “stagnation and decay’!

While the Romanesque and Gothic were evolving in the West, great developments were also taking place in the Byzantine world. The brilliant wall mosaics (such as at Hosios Lukas, Chios, Daphni, Thessaloniki, and Constantinople), the murals, ivories, enamels, and metalwork, and the book illumination—all testify to the vitality of the arts of this period. But the two worlds were drifting apart. The schism of the churches, the acrimonious rivalries in trade put up increasing barriers. The West became less familiar with the East, and after the Turkish conquest memories died, so that by the eighteenth century, when Gibbon wrote his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the picture he gave of the Byzantine world was essentially a false one.**

The Turks in their masterly campaign had by-passed the massive bastions of Constantinople, crossed the Bosporus, and subjugated the Balkan lands, thus separating the East from the West in Christendom. Finally, they dared the conquest of Constantinople itself, and after a protracted siege the city fell to Mohammed II in 1453. With the fabulous capital in the hands of the Turks, the Byzantine Empire as a political unit went down to its end. The Turkish rulers have sometimes shown a more humane attitude toward the Christian population than vice versa. Smaller places of Christian worship, where no crowds could gather to conspire against the ruling power,and the chapels in fields and on hillsides could be used. The large churches were expropriated by the Turks, and many received an addition of the minaret, that slender, gracefully joined tower from which the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. As the Moslem religion prohibits all figurative art, the mosaics and murals were whitewashed or broken down, the religious paraphernalia disposed of—if not already hidden away by the Orthodox population. The monumental complex of the imperial residence fell into ruins. Buildings, terraces, and stairways were used as quarries. One of the marvels of the world, the church of St. Sophia, was transformed into a gigantic mosque. The city’s tactical position offered a springboard for the military and commercial advance of the Ottomans into the Western world.

The century which brought the downfall of Byzantium had not yet ended, when a boy was born, allegedly of Christian Armenian-Greek parentage, who was brought up as a Turkish janissary. Sinan, as he was called, became the unequaled master of Moslem architecture and related arts in the brilliant epoch of the Osmanli sultans. He no doubt studied the St. Sophia of Constantinople; but he also saw much of Near Eastern architecture and he created a style of which the unity, elegance, and grandeur only now—when travel and photography make it possible to study his work as a whole—are beginning to be widely appreciated. Under Suleiman the Magnificent, called Lawgiver by the Turks, a thorough rebuilding of Istanbul began. And soon new mosques, not less in size or grace than churches of the Byzantine epoch, decorated the horizon of that majestic city, with their delicate tilework and their domes vibrating in the hazy sunshine. Sinan was also a remarkable military engineer.® He participated at the siege of Rhodes in 1522 and later in the victorious campaign when the Danube was forced. He directed the earthworks in the battle at Mohacs in Hungary, when the road to Vienna was laid open (1526). The Hungarian king Lajos (Louis II), who perished in that battle, was married to a sister of the Habsburg Charles V; thus the Turkish menace thrust at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. It was Suleiman’s ambition to complete the subjugation of Central Europe, but he died during the campaign. The Turks did not penetrate beyond eastern Austria, but halted to consolidate their overextended line of supplies.

The Greeks who remained in Istanbul after the conquest withdrew to the shore quarter and the hills on the southern edge of the Golden Horn. Here they formed a tightly woven community, known as Phanar, which received many privileges from the first. The Moslem conquest and the vicissitudes of Frankish rule had long engulfed the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The patriarch of Constantinople became the sole head of the Byzantine Church, the administrator of all Orthodox Christians under Turkish rule.

The collection of tithes in distant provinces was in the hands of Greeks from Phanar, and seemingly they handled their office so efficiently that the Turkish administration had them collect the taxes as well. In Romania, even after it became an independent kingdom in the last century, the collection of taxes was still entrusted to the descendants of Phanariot Greeks. The successful management of the various tax moneys might explain the presence, even in recent years, of very wealthy Greek bankers and shippers in Cairo, Damascus, Smyrna, Sophia, Bucharest.

Even if the Orthodox patriarchs had acceded to the demands of Rome and the West had joined in full force against Ottoman might, it is doubtful whether a final victory over the Turks could have been achieved. The terrific momentum of the Moslem onslaught probably could not have been stemmed. And the Orthodox world, having bargained away its individual culture and spiritual unity, would have foundered in the aggressiveness of the West.

Although as a political unit the Byzantine Empire became a memory, its influence was by that time profoundly established in Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, and beyond, as well as in the Near East. In the occupied Hellenic lands patriotism and religion, fused into a spiritual flame, kept language, literature, and art alive until—within the past century—freedom was regained.

The fortifications of Constantinople underwent one major enlargement and many repairs in the course of the centuries. But certain sections still present much the same appearance as when Emperor Theodosius IJ, in mid-fifth century, enlarged the city and consequently strengthened the fortifications (Pl. 1A). The bulwarks were massive enough to repulse attacks by Huns, Avars, Persians, Arabs, Bulgars, and Russians successively, and even held back the Turks for a long time. There were two walls, some thirty-six feet high. The inner one was built of cut stone and brick, five or so courses of each alternating. As reinforcement in each were ninety-six towers, spaced some 165 feet apart, those in one wall alternating with those in the other. Then came a moat between high escarpments. This massive construction had ten gates, the grandest of which was called the Golden Gate. Legend says that it was walled up after the Turks took the city because of a prophecy that through this gate would enter the reconqueror. But from the stonework it appears that it was filled in in preparation for the crusaders’ attack in 1204. The vast network of fortifications stands today in melancholy ruin; but the gates still have power enough to strike back at truck fenders when careless drivers come too near to them.

The church of St. Sophia—Holy Wisdom—in Constantinople was erected by the Emperor Justinian to replace an earlier basilica, and was dedicated in 537. Its plan is daring and original. Over the central square, a dome one hundred feet in diameter rests upon huge arches with pendentives at the corners. It took a little over five years to complete the church, which was for centuries the largest in the world. The Byzantine system of construction, alternating courses of brick with mortar almost as thick, was not suited to such rapid work.*® The mortar dried unevenly and some of the arches buckled. An earthquake in 553 may have damaged the structure; another, four years later, caused the dome to fall. When it was rebuilt, it rose 180 feet above the ground. The church was justly called the newest “wonder of the world.” Its delicately proportioned walls are one of the glories of architecture.

This superlative building did not stand alone. Between 527 and 586, the church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus was erected, as well as the churches of St. Eirene and the Holy Apostles, each representing an exquisite variation in the development of Byzantine architecture and art. The five-domed plan of the Holy Apostles was copied in St. Mark at Venice.

St. Sophia today (Pl. 1C), despite the minarets and Turkish buildings that surround it, stands apart through its supple construction. The incredibly flat dome, its drum pierced by forty openings, appears bubble-light. The vast space of the interior is enclosed with the least possible sense of confinement, producing an atmosphere warm and colorful and at the same time uplifting. The many windows give the interior an even and noble illumination. Throughout the Romanesque and Gothic this goal was striven for, but it took the West seven hundred years more to achieve it.

Among the various impressive architectural remnants of the Near East, a few examples have been chosen to illustrate the early dates of the edifices and the skill of workmanship. The Egyptians were among the earliest followers of Christ’s teaching. The converts, known as Copts, were in communion with the neighboring Ethiopians, likewise Christianized in very early times. Murals and manuscripts of the latter land preserve a strong touch of the Coptic manner, and some Abyssinian churches were hewn out of living rock, probably influenced by Egyptian technique from pre-Christian times. In the Sudan, south of Egypt, where mighty monuments of the Pharaohs are now endangered by the building of the Aswan Dam, the figures of Christian saints are found on the walls of pagan temples among the gods of the earlier religion. In the ruins of a Coptic monastery near Aswan (PI. 2A), founded in the fourth century, the powerful arches, the remnants of tunnel vaulting, and the carved decorations give an idea of the regional type of construction in clay and stone.

At Til Keuy, thirty miles southwest of the city of Kayseri, which was once the capital of Cappadocia, in Central Turkey, lie the ruins of the church dedicated to St. Andrew, built in the sixth century (PI. 2B). The large, well-dressed stones make possible a wide span. It was a two-aisled mortuary church with some twenty tombs under the floor of the north aisle. Originally it seems to have been a basilica with columns and a flat roof; a painted inscription survives from this earliest structure.** The region was a prosperous province under Byzantine rule. It is tragic that such influential accomplishment must be judged from such fragments.

The monastery church of St. Simeon the Stylite (Pl. 2D), some thirty miles northwest of Aleppo, Syria, was erected on the site where the hermit saint died in 459. The stonework of the basilica shows assurance, even elegance, achieved with fine metal tools; highly feared sword blades were fashioned in nearby Damascus. The massivity of the construction is lightened by the use of free-standing columns in the archway, and by the grace of the cornices, moldings, and other sculptural decoration. It is a building of unusual plan, with four basilica-like bodies radiating from a center, where the column stood on which the saint had spent much of his contemplative life. While some authorities date the building from early seventh century, others would have it more than a hundred years older. It stood near a road that was important from a military point of view since Hittite times and that Arabs, Egyptians, and crusaders used as a battleground. By the end of the tenth century, it fell victim to the continuous strife that raged about it.

The population of the large area known as Syria and Palestine before World War II—comprising the biblical territories of Galilee, Samaria, and Judea—was among the first to convert to Christianity. By the early years of our epoch, Syrian culture had developed to a height and originality that affected the entire Mediterranean world. Even their earliest buildings for Christian worship show considerable deviation from the classic style. The Omayad Mosque, the “Great Mosque,” in Damascus (Pl. 2C) was originally the church of St. John the Baptist, begun by Theodosius I in 875 on the site of a Roman temple and apparently making use of its classical columns. It was considerably rebuilt in the eighth century to turn it into a mosque. Here was venerated as a relic the alleged head of John the Baptist, which disappeared after the crusaders ransacked the area. Now two French churches, Soissons and Amiens, claim its possession.

Looking back through the perspective of history, it may appear that while the Moslem benefited from the intellectual and practical achievements of the “infidel,” he also gave much. Ramla or Ramle, in Israel today, is an Arab foundation dating from the early eighth century. The name is derived from the Arabic raml, meaning sand. Situated on the way between Jerusalem and the ancient port of Jaffa, it was a city of great importance even after the advent of the crusaders at the end of the eleventh century. An Arab historian describes it as “well-built, its water good and plentiful, its fruit abundant, commerce prosperous, its bread . . . the best and the whitest.”

Among its historical monuments, the hospice was a Byzantine foundation, the great mosque from the twelfth century was originally a crusaders’ church, and the tower from the fourteenth is Moslem.

The cistern of Ramla (Pl. 4C), built under the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid in 789, is a subterranean structure with strong retaining walls and a well-preserved pavement. It was laid out into six aisles, covered by tunnel vaults which spring from low lateral pointed arches and are reinforced by higher transverse arches.* Each vaulted bay was pierced by an opening some two feet square, so that twenty-four people could draw water at the same time. A staircase led down to the bottom of the cistern. In this case posterity showed appreciation, in surrounding the structure with a public garden.

Alone in Syria, eight other well-preserved examples of such cisterns can be found. In Constantinople, where an adequate water supply was paramount in case of siege or drought, every reign built new cisterns, some open, some covered, whether for palace, mansion, monastery, or church. Over thirty of them exist today, showing great variety of construction. Many of the bricks used in the cisterns were stamped in mid-fifth century, others in the time of Justinian, and the upper courses show the monograms of Byzantine stonemasons.**

Another clear forerunner of the Gothic is the Nilometer in Egypt (Pl. 4B), datable through its inscription at 861-862. Travelers from various lands remark that the rise or fall of the water level was the object of daily concern, and served as the usual opening of conversation in Egypt.*° The Nilometer, on Roda Island near Cairo, was a gauge. It consisted of a tall graduated column rising from a stone-lined pit. The waters of the Nile flowed in through three tunnels, making possible continuous observation of the level. The four sides of the stone pit are strengthened by arched recesses, their pointed arched vaults resting on a pair of engaged colonnettes. Careful measurements reveal that the arches have been struck from two centers one-third of the span apart; thus they comprise what Gothic architects called, much later, “tiers points.” *

Although relatively near the heartland of the Byzantine Empire, the Kingdom of Armenia cannot be considered a mere offshoot of the civilization that centered in Constantinople. The racial history of the Armenians is different; the pre-Christian centuries brought them in touch with other cultures. When a national church was established there, as early as 303, the Greek language was replaced by Armenian, a national alphabet introduced, and the Bible translated. Much fighting occurred with the Arabs’ rise in the Near East, and early in the eighth century the Armenian katholikos, or supreme head of the church, intervened for peace between the Armenian princes and the Arab caliph. Late in the following century, the country freed itself entirely and for nearly two hundred years enjoyed unusual prosperity, although it was divided into various kingdoms. Throughout Greater Armenia the ruins of innumerable monuments, irrigation works, churches, and palaces still stand as tokens of the native virtuosity in construction.

The church of Achthamar (PI. 8A) was built in 915-921, on a small island in Lake Van. The plan is a square with four buttressing niches projecting from it and so forming a cross. One of them constitutes the apse, and the others, tiny side chapels. Adequate lighting is achieved by windows in a high octagonal drum that houses the cupola. These features are later encountered in the Balkans also. Especial interest lies in the fine handling of the stone and in the sculptured reliefs that adorn the whole of the exterior. Stylistically these sculptures embody the influence of Sassanian Persia. Three encircling friezes of animals, hunters, grapevines and pomegranates stand out as if formed with a cooky mold. The story of Jonah (PI. 38C) gives a clear idea of the storytelling charm of this work. In the medallions, local saints and heroes appear, as well as evangelists and biblical characters.**

Armenian painting can best be studied today through the numerous book illustrations, which show influences varying between the Byzantine-Greek, the Persian, and the work of neighboring Syria—such as the Rabula Gospels from the sixth century (see PI. 62A). Remnants of wall paintings are extant at Achthamar and even in some forerunners from as early as the seventh century. Besides apostles and church fathers (Pl. 3B) here are also faded remnants of scenes representing the Visitation, the Nativity, the Entry into Jerusalem, among others, rendered with an immediacy that is close in style to the carving. From this plate it can be seen that the church structure, with its semicircular niches, suave domes, and pleasant transitional members, was far more subtle than the exterior shell would indicate. Though the interior of the church at Achthamar was apparently covered with wall paintings, the vicissitudes of nearly a thousand years have taken a heavy toll of them. Perhaps even this much survives only because the building stands upon a lonely island, completely deserted. The adjacent royal palace is just a pile of stone. Dangerously near the Russo-Turkish border, it sees visitors very seldom. It is an abode only to the sea birds that nest there undisturbed.

The cathedral at Ani occupies a still more striking place in the highly advanced architecture of Armenia (PI. 4A). Ani lies north of Achthamar, indeed about halfway from Lake Van to Georgian Tiflis. Built between the years 989 and 1001, it is a cruciform domed church, constructed entirely of fine dressed stone. The side aisles are roofed with barrel vaulting. Although not of monumental size, its interior is imposing because of the harmony of proportion. Pointed and stepped arches rise from powerful clustered piers, supporting a dome on pendentives. Recessed pilasters are placed against the north and south walls. Small semicircular niches enliven the apse. The same elements as seen here were used in other contemporary churches of the region. Arches and cross ribs to bear the weight of the stone web were common." The small double-arched windows (even triple sometimes) familiar from the later Venetian Gothic are found in Armenia constructed in stone.’§ One is strongly reminded of the early Gothic of Western Europe, with the difference that these forms appear here much earlier. When Achthamar and Ani were in construction, the Cistercian order did not exist.

It is recorded that, when the dome of St. Sophia in Constantinople was damaged by earthquake in the late tenth century, the architect of Ani was called in to make the repairs.

Besides the possession of the Holy Sepulcher and control of trade routes, the Holy Land offered highly attractive and desirable property for the crusaders to occupy. To consolidate their position, well-defended bases were necessary, where men and war materials could stand at call. Such fortresses were garrisoned by their feudal lords—a practice that tended to strengthen local units and weaken the central power. Krak des Chevaliers (PI. 5A), a fortress begun in the early thirteenth century, belonged to the Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, better known as the Hospitalers. This order of lay brothers was originally formed as a sort of medical corps to serve the sick and wounded of the crusades. Their hospital at Jerusalem could accommodate two thousand patients, and was remarkably modern in its friendly service, excellent diet, and individual care. Their success brought tremendous wealth. They owned banks, land, trading houses, and exercised sovereign rights as a feudal entity that extended far beyond the frontiers of the Holy Land.

The great fortress housed about two thousand men. It stands on a height in North Syria near the Lebanese border, dominating the important inland road from Aleppo to Damascus, and seems impregnable with its double row of massive walls, one peering above the other, divided by a moat. Just as in Guatemala the Maya Indian and in Peru the Incas’ descendants constructed churches and palaces for their Spanish masters, here also thousands of local laborers must have been impressed to erect this fortress with the necessary speed. It duplicates in line and construction methods a number of Arab fortresses in the area. Clearly visible is the device known as machicolation that can be traced to Arab architecture. The machicolation is a corbeled parapet at the top of a building, with openings in the floor through which the defenders can see the foot of the structure and drop various unpleasant objects on the heads of attackers. The device, apparently derived from the projecting latrines of Syrian tower-houses, does not appear in Western Europe before the end of the twelfth century. Examples at Norwich and Winchester in England date from 1186-1193 and somewhat later in the town halls (signorie) of Florence and Siena.®

To local stonecutters and masons—masters of their craft—must be attributed also the graceful yet thoroughly sound “Gothic” arched passageway (PI. 5B). The fortress of Krak des Chevaliers was taken in 1271 by the troops of the Sultan of Egypt. Driven from the mainland, the Hospitalers moved to Cyprus, then to Rhodes, and later withdrew to Crete. Finally Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, granted them the island of Malta (1530); hence they are known today as the Knights of Malta.

Of all the centers of architecture, culture, and thought in the Near East, Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, was the most important. The churches that were built there were of all periods, and extremely numerous. Some, such as St. Sophia, were constructed within the time span of a few years and have kept their character for almost a millennium and a half; others have undergone many changes across the centuries. An example is the church known today as Kariye Cami, St. Saviour in Chora (Pl. 1B), meaning “in the fields” or “outside the walls.” Thus the first structure here must have antedated the period in which the land walls of Theodosius (see Pl. 1A) were constructed. Ruined in its earliest form by an earthquake, it is believed to have been rebuilt by Justinian, only to be destroyed by another temblor in the mid-sixth century. It was again rebuilt a century later, and a number of important personalities were buried there. During the iconoclastic period the monastery attached to it was suppressed, and the church must have suffered. Restored in the ninth century, it had again fallen to ruin by the twelfth; then, in its fifth version, it was rebuilt more or less on the plan visible today. Although damaged during the Frankish domination, the church and monastery buildings were brought back into condition by Theodoros Metochites, then chief treasurer of the empire and confidant of the Emperor Andronicus II of whom we shall hear again. Theodoros built an aisle across the north side as a mortuary chapel (at the right) and had it decorated with the wall paintings which are of special interest to us. Brilliant and lively mosaics depicting the lives of Jesus and the Virgin cover the walls of the two narthices. According to a Greek chronicler, the work was finished before 1321. Later, Theodoros fell into disgrace and died there as a monk in 1331.

The murals of Kariye Cami are thought to have been executed by the same anonymous master who designed the mosaics of the narthices. The theme is the Triumph over Death. Christ in Limbo is represented in the apse (PI. 75A), a figure of superlative power, lifting Adam and Eve out of the kingdom of Hades. The delineation of Christ’s figure—expression, pose, and his gar-ments—was by this time firmly established, and characterizes him in Byzantine art through the centuries. The text above, Anastasis, signifies the Resurrection, embodying also the sense of the Redemption of Mankind.

The Turkish official under whose jurisdiction the buildings fell after the conquest may have had some appreciation of their beauty and artistic merit. At any rate he did not have the decorations torn away; instead they were covered with thick coats of whitewash, so that recent careful restoration has revealed them almost in their pristine hues. With its immediacy, storytelling power, and fine colors, the mural demolishes the oft-repeated assertion of the dull, conventionalized character of Late Byzantine art. It gains importance when we consider that Kariye Cami’s mosaics and wall paintings were set up in the very years of Giotto’s mature output.

The capture and pillage of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 was a blow from which the Byzantine Empire never fully recovered. Although by 1261 the Greeks could reenter their capital, the Peloponnesus was divided among the Franks, with some Greek lords holding out against them and Venice in firm possession of strategic harbors. In an effort to consolidate their holdings, the Franks established a string of three fortresses on three heights across the peninsula. One of these is the site of the present Mistra (Pl. 12A). But the power of Byzantium was again on the rise, and the emperor finally won command over the heartland of the Peloponnesus.

It is recorded that an old town of Mistra, some two miles southwest of Sparta, was important in the twelfth century for its production of silken webs “finer than the spider’s’—largely the work of a Jewish colony there. Reestablished on a sharply sloping hill, enlarged and embellished by the Palaeologos family some 150 years later, Mistra became known as “the wonder of Morea.” Constantine XI Palaeologos, the last Emperor of Byzantium, was brought up there and ruled for six years before he left to be crowned at Constantinople and to die fighting the Turks on the ramparts of his capital. The region around Mistra survived the holocaust until 1460. Then the Turks garrisoned a fortress on the summit, and the cosmopolitan little city sank into neglect and ruin.

One climbs steep and narrow paths, passing buildings that are sometimes no more than piles of stones. Through glassless windows, broken roofs, and fissured walls, animals crawl and birds fly in and out. Yet in at least seven churches the great performance of Late Byzantine mural painting can be observed.*°

The church of Peribleptos, the Conspicuous, perched at the edge of a bluff, dates from the second half of the fourteenth century (PI. 12C ). Its interior is frescoed from ceiling to floor, and glows like a jewel box. In the apse, the Virgin in the aspect of the Mother Church is seated with the youthful King on her knee, on the typical throne of a Byzantine sovereign (Pl. 12B). At each side the tasseled ends of the “imperial purple” (that is, crimson) cushion are clearly to be seen. Angels flank the scene. Plate 13 shows the left side of the apse, where different compositions are separated by a narrow dark-red band with white edging. Nearest the eye is the scene of the Supper at Emmaus. The table is covered with a tasseled and embroidered cloth. The toylike architecture is draped with a curtain to indicate an interior, as is traditional in Byzantine iconography. Above this scene, Mary, surrounded by the apostles and flanked by two archangels, witnesses the Ascension. Despite what the building went through, the colors are warm and well differentiated. The trees, conventionalized and far from realistic, make one think of the work of Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli in Italy nearly a century later. In the arch of the apse, Christ in a circular aureole is carried upward by four magnificent angels in shining colors; a rosy red and a vibrant yellow shading to orange stand out. The subject matter and, to a great extent, the sequences of the murals are all established elements of Late Byzantine painting, and occur nearly unchanged—even in icons, or portable holy paintings—into the nineteenth century.

Conservation and restoration” were done here before modern methods could be applied. In the last years the murals are getting more attention, as their outstanding importance is being realized.

The call to spend one’s life in contemplation, celibate and solitary, is as old as mankind's striving to fathom the mystery of divinity. Long before Christ, highly organized monasticism existed in India and other parts of Asia. Buddhistic religious practices are in many ways forerunners of the Christian, such as the tonsure of monks and priests, the adoption of uniform garb, the establishment of monasteries on mountaintops, or in remote valleys. The service in the temple as communion with God, the chanting, the accompaniment of music, the use of the prayer wheel and of bells and incense, pilgrimages, the veneration of relics and holy images, are all pre-Christian. Even the rosary is found in the Buddhist religion. From the om mani padme hum to the Pater Noster is not a long way.

In the arts, also, Christianity took over much from the great previous religions. The glory or halo of light about the head of a holy personage, the aureole or the almond-shaped mandorla enveloping the whole figure occur in ancient depictions. Particular colors are reserved for a particular occasion or saint. Heaven and hell, demons and furies, miracles, are all represented in pictures and in carving before Christianity. Angels, as heavenly guardians or winged ministers of good, appear in Buddhist art several centuries before Christ. In a scene of unusual poetic feeling, on a sculptured stele, the young Buddha is shown leaving his home at dawn; four winged angels uphold the legs of his horse so that he can depart without awakening his parents.

Christianity went through its formative phase in the Near East. Christian monasticism stems from Egypt, where it first took the form of retirement into solitude. The wilderness around Mount Sinai was a favorite place for hermits. An ancient caravan road crossed the wedge-shaped Sinaitic Peninsula, trodden by countless multitudes between Palestine and Egypt. This region had the reputation of sanctity since antiquity. It is recorded that the heathen Arabs celebrated a moon feast there to “Sin,” who was a moon god also in Babylonian times. The mountain itself figures as setting for Elijah’s ascent, for Moses’ vision of the Burning Bush, and for the delivery of the Ten Commandments into his hands.

Once, the peninsula was better wooded, and numerous Christian hermits lived in its many caves. Later they gathered into communal groups under austere rules, which were first laid down by St. Basil the Great in the fourth century. Soon the necessity arose to erect quarters to protect the monks from harassment by the Arabs and to accommodate pilgrims to the holy mountain. The Byzantine Emperor Justinian built the first monastery and church in the midsixth century, surrounding the place with a fortification. When, some three hundred years later, the bones of the martyred St. Catherine of Alexandria were deposited there, the monastery took on her name.

Besides its Judaeo-Christian associations, the place was venerated also by the Moslems. According to tradition, a monk at Mount Sinai wrote down the Koran at the dictation of Mohammed the Prophet, who was unlettered; and Mohammed, who always evinced admiration and respect for cultural accomplishments, granted a charter to the monks in gratitude, assuring them the safety of their lives and property from his followers. From Mount Sinai, Mohammed is believed by some Moslems to have been carried aloft to Heaven on the back of a great camel which left its footprint on the peak.

As the schism between the two Christian denominations became marked, in the mid-eleventh century, and amidst the engulfing conquest of the Moslems, the monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai served as the link between the biblical lands—at that time no longer in Christian hands—and the rising civilization of Western Europe. Up to the fifteenth century the Roman Catholic hierarchy accepted the popularity of the Coptic saint, and the pilgrims of that faith going to the Holy Land stopped there also as at an important shrine. A sketch from that time shows on the mountain a Saracen mosque, the church of Elijah, a church “where the Law was given to Moses,” the church of the “garden of the Blessed Catherine” with its well of miraculous water, and the monastery dedicated to her. In 1483 Felix Fabri, a Swiss monk from the Dominican monastery in Ulm, Wiirttemberg, made the pilgrimage, and in his old age described his visit to Mount Sinai. Although he had been taught to regard the monks of St. Basil as without virtue in the eyes of God, he was deeply moved by the holiness of the spot.** We realize from his pages what chasms of bitter resentment, petty grudge, and unrelenting suspicion separated the two denominations of Christianity.

The monks of Mount Sinai received income from local sources, especially in the form of offerings from the pilgrims, and could count on subvention from various daughter houses, notably communities on Rhodes, Cyprus, Crete, and Corfu, even after all but the last had fallen to the Turks. The charter “sealed by the hand” of the Prophet was renewed in the early sixteenth century by the Ottoman sultan and, although not always honored, was nevertheless important in preserving, in a number of lands, branches and dependencies dedicated to St. Catherine of Sinai.

The monastery at Mount Sinai has a tremendous religious radiation, even after one and a half millenniums of existence in an Arabic country. And the most important monasteries in Greece, those at Mount Athos and Meteora, looked toward it for orientation, as the keeper of the oldest Christian tradition.

As at Mount Sinai, caves and other natural shelters attracted hermits to the small peninsula of Mount Athos in eastern Macedonia. There, on a tongue of land some thirty miles long and eight miles at its widest point, twenty monasteries with their appended hermitages are functioning even today—a unique agglomeration of religious bodies. The Holy Mountain—Aghion Oros in Greek—rises nearly seven thousand feet at the end of the peninsula. Its associations reach back into legendary times. It is a “weather breeder” of fierce, sudden thunderstorms and incalculable winds, which defeated Xerxes’ navy in 491 B.c. The Christian legend has it that the ship on which the Virgin sailed with St. John for Cyprus was blown out of its course to Athos, then the abode of ancient gods. When she stepped ashore, the idols shattered. Before leaving, she blessed the place and called it her garden, devoted to contemplation. Since then, entrance is forbidden to any other woman; not even female animals may cross the boundary.

Here, in the protection of idyllic forests, surrounded by the changing green-blue depths of the Aegean Sea, those religious men found peace as early as the fourth century. By the tenth century they had grown so numerous that Athanasius organized for them the first monastery—or “community,” as it is called, reflected in its Greek name Lavra—the nucleus of what became a republic of monasteries. In the eleventh century the Byzantine emperor gave further privileges and donations, and the Holy Mountain became a fountainhead of spiritual power and religious art. At its highest period it had forty monasteries, with a multitude of inmates. Today, with only half the religious establishments, their numbers are constantly shrinking.

The monasteries fall into two classes, the cenobites, who live in communities under strict rules administered by a single head, and the idiorrhythms with an elected leader, whose lives are freer and whose discipline is less severe. Besides these, there are the hermits whose abodes are scattered throughout the peninsula; they are free to follow the dictates of their “inner rule.”

When Thessaloniki fell to the Turks (1480), Mount Athos saw its first Moslem officials. But these left the holy men in peace and respected their privileges. Isolated from the suffering and death which war brought to wide areas, libraries could be gathered, with works both copied and composed there. Many of the finest murals at Mount Athos were executed in the second half of the sixteenth century, when the Greek mainland and the rest of the Balkans had long been under Turkish rule. However, the uprising of the Greeks for a national independence (1821) brought the monks also into the conflict, and they gave shelter to Christian fugitives. A Turkish army of three thousand men occupied the peninsula and housed in the monasteries for nine years. Four-fifths of the monks fled; the old buildings began to decay. Many art pieces and books were hidden or taken away, but the murals continued to deteriorate. The cultivated lands, olive groves, and gardens began to revert to wilderness. At Chilandari, once one of the wealthiest monasteries in art and worldly goods, only three monks remained as caretakers. One can imagine what they availed in the vast complex, in which soldiers and their women were living, cooking, washing, and disregarding—even perhaps trying to desecrate—the painted images of the “infidels.” In the last quarter of the nineteenth century an economic upswing, the result of independence achieved in a number of Balkan countries, and lavish gifts from Russia contributed to a wave of restoration. But by that time much of the original medieval character of the monasteries had already been lost. Even skillful and trained restorers—rare indeed at that time—could not have saved many of the details.

Thus the monasteries at Mount Athos saw the flowering of Byzantine mural painting, and contributed toward it considerably. But they also saw their treasures pillaged and soiled. Now, in the present day, with a sparse and ignorant younger generation which cannot carry on the great tradition, the future looks far from bright.*!

The east side of the peninsula has a mildly rising terrain, and the establishments reach down on even ground to the water’s edge. Since shipping and fishing were important, we often see service buildings near the shore, where boats could be sheltered when the fierce wind blew the waves to a perilous height. As were all monasteries of the Middle Ages, those on Mount Athos were provided with fortifications against pirates and other raiders attracted by the treasures accumulated there. One of the earliest establishments, Vatopedi (PI. 6A), still displays its sturdy bleak citadel-like walls. Expanding in later centuries when life was more friendly, it made use of the outer walls as foundations for further construction. The upper stories were frail, usually built of wood, and fell prey to frequent fires. The large court (Pl. 7A) has an extended pavement, trodden smooth by the feet of monks and pilgrims through many centuries. The lead-covered domes of the churches have the outline of St. Mark’s in Venice. Fountains of pure water welcome the traveler.

The katholikon, or main church (Pl. 7C), placed as usual in the center of the courtyard, offers a display of taste ranging from inspiring manuscripts and finely chased enamels of the thirteenth century to factory-made chandeliers of the nineteenth. The gifts of powerful donors had to be exhibited; this is why so many lamps in so many styles hang in so many churches. Note the magnificent candelabrum at the right, resting on crouching lions, so characteristic of Eastern Christianity. The lion was known from life by the early Christians of Africa and Asia Minor, and was realistically rendered, while the West long represented it rather as a dog with a human face. As a backdrop to the scene stands the elaborate iconostasis, hung with icons and curtained in velvet, which screens the altar from public view. In the tall, narrow, domed stand at the left center, that particular icon is exhibited which has bearing on the day or season. Flowers, blessed by use in the service, are strewn on the floor after special ceremonies.

The trapeza, or refectory (PI. 6B), has plain stone slabs as tables, but the walls are richly painted with religious subjects. Life-size figures of the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation occupy the two niches, separated by the masonry bay. In the upper left is the Feast of Abraham, at the right the Last Supper. In the large curvature of the bay Mother and Child sit enthroned, surrounded by apostles and saints. The wall paintings were periodically “refreshed”—sometimes all too effectively—and dating and authorship are thus rendered uncertain. For other illustrations from Vatopedi, see Pls. 66C and 88B.

Lavra, the earliest and largest of the foundations, also went through many changes. The passageway to the church, now enclosed in nineteenth century glass of dubious taste, displays a mural of the Last Judgment (PI. 9A). The monstrous maw of Hell swallowing the wicked is frequently encountered in Late Byzantine painting. The categorical divisions with their explanatory text, the harsh coloring, and the folkloristic flowered frieze running the length of the benches show how benevolent but crude “reconstruction” can eradicate vestiges of earlier centuries. (See also PI. 65B and C.)

Also on the east side of the peninsula stands Iviron (PI. 10A), another of the larger and more important monasteries. It was founded in 980, traditionally with the approval of Athanasius.** It was in its harbor that the Virgin’s boat is said to have found refuge from the roaring storm. The hills, thickly wooded even today, that rise behind the complex, offer a wide view of the Holy Mountain, which is often wreathed in clouds. Since wood was the only material at hand for cooking and heating and even for much of the building, fire has done much damage here, as among most of the monasteries on Mount Athos. But the great gate tower stands in medieval massivity.

Lord Curzon who visited Iviron in 1831 judged the monastery to be even larger than Lavra or Vatopedi at that time, and called it a fortified town.” (See also Pl. 24B.) Curzon spent some time in the library, and noted an octavo manuscript of Sophocles and a Coptic psalter with Arabic translation, as well as superb specimens of Greek manuscripts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the works of SS. Chrysostom and Basil, and a large folio New Testament executed in magnificent calligraphy, its red velvet binding an art piece in itself. His rather cursory statistics mention some 5,000 printed books, 2,000 manuscripts on paper, 1,000 manuscripts on vellum—many of them immensely thick quartos, as much as 18 inches square and 6 inches through. Considering the destruction of time and the diminishing number of monks, it is reassuring that the Greek Ministry of Religion and Education, through its Archaeological Service, has classified and inventoried the Iviron Library as one of the most important on Mount Athos today.” There are still close to 1,400 manuscripts and 15,000 printed books on hand, many of them first editions; the overwhelming majority of them are in Greek, but Russian and other Slavic languages, Latin and West European tongues are also represented.

The most imposing position on the west coast is held by the monastery of Simopetra (Pl. 8A). It stands on fortress-like abutments on an isolated rock, its height greatly accentuated by the steep cliffs that fall away below it. Since its foundation around the mid-fourteenth century, it has been several times laid waste by fire, and little could be saved from earlier days. Even its katholikon is without wall painting. Altogether some two dozen monks live in this romantic but forsaken abode, mostly Greeks, some from Asia Minor.

The monastery of Grigoriou (Pl. 9C ) was founded in the late thirteenth century by Gregory, a monk from Mount Sinai. The present building, constructed with donations from a Moldavian prince (Romania), is of late eighteenth century, and its frescoes date from about the same time, with recent “refreshings.” *! Its compact outline is more like that of a palace than of a fortress; modern cement piers like elegant columns support the superstructure. The painstakingly constructed terraces grew vegetables, olives and other fruits for the use of the monks. (Many of the monks never tasted meat, and allowed themselves fish only on special feast days. ) Beyond, stretch the rocky bluffs of the west coast, heavily wooded in patches and, owing to the absence of grazing animals, luxuriant with the rare wildflowers of the seasons.

The monastery of Panteleimon (PI. 8B), or Russiko, as it is popularly known, is built on a gentle slope and is one of the largest establishments on the peninsula. It was founded by Russian monks, as the name implies. Walking its streets, one has the impression of being transported to a nineteenth century Russian town as described by Gogol and Turgenev. The gilded sheen has faded from the onion domes. Exteriors and interiors show the melancholy marks of decay. But they are still reminders of the great attraction that this place had for the Russians before World War IJ. At one time Russian monks outnumbered the Greeks on the peninsula.” The refectory, enlarged at the end of the nineteenth century to seat eight hundred monks, was not sufficient to accommodate all the religious at one serving.

Several four- and five-story modern buildings line the shore, where the numerous Russian pilgrims who came by boat on the way to or from the Holy Land could lodge. The Athos monks in their free time carved crosses and other religious objects of wood with an admirable delicacy, in a special style; what is sold today is less than a shadow of the craft. The visitor is received in a vast, once-magnificent audience hall, the walls hung with the dusty portraits of Russian and Balkan rulers. As the amenities of welcome are being offered, one can notice that the velvet of one’s armchair is split and that the lace doily on the table falls to shreds at a touch. The monumental dining hall once catering to the pilgrims is now locked, and sea birds flying in and out of the broken windows bring the only life to it. The pier is in dire need of repair, and the frail old gatekeeper merely waves one goodbye, lying pale on his sagging divan.

The monastery of Dionysiou, founded in mid-fourteenth century by Dionysius of Kastoria, has the patina of ages upon it, as one of the very few that for centuries has had no destructive fires within its walls. A steep stone-paved walk leads upward from the sea to its one gate, which could have served a medieval castle. From the narrow dilapidated balconies, supported by aged struts, an inspiring panorama opens across the water toward the west, where Mount Olympus stands (PI. 10B ). In the refectory (PI. 10C and D) the monks sit before rigorously scrubbed wooden tables on benches without backs. The crude cabinet under the pulpit shows the simple taste of the last generation. In strong contrast is the golden Rococo pulpit with its perforated pattern of vines. On the lectern, shaped like an eagle with spread wings, lies the book which is read aloud during the meal. The monastery is said to possess unrestored murals by the Cretan painter Zorzi from the mid-sixteenth century.*1 Among more frequently encountered subjects (Pl. 10C), the Ladder of St. John Climacos depicts, with a light touch and vivacious detail, the progress of the monastic soul toward final salvation. Climacos, born in Palestine in the late sixth century, was a monk at Mount Sinai and for a while a hermit in the Arabian Desert. He wrote a classic work on ascetic philosophy called The Climax or Ladder of Perfection, hence his nickname.

As a special favor the abbot conducted us down into the foundations to see a chapel in the earliest part of the structure. After descending several flights of very narrow stairs, in pitch darkness, by a wavering candle flame, we found ourselves in a tiny room with a simple wooden iconostasis half empty of icons—and whatever wall painting was visible was shockingly bright and new.

We arrived in late afternoon at Dochiariou, the last of the monasteries visited. Luckily the big gate was still open, but we had to wait for the evening service to come to an end. The mellow voices of the monks had an overtone of lament; the a cappella singing gave the traditional melodies an eerie timbre as they floated out over the courtyard where we sat on a bench. The katholikon is a tall, majestic church, said to be the largest on Athos. We were admitted as the candles were being extinguished; smoke floated in the air mixed with the musky aroma of incense. The bearded old monks were leaving, some of them in whispered conversation. The vast interior with its rich iconostasis is painted throughout—walls and ceiling—said to be the work of Cretan painters from the second half of the sixteenth century.

Today, the most authentic paintings can be found high in a dome or a gallery, preserved by the protected position and out of easy reach of a restoring brush. The awe-inspiring Pantocrator, Christ in Judgment, in the dome (PI. 9B), is placed with great skill so as to show no distortion from any point. The colorful folds of the garments contrast with the expressive, majestic face. Under Him, the heavenly hierarchy form a circle, and their proportions and color harmonies make His figure seem still more elevated above the church floor where we stand. As the parting sun strikes into the lofty lantern, the cupola glows with golden warmth and color. One understands the constant inspiration, the pride of belonging there that emanates from the abbot. As he speaks of historians who previously visited the monastery, his eye scans lovingly the seascape and the dark mountains iridescent in the sunset.

Before the peninsula joins the mainland, it narrows to a strip of land something over a mile wide, across which the Persian king Xerxes undertook to drive a canal. A low stone wall closes off the celibatic retreat of the monks from the outside world; and just beyond it, on the western shore, a village of some ninety small houses, called Prosfori, lies, clustered around a medieval building which gives the popular name Pyrgos (the tower) to the place. Once this was an outpost of the monastery Vatopedi, and it is still the last point where women and female animals may go (Pl. 7B). In its present form the tower was built by Andronicus II (1260-1832), but it has been suggested that it stands on an earlier foundation. It served as living quarters for the wife of the Byzantine emperor while he was doing penance on the Holy Mountain. Sunshine falls through long cracks in the masonry. The tower has an inner structure of wood, probably not much younger than the stonework. Through its open windows vistas are framed into idyllic landscapes. Below, the sea reveals in emerald clarity pebbles, fish, and the crumbled walls of a submerged settlement several yards below the surface. Today again a noble lady is hostess there, benefactress of the whole village. Spartan-furnished rooms, with a candle set beside the rough bedstead, await those who return from that unique experience—a visit to Mount Athos.

In 1839 a French glass painter and art collector, A. N. Didron, while staying at Mount Athos noted that although the dates of the many murals extended through centuries, certain religious scenes were repeated almost exactly. Frescoes were being painted at the time of his visit. One monk spread fresh plaster on the wall; the master—without the use of a cartoon or model— sketched the composition. A pupil filled in the outline with colors, while another gilded the halos or lettered the inscriptions and still another executed the ornamentation. Beginners were set to grinding and mixing colors. If any question arose, the solution was sought in their “Primer of Painting,” a much-thumbed manuscript which they said was three hundred years old. The manuscript was credited to one Dionysius, or Denys, monk of Fourna, who in turn credited his master for the knowledge. Try as he would, Didron could not acquire the painter’s vade mecum, which the monk called “his eyes and hands.” So he chose what appeared the oldest and best edition and had it copied at the monastery. It was published in Paris in 1845.74

It must be pointed out that the Byzantine artistic canon was held to be as much the revelation of truth as was the Holy Writ, and therefore all repetitions and multiplications had to adhere to tradition. It was not the aim to entertain or delight, but to instruct and edify. Naturalism was irrelevant. In Byzantine art a scene was not presented from a single visual angle; one section might be looked at from above, another from below—with the purpose of obtaining emphasis and guiding the eye. The often repeated gestures stem from the language of hands which came down from ancient Greek drama.*® Denys’s “Primer” is based on the ruling of the Council of Nicaea that the structure of the painting is not the invention of the painter, but must preserve the statutory rules and traditions of the Universal Church. The first section of his manuscript gives technical directions on how to prepare the materials. The second describes the scenes to be represented, giving their protagonists and the symbols which identify them. The third section instructs the painter what scenes should be assigned to what part of a building; and the last lays down details for the depiction of Jesus, the Trinity, Mary, and the saints, their expressions, gestures, garments, and the proper colors for various occasions. Thus it is clear that the painters of Mount Athos, though rarely innovators, were the guardians of the Byzantine iconographical tradition. Since traveling students came to them and Athonite painters journeyed far and wide, this artistic tradition was long upheld, and spread throughout much of the Orthodox world.

Three death scenes (Pl. 11) demonstrate that while following the vade mecum of Orthodox painting, the personality of the painter nevertheless comes through. Athanasius the Athonite, founder of Lavra, was born in Trebizond (ca. 920-1003). When he died, he was abbot general of sixty communities of hermits and monks, all on Mount Athos. It is only natural that his life as a paragon should be painted again and again. The Death of St. Athanasius (Pl. 11A), attributed to a painter of the Cretan School from the early sixteenth century, follows the strict principles which ruled Byzantine painting at the time. The saint is seen lying in state within the walls of his monastery, surrounded by his followers who are crowded into a tight arc of figures. In the background, scenes of his early life are depicted—the study of holy books in a hermit’s cave, consultation with an ancient stylite saint on his column who is being fed by means of a basket pulled up by a rope. In the upper left corner an angel carries Athanasius’ soul in the form of an infant to Paradise. In the center a sixteenth century church is represented _—not, as would be historically correct, one from the tenth century. Other paintings from Lavra are shown on Pls. 60C, 62C, 65B.

Very similar in composition is the Death of St. Ephraim, at Dochiariou (Pl. 11B). This popular hermit saint, who died about 870, was a native of Mesopotamia, the head of a school, and later a monk who devoted his days to writing. His work, written in Syrian, was translated early into Armenian, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic. In the mural, which was executed in 1568 by a painter of the Cretan school, Ephraim lies in the open. The semicircular mounds indicate hills. An icon is laid on his breast, as with Athanasius. Tall candles burn at his head, and a priest swings a censer while a fellow monk leans down to catch his last words.

A mural by an Athonite painter showing the same subject (Pl. 11C) extends along the exterior wall of the church of Paraskevi (Holy Friday) in Siatista in western Macedonia, on the important trade route that leads into the Danubian Valley. It is dated 1611. The scene follows established rules, but a certain loosening of the composition is noticeable. Monks, light- and dark-cowled, flock to pay their respects. An aged man is carried in on a ladder. Note the figure on a mule and the old man with a bundle over his shoulder (right) that appear also in the earlier composition. As in other versions, his soul is carried to Heaven in the form of an infant. Here some fifteen feet of wall are given to concentrated storytelling. Many details are not clearly separated, and blend into a tapestry-like composition; the “message” seems somewhat subordinated to the decorative effect. Colors are monotone—white, brick-red, brown, and black. The row of saints in the lower section, carefully differentiated in type and labeled, are medallion-like in appearance because of their great halos. A red strip edged in white separates the two subjects, a method encountered in other parts of Macedonia, as well as on the island of Crete. Another section of these murals can be seen on PI. 97A.

This arrangement in death and burial scenes remained popular, and occurs even on small icons in many lands into the nineteenth century. The prototype is the composition prescribed for the Dormition of the Virgin (see Pls. 15C and 19A).

An idea may have been gained by now of the high standard of painting in places of great importance and culture and in the isolation of monasteries, where the art could be preserved. But the simple folk of the villages also cared much that their places of worship should be worthy of their religion. In unknown, unimportant, and seldom visited regions, icons and murals are preserved which testify to this ideal.

Macedonia, a land with a long and great historical past, gave birth to such different personalities as Alexander the Great and Mustafa Kemal. To draw its borders would be difficult, because in various periods the demarcations differed. The Macedonians—with territory now divided between Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia—had enough historical, national, and religious identity to force Belgrade to acknowledge a separate Macedonian Orthodox Church, which has an archbishopric at the ancient town of Ohrid although recognizing the Serbian patriarch in the capital. The region was trodden by numberless folk driven away from their birthplaces. Although separated on the north by mountain ranges, it was not far from the Danubian Valley, the source and goal of much of its commerce. It shows the impact of Roman, Orthodox, and finally Turkish influences that met on its ground. It took over many cultural traits from Greece, but even today Greek Macedonia is regarded as “foreign” territory by the Athenians.

While the Roman visits either of Peter or of Paul are far from clarified, Paul’s presence in Greece, Macedonia, and Crete is documented in some detail in the Bible. The Apostle to the Gentiles preached in Thessaloniki in the winter of 49-50 of our era. He founded a church in In 1839 a French glass painter and art collector, A. N. Didron, while staying at Mount Athos noted that although the dates of the many murals extended through centuries, certain religious scenes were repeated almost exactly. Frescoes were being painted at the time of his visit. One monk spread fresh plaster on the wall; the master—without the use of a cartoon or model— sketched the composition. A pupil filled in the outline with colors, while another gilded the halos or lettered the inscriptions and still another executed the ornamentation. Beginners were set to grinding and mixing colors. If any question arose, the solution was sought in their “Primer of Painting,” a much-thumbed manuscript which they said was three hundred years old. The manuscript was credited to one Dionysius, or Denys, monk of Fourna, who in turn credited his master for the knowledge. Try as he would, Didron could not acquire the painter’s vade mecum, which the monk called “his eyes and hands.” So he chose what appeared the oldest and best edition and had it copied at the monastery. It was published in Paris in 1845.74

It must be pointed out that the Byzantine artistic canon was held to be as much the revelation of truth as was the Holy Writ, and therefore all repetitions and multiplications had to adhere to tradition. It was not the aim to entertain or delight, but to instruct and edify. Naturalism was irrelevant. In Byzantine art a scene was not presented from a single visual angle; one section might be looked at from above, another from below—with the purpose of obtaining emphasis and guiding the eye. The often repeated gestures stem from the language of hands which came down from ancient Greek drama.*® Denys’s “Primer” is based on the ruling of the Council of Nicaea that the structure of the painting is not the invention of the painter, but must preserve the statutory rules and traditions of the Universal Church. The first section of his manuscript gives technical directions on how to prepare the materials. The second describes the scenes to be represented, giving their protagonists and the symbols which identify them. The third section instructs the painter what scenes should be assigned to what part of a building; and the last lays down details for the depiction of Jesus, the Trinity, Mary, and the saints, their expressions, gestures, garments, and the proper colors for various occasions. Thus it is clear that the painters of Mount Athos, though rarely innovators, were the guardians of the Byzantine iconographical tradition. Since traveling students came to them and Athonite painters journeyed far and wide, this artistic tradition was long upheld, and spread throughout much of the Orthodox world.

Three death scenes (Pl. 11) demonstrate that while following the vade mecum of Orthodox painting, the personality of the painter nevertheless comes through. Athanasius the Athonite, founder of Lavra, was born in Trebizond (ca. 920-1003). When he died, he was abbot general of sixty communities of hermits and monks, all on Mount Athos. It is only natural that his life as a paragon should be painted again and again. The Death of St. Athanasius (Pl. 11A), attributed to a painter of the Cretan School from the early sixteenth century, follows the strict principles which ruled Byzantine painting at the time. The saint is seen lying in state within the walls of his monastery, surrounded by his followers who are crowded into a tight arc of figures. In the background, scenes of his early life are depicted—the study of holy books in a hermit’s cave, consultation with an ancient stylite saint on his column who is being fed by means of a basket pulled up by a rope. In the upper left corner an angel carries Athanasius’ soul in the form of an infant to Paradise. In the center a sixteenth century church is represented _—not, as would be historically correct, one from the tenth century. Other paintings from Lavra are shown on Pls. 60C, 62C, 65B. 

Very similar in composition is the Death of St. Ephraim, at Dochiariou (Pl. 11B). This popular hermit saint, who died about 870, was a native of Mesopotamia, the head of a school, and later a monk who devoted his days to writing. His work, written in Syrian, was translated early into Armenian, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic. In the mural, which was executed in 1568 by a painter of the Cretan school, Ephraim lies in the open. The semicircular mounds indicate hills. An icon is laid on his breast, as with Athanasius. Tall candles burn at his head, and a priest swings a censer while a fellow monk leans down to catch his last words.

A mural by an Athonite painter showing the same subject (Pl. 11C) extends along the exterior wall of the church of Paraskevi (Holy Friday) in Siatista in western Macedonia, on the important trade route that leads into the Danubian Valley. It is dated 1611. The scene follows established rules, but a certain loosening of the composition is noticeable. Monks, light- and dark-cowled, flock to pay their respects. An aged man is carried in on a ladder. Note the figure on a mule and the old man with a bundle over his shoulder (right) that appear also in the earlier composition. As in other versions, his soul is carried to Heaven in the form of an infant. Here some fifteen feet of wall are given to concentrated storytelling. Many details are not clearly separated, and blend into a tapestry-like composition; the “message” seems somewhat subordinated to the decorative effect. Colors are monotone—white, brick-red, brown, and black. The row of saints in the lower section, carefully differentiated in type and labeled, are medallion-like in appearance because of their great halos. A red strip edged in white separates the two subjects, a method encountered in other parts of Macedonia, as well as on the island of Crete. Another section of these murals can be seen on PI. 97A.

This arrangement in death and burial scenes remained popular, and occurs even on small icons in many lands into the nineteenth century. The prototype is the composition prescribed for the Dormition of the Virgin (see Pls. 15C and 19A).

An idea may have been gained by now of the high standard of painting in places of great importance and culture and in the isolation of monasteries, where the art could be preserved. But the simple folk of the villages also cared much that their places of worship should be worthy of their religion. In unknown, unimportant, and seldom visited regions, icons and murals are preserved which testify to this ideal.

Macedonia, a land with a long and great historical past, gave birth to such different personalities as Alexander the Great and Mustafa Kemal. To draw its borders would be difficult, because in various periods the demarcations differed. The Macedonians—with territory now divided between Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia—had enough historical, national, and religious identity to force Belgrade to acknowledge a separate Macedonian Orthodox Church, which has an archbishopric at the ancient town of Ohrid although recognizing the Serbian patriarch in the capital. The region was trodden by numberless folk driven away from their birthplaces. Although separated on the north by mountain ranges, it was not far from the Danubian Valley, the source and goal of much of its commerce. It shows the impact of Roman, Orthodox, and finally Turkish influences that met on its ground. It took over many cultural traits from Greece, but even today Greek Macedonia is regarded as “foreign” territory by the Athenians.

While the Roman visits either of Peter or of Paul are far from clarified, Paul’s presence in Greece, Macedonia, and Crete is documented in some detail in the Bible. The Apostle to the Gentiles preached in Thessaloniki in the winter of 49-50 of our era. He founded a church in Thessaloniki for which he had a predilection, and in his Epistle to the Thessalonians there is a special reference to the women of the city. He spoke in Greek, spreading the Gospel in the common language of the eastern Mediterranean.

Most of Macedonia came under Turkish rule in 1371 and by 1407 was irretrievably lost. Large tracts of land were bestowed upon Ottoman chiefs, and they in return furnished soldiers for the Moslem forces, drawn from the population on their properties. The Orthodox religion was kept up stanchly by the peasants, aided by the local priest. His life differed little from that of his farming neighbors. By Orthodox rules he should marry and have children (only the monks are celibate). And just because he lived like the villagers, in his little whitewashed house with its roofed porch, looking out upon the everyday life of the community, he grew intimate with the joys and sorrows of his parishioners. The Christian religion was generally tolerated as long as it was not conducive to visible national demonstrations against the Turkish overlords. As few larger cities existed, there were few places where the population was dense. For the Christian believers, small clan chapels or village churches sufficed. Much feuding went on between the pashas and the Porte, and the surveillance of the population was sometimes lax, sometimes eased with bribes. By the eighteenth century the local governors had become practically independent—which meant on occasion still less rigidity in keeping the established rules.

The manors of the well-to-do were enclosed within walls, and comprised barns, sheds, various outhouses, as well as dwellings. It was not difficult to disguise the family chapel that had nestled among these, often so small that it could hold no more than ten or twenty. A porch might be placed around it, over which the old roof was skillfully extended, or a lattice before it, reaching to the eaves. Some twenty such concealed churches can be found in the town of Verroia alone (the biblical Beroea). Ayios Christos, one of the earliest, contains frescoes signed Kalergis and dated 1815—among them two kneeling angels which, through the weightlessness of their bodies and the grace of their design, compare with those of the fifteenth century Baldovinetti (see also Pl. 23). Other churches date from the sixteenth century, while some murals seem to be from the mid-seventeenth and were refurbished as late as 1804 and even 1858—witnesses to the persistence of these people.

West of Verroia lies Siatista, somewhat off the present road, on an elevated incline of a hill that leads to a mountain pass, still used by pack trains of mules. Sections of the exterior mural of the church of St. Paraskevi are reproduced on Pls. 11C and 974A. The interior shows the pride which the wealthy community took in its place of worship. The elaborate woodwork was once heavily gilded, as were the backgrounds and halos in the murals. It seems that after an uprising against the Turks, the Christians, in fear of losing the pride of their town, smeared the church interior with charcoal dust—available in abundance here, where charcoal is burned. Only spots of the gold of a halo and a few glimpses of lively coloring glint through the smoky layer, awaiting expert hands to reveal the beauty of the decoration.

Where the borders of Greece, Albania, and Yugoslavia meet, there are little-disturbed river valleys with sheep grazing along the shores, delightful lakes framed by rugged mountain ranges. At a distance, the town of Kastoria, on a hilly peninsula, shimmers like a mirage across its lake. On entering the place, one sees immediately the lively tempo of an energetic mountain people. Owing to its geographical position, Kastoria has been a flourishing commercial center since pre-Roman times. The town takes its name from the Greek kastor, beaver, which abounded in the region. The tradition of working fur remains a main source of wealth and craftsmanship today. The prosperous merchants built opulent houses, sometimes three stories high, and spent much on their decoration. Typical are the deep bay windows, richly carpeted and strewn with velvet and embroidered cushions, the lace-like wood carving, the flower-painted paneling, and the patterns in colored glass. The use of gilding and white lacquer shows that the mode of the Baroque and Rococo was known here also.

Altogether more than sixty painted churches and chapels are found in and around Kastoria. The steep hillside is dotted with small stone buildings commanding a magnificent view (PI. 14A), and only the initiate will recognize them as chapels by the tiny shell-like apses. They date from the tenth and eleventh centuries to the seventeenth and even later.*! Many can be approached only up rough footpaths or mulepaths. Unfortunately, few of the population are aware what national and art-historical significance such edifices have. This writer called on the Metropolitan of Kastoria. After the customary courtesies—the offering of a fruit conserve, the ouzo (native brandy), the tiny cup of Turkish-style coffee—I mentioned the damage to murals and icons from the careless placing of tapers and candles. The tall, bearded bishop, erect in his high chair, leaning on his silver-topped staff, fingering a jeweled cross on his breast, answered in deep-toned indignation that he could not accept criticism of the way his flock chose to worship. Icons often suffer also from a yearly washing by the devout with rosewater, wine, or a mixture of water and vinegar. While the cleaning might brighten the colors for a time, in the long run it dulls the picture.

The church of Anargyri is one of the largest in the town, a three-aisled basilica, dedicated to the mendicant “healing” saints—best known of whom are Cosmos, Damian, and Panteleimon (Pl. 14B). Dating from the tenth and eleventh centuries, it is constructed mostly of brick, with some stone and heavy mortar in between, laid in a decorative pattern. The narthex, or vestibule, is like a separate wing across the front of the building, behind which rises the high clerestory that lights the nave. Remnants of frescoes can still be discerned on the exterior walls. Inside, covering walls and ceiling, the entire Orthodox repertory of saints and scenes is on display. Because of its somewhat remote situation, the paintings have suffered little and are now being cleaned by a new method which does minimum damage to the original lines and colors. For details of the murals see Pls. 22B, 23C, 82B, 95C.

The former monastery and pilgrim shrine of Mavriotissa is idyllically situated at the tip of the peninsula, under enormous plane trees (PI. 15A), about half an hour’s walk along the shore from the center of the town. Two chapels were joined here; the larger and taller, with an apse (right), dates from the eleventh century, the smaller from the sixteenth. Traces of exterior murals remain (Pl. 14C). The door at the left leads into a large bare narthex, with a mural of the Last Judgment (PI. 15B). Worn and faded though it is, it has not been defaced or glaringly repainted. The Saviour sits enthroned as judge, flanked by the Virgin Mary and the Baptist as intercessors and surrounded by the company of apostles and the blessed. Below Him are the Cross, the Dove, and the Book, symbols of the Godhead, likewise enthroned and guarded by archangels. Two figures kneel at the foot—some say the donors, others Adam and Eve as symbols of redeemed mankind. A river of fire descends from the foot of the Throne, and archangels with long spears are thrusting the wicked into the curling flames. A comparison with the vast mosaic of this same subject at Torcello near Venice shows revealing similarities (PI. 15D). The dates of these two Judgments are close to each other: the mural is assigned to the end of the twelfth, the mosaic to early thirteenth century. The former shows in various decorative details the tradition and feeling of mosaicwork. Both seem to have been drawn from an Orthodox prototype.

The inside of this same wall is occupied by murals of the Crucifixion and the Dormition of the Virgin. The latter scene (PI. 15C) follows the traditional arrangement which served as model for death and burial scenes of other saintly personages in Byzantine art. One sees the apostles gathered about the bier—Peter, with a censer, at the head, Paul at the foot. Another figure leans down to catch the last words—legend has it that she spoke again after expiring. Christ himself takes up her soul as a white-clad infant whom angels reach down to receive. The inclusion of the two figures in front of the bier—the importunate Jew and the punishing angel from a late legend—places the painting as not before the end of the fourteenth century.

Not only in Macedonia but in other Balkan lands, frescoes, whitewashed for generations, are now being uncovered, revealing how generally and how well the craft was practiced even after the fall of Constantinople.

While in the wide areas of the Orthodox faith, the religious service was conducted in the language of the country, paintings used a visual language that was understood everywhere. Slowly each country developed preferences in its manner of painting, but greater differences can be observed in the architecture.

Bulgaria, a neighbor to Byzantium, fell in 1896 to the Turkish power and remained under it until 1878. After the first century or so, the occupation lost much of its rigor. As elsewhere, the Turkish administration was lenient in matters of religion, so long as it did not become ostentatious. The church in Bulgaria was placed by the Turks under the patriarch of Constantinople. A remarkable example of the persistence of tradition is the monastery of Rila, Bulgaria (PI. 16B), which is situated in a picturesque gorge surrounded by forest-clad mountains that rise to some eight thousand feet. The largest and wealthiest of Bulgarian monasteries, Rila, was founded in the mid-fourteenth century—the square tower is datable at 1335—and remained an active center whence religious stimulus and artistic influence could be dispersed throughout the land.** It is known that connections were kept up with the Athonite monasteries, some of which were sustained by contributions from the Bulgarian people. Indeed, today Chilandari has more Bulgarian than Serbian monks.

This complex shows well how monastic architecture, leaning on the tradition of Mount Athos, has been adapted in the hands of regional craftsmen. Like neighboring Balkan monasteries, it is built of stone, with some brick, rubble, and mortar, smoothed over with plaster, and whitewashed. Since the monastic principle was that of seclusion, the attractive face of the establishment looks onto the star-shaped court (PI. 16C). A great fire destroyed most of the complex in 1833. The Turkish authorities permitted rebuilding under the stipulation that the old dimensions be kept. Today it is impossible to judge whether this dictum was strictly adhered to— but what now stands (the picture was taken in 1932) is certainly imposing. In the foreground is the brown- and white-striped church, typically Byzantine in line, with a number of little domes sheathed in metal. The interior (Pl. 16D), finished around 1847, displays exquisite carving and sumptuous gilding. Where there is no woodwork, the walls are bright with murals.

The sometimes skeptical visitor is nearly always assured that everything in these old buildings is unchanged, but the sight of a monk repainting a section of the church atrium (Pl. 16A) contradicts the statement. Damaged and faded sections were all too often freshened by persons who lacked the understanding of how to conserve without changing. The familiar subject of the Last Judgment, so obviously “restored” (PI. 17A), loses nearly completely the medieval concept in its modern garb. (Compare Pl. 15B and D.)

On the northeastern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains lies Moldavia, a former principality. The monastery of Sucevita, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, is the largest of thirteen monasteries there with churches painted outside and inside (PI. 17C). Its square ground plan still recalls a medieval fortress. The massive block of the living quarters has little architectural refinement. The style of the church itself harks back to wooden prototypes, which preceded masonry construction in the timber-rich region. The tendency was to keep all religious buildings modest, and often chapels or churches were sunk a half-story into the ground.

Religious establishments received not only subsidy from their patrons but gifts such as jewelry, illuminated manuscripts and, later, printed books. The imagination of the regional painter was fertilized by these and later by woodcuts which were produced in the land throughout the Turkish occupation. The painters were often monks, but the names of itinerant lay craftsmen are also recorded, some of them said to have come from Macedonia.

The outside apse of the church at Sucevita shows an extended shingle roof, reminder of the tradition of the wooden churches (Pl. 17B). Painted panels in the arched surface alternate with those placed on the wide pilasters, giving through the different levels a play of sun and shade. Represented on the exterior are: the Heavenly Host, the Child Emmanuel, the Virgin, bishops, martyrs, and hermits. Such wall paintings also commemorate historical events, including the fall of Constantinople.

Extremely effective is the representation of the Spiritual Ladder of St. John Climacos, painted in 1582 (Pl. 17D). Angels nudge the monks forward in their upward climb, the wedge-shaped wings give the composition rhythmic emphasis. Each rung of the Ladder represents a virtue, and the humans who reach the top are received by the Lord at what looks like the open trapdoor of a hayloft. The paintings were retouched in 1882 in a “barbarous way’;*° again only the upper sections, difficult to reach, preserve in patches their older flavor.

Besides murals, the painters also furnished icons on wood and, from the eighteenth century on, holy pictures on glass. These, hanging in a peasant house, with their vivid colors gave a religious touch to the room and at the same time were a declaration of Orthodox faith. Talented hands carved benches and other church furniture. Unavoidably, oriental and Turkish motifs were mixed in, lending the work strong folkloristic flavor.

Across the border toward the east lay the vast territory under Russian dominance. This country also was converted to Christianity from Constantinople. Its twelfth and thirteenth century art and architecture, as much as remains, show strong Byzantine influence. But, as the country’s power grew and the Gospel was spread in the language, the Russian arts and crafts took on more and more national characteristics. While the general plan of a church or the composition of a holy painting reveals the common ancestry with other Orthodox lands, from the fifteenth or sixteenth century onward Russian art wrote its own history.

Serbia, an old kingdom, is the nucleus of present-day Yugoslavia which comprises also Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Hercegovina, Dalmatia, Montenegro, and a part of southern Hungary. Belgrade, the capital, stands at the great bend of the Danube, where the river turns at right angles and flows eastward. The history of the Serbians is perhaps the most turbulent of all the Balkan States. Always excellent and courageous fighters, with Slavic fanaticism for what they thought was right, they had to struggle for independence under cruel pressure, on one side from Venice and Hungary serving Rome, and on the other side from the Byzantine Empire representing the Greek Church. By the mid-twelfth century Serbia was a unified nation and had established a dynasty that reigned for nearly two hundred years, a continuity rare in those times. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their Orthodox monasteries and churches show national spirit and style.

From the first onslaught of the Turks in the mid-fourteenth century, the Serbs allied with the Hungarians to stem the advance. But the constant squabbles and scheming among Christians weakened the Serbian position, and in 1371, on the field by the Maritsa River, the first decisive defeat was delivered by the Turks. A few years later the disaster at Kossovo took the flower of Serbian aristocracy and military leadership. Nevertheless, for seventy years, by paying tribute to the sultan, Serbia was able to maintain a government under its own rulers. A number of alliances with Western powers were tried unsuccessfully, and in 1459 the country was fully occupied by a large Turkish army. Some two decades later Turkish dominance of the Balkans was complete. The only fragments of land to retain independence were the city republic of Ragusa, today Dubrovnik (see Pls. 834B, 835A), and the tiny mountain principality of Montenegro. Under Suleiman I, the Turks resumed their relentless forward march north along the Danubian plain. After the battle of Mohacs, Hungary’s power was also broken. Between 1550 and 1648, when the West was fighting its wars of religion, the Ottoman Empire extended its power from the northwest Carpathian mountain range of Hungary to the Adriatic shores of Hercegovina with a gigantic hinterland through Asia Minor and along the coast of North Africa.

Although the land was submerged in a Moslem sea, the Serbian Orthodox Church kept the national spirit alive. In 1557 the Grand Vizier, Mehmed Sokolovic, a native of Hercegovina, revived the patriarchate of Pec (Ipek); and while the nation’s literature virtually ceased to exist, Serbian was spoken by the local beys and pashas during the sixteenth century and freely used in correspondence between the Porte and Ragusa and some Hungarian princes in the north.

The church at Sopocani (PI. 18A) began as a burial chapel for the Serbian King Uros I, who died as the monk Simeon at the monastery of Chilandari, Mount Athos, in the mid-thirteenth century. It was first a simple single-nave church; later a chapel was added, surmounted by a small cupola. The semicircular apse is characteristic of buildings in Byzantine style. Greatly damaged by the Turks, the church and the monastery attached to it were deserted for a time, but its frescoes are now well restored and are considered by many the finest example of Serbian art of that period.*®

The Dormition of the Virgin (PI. 19A) shows the typical Byzantine composition. Christ stands at Mary’s bier, holding her soul as an infant in His arms, amid the grieving apostles. Above, in accord with Byzantine practice which combines various episodes of a story within one picture, the apostles are seen being transported by angels in cloud boats to her bedside. Christ is seen again in a mandorla in Heaven. The grouping has rhythmic grace; the colors are characteristically mild and harmonious. Ocher, green, and violet predominate, and parts of the background were once gilded. The coloring brings out the variety in the folds of the garments. The postures and gestures, as well as facial expression, communicate sorrow.

On the curving wall of the apse, a touching array of saintly witnesses attends the Mass ( Pls. 18B and 19B). The text on their scrolls is in Cyrillic lettering.

Pec was the seat of the Orthodox patriarchate, and its first metropolitan church was built in the early thirteenth century, dedicated to the Holy Apostles. Within a few decades churches were added to left and right, thus achieving more breadth than length in the complex (Pl. 20C). Each of the additions is different enough in detail to be noticed, but together they form a harmonious unit. The low apses have a friendly curve, as do the roofs, giving the whole a look of joviality.

The frescoes, originally from the mid-thirteenth century, have been restored and are darkened again by the smudge of tapers, candles, and incense. Even so, the archangel and the warrior saint represented here (Pl. 20A) convey the sense of energy and readiness. Their weapons record mid-thirteenth century armature. Note in the figure on the right the bow, the mace, and round target shield slung over a shoulder. In a parallel representation, in the church of Peribleptos in Ohrid, the painter has put his own name and the date on the arc of a bared sword: Master Michael, 1295. The presence of fierce warriors inside the church is not to be wondered at, when we know that Pec was chosen for the patriarchate after an earlier site had to be abandoned as too close to enemy territory.

In the courtyard of the convent of Studenica, founded at the end of the eleventh century, King Milutin had a little church built in 1814 which was named for him: the King’s Church (Pl. 20B ).*® It has pleasant proportions, and its relationship to the space in the court and conventual buildings is worked out delightfully.

With the church of Gracanica (Pl. 214) a more advanced ground plan comes to the fore. Erected in the first half of the fourteenth century on the cross-in-square plan, it has a central cupola with pendentives and four lower domed structures at the corners. Narthex and exonarthex (left) were added some years later. The outside walls are a colorful combination of stone and brick, while for the interior arches only brick was used. Although much ravaged, its elegant lines could be restored to good advantage, and it stands today as a masterpiece of Byzanto-Serbian architecture.

The monastery-church of Mileseva is set among pine forest and pasture land. Founded about the first third of the thirteenth century, the church was restored in the sixteenth century, when its narthex and lateral chapels were added (PI. 21B). The triple apse is unusual in form. The murals, dating from about 1237, are remarkable even among the fine harvest which this century produced in the country. In this rare instance the names of the painters are preserved—but only as Dimitri and Christophorus. In Italy, where Duccio, Giotto, and their contemporaries are heralded as precursors of the Renaissance, little can be found more expressive or better painted than the radiant and eloquent angel at the tomb of Christ (PI. 21C).

Ohrid, on a lake of the same name, is near the border where the Greek and Serbian sectors of Macedonia meet Albania, The church of San Jovan Kaneo is the pride of the small fishing community that lives on the shore (PI. 22A). It was built at the end of the thirteenth century on the cross-in-square plan, with an octagonal cupola, and amazing decorative skill is apparent in its brickwork. One is reminded of some of the small churches at nearby Kastoria in Greece —curiously enough, also a lake region. Another, much larger and more important, church, St. Sophia, stands in Ohrid, where besides numerous objects of fine Byzantine craftsmanship, outstanding murals of the eleventh century have been restored, which will be discussed shortly.

Approaching Manasija, which was built in the early fifteenth century (PI. 24A), one is struck by the similarity of the massive walls and towers to some of the Athos monasteries, especially Iviron (see Pls. 1OA and 24B). In the Athos prototype, living quarters were added on top of the original walls and windows opened in the medieval masonry. But at Manasija, the walls were left in their forbidding plainness, surrounded by a moat and closing in the compound as originally planned. The church with its smooth stonework presents a contrast to the somber aspect of the citadel—‘“a delicate nut in a powerful shell.” 

Among the murals within this church, the warrior saints(Pl. 25B) are especially well known —and with right. Full-panoplied, with lances, arrows, and swords, they are on the point of going into action. For some, there may be an echo of mosaic tradition in the variety of decorative detail.

The fifteenth century Mercurius from Karyes, Mount Athos (Pl. 25C), is related to the warriors on the Serbian wall. Here again costume and armament are delineated with much attention to detail. This work was recently ascribed to the legendary Manuel Panselinos and placed a century earlier. In the fresco of Pippo Spano (PI. 25A) by the Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno, we have a Western version of the warrior of the mid-fifteenth century, and some elements in this figure, such as the curved sword and the fringes of the shirt, show similarity. But in the spirit there is a marked contrast. The truculence and swashbucklering of the mercenary are here individualized, while in the Byzantine renditions the individual has been elevated to the hero-saint.

In Pl. 22B and C two scenes of the Ascension are compared. The latter, in St. Sophia of Ohrid in Serbian Macedonia, is said to have been painted before 1056. Here seven rainbow colors form the circular glory which is embraced by four angels. The majesty of Christ’s figure, the ingenious arrangement of the rich folds of His garb, and the weightlessness of the whole composition command respect in such an early work. The angels seem to cleave to the outer circle; their draperies are floating in space, as if wafting them upward. The same theme was rendered in Greek Macedonia about the same time (Pl. 22B). The glory here is the almond-shaped mandorla, in four colors. Very recent discoveries in Byzantine murals in widely distant places prove that the stars were part of the original composition, often glimmering with gold. The folds of Christ’s garments are exquisitely drawn. Here the angels are loosened away from the geometric contours of the mandorla, giving the feeling more of upholding than of floating, and the wings are designed to stand away from the central figure.

A cloud boat (PI. 22D) from the Dormition of the Virgin at Sopocani is shown here in detail (see also Pl. 19A). There is an interesting differentiation of the two figures, the intellectual apostle and the celestially sweet angel. The wings are not arranged “realistically” but for decorative necessity. The cloud boat is drop-shaped, rounding toward the earth; its scalloped upper section emphasizes the heads and wings.

The wings of the kneeling angel at Ohrid again are adjusted to the design (PI. 234) and made especially impressive through fortunate coloring—from white to blue to gold. Note the live movement of the figure, in his sweeping obeisance.

Both standing angels (PI. 23B and C) carry long thin staves; they are attending Mother and Child who are pictured in the apse. The angel on the left comes from a church built in the midtwelfth century, in Kurbinovo, near Lake Prespa, Yugoslavia. He has a nervous, fluttering quality and Byzantine attenuation. The swirling folds and wings strengthen the impression of hovering above the earth. The other angel, like as he is, in the apse at Anargyri, Kastoria, is more stable in effect. The undulating garments and the delicacy of the gesturing arms make the figure seem to sway like a lily.

These examples from a little-known area of Christian art, demonstrate amply, in their variety of detail, the spontaneity, coloristic appeal, and storytelling power of Late Byzantine art.

The world of the Orthodox faith, once larger than that of the Roman Church, was ravaged by centuries of Turkish occupation. But even harassed and persecuted, religious activities went on. For religion meant life to the nation, and where life was, there had to be also religion. An easing occurred in the Balkans when the declining Turkish power retired beyond the borders of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Refurbishing of old and construction of new religious establishments went hand in hand. A number of monasteries were built in Croatia alone, just across the Danube from where Serbia was still occupied by the Turks. These buildings reflect taste and techniques of the seventeenth and eighteenth century West, although the iconography adhered in general to the Byzantine tradition.

The process of Westernization can be observed in Orthodox churches in whatever part of Europe or America they may stand. The casual stroller may not even notice that he passes an Orthodox church. But within, the congregation listens still to gripping Byzantine chant and a service that harks back to the earliest years of Christianity. The church is for them an island on which they stand proudly, restating their loyalty to a civilization from which the West borrowed so much, when Byzantium was a world.

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