Download PDF | (Oxford History Of Art) Robin Cormack Byzantine Art, Oxford University Press (2018).
377 Pages
Preface
This part of the Oxford History of Art must expect to engage with a variety of viewpoints which may be mutually incompatible. Byzantine art for some will be seen as a direct continuation of GrecoRoman art.
In this case, it is the next stage in a story in which the art and aesthetic ideas of antiquity move on and are developed in the different circumstances of a society that described itself as Roman, at least until it had doubts in the thirteenth century, but that thought and wrote predominantly in Greek rather than Latin. From such a perspective, Byzantine art emerges as western art and will be seen at its most effective in its continuation and adaptations of classicism. Byzantine intellectuals encouraged this viewpoint when they praised their own art for its ‘lifelike’ appearance, and when they even invoked the famous artists of anti-quity in comparison.
The ninth-century intellectual Photios, who became patriarch and head of the Byzantine church, actually described one church pavement in Constantinople, decorated with inlaid representations of various animals, as a work of art that surpassed that of Phidias, Parrhasios, Praxiteles, and Zeuxis. No one now will take his claim at face value, and most will regard it as eccentric, probably demonstrating book learning rather than an appreciation of ancient art. Yet it is the shock of Byzantine remarks like this that injects a tension into a viewing of Byzantine art as a continuation of antiquity. How true and how false is our perception of Byzantine art and the Byzantines’ perception of their own art?
The opposite standpoint is to put the greatest emphasis on discontinuity with antiquity. The question is then how radically Christian art rejected classical learning and culture because they were unacceptably tinged with paganism, and how far the innovation of Byzantine art lay in the exploration of non-naturalistic imagery. Was there a deliberate and positive move against and away from classical 'illusionism' and towards an art that might better convey and symbolize the eternal values of the Christian religion and the superiority of another world beyond the earthly world? This view lias sometimes stimulated the idea of Byzantine art as an abstract form of art more in line with the orient than with the west, and has encouraged the viewing of Byzantine art as a non-western art.
These two views of Byzantine art are perhaps the extremes and exist with many variations in between. This book aims to deconstruct the extremes by arguing that Byzantium and Byzantine art are products of the Roman world, and that any stark east-west polarity in culture had ahead}
vi PREFACE
been broken down by the internationalism of the Roman empire when Christian art developed.
The method of this book is to accept that these general questions have always dominated the literature on the subject, and that they can only be broken down and tested through analysis of all the specific images and materials that make up the totality of Byzantine art. At the same time, there is no such thing as an innocent eye, and everyone will come to Byzantine art with the baggage of these and other equally broad assumptions as they face the objects.
It follows tha't the quality of any particular Byzantine work will for some lie in its classical echoes, and for others in its bold decorative features, and this may lead to profound disagreement over the nature of the period itself and the materials that hold the best clues to its understanding. Any resolution of these questions must in the end involve treating particular moments of time in depth and with a full awareness of how the Byzantines themselves structured their thought processes. A full art history of Byzantium is also a cultural history of Byzantium.
This probably means that studying Byzantium chronologically can demonstrate the extent and nature of change over the centuries, yet it may involve too restricted a selection of materials; whereas studying it synchronically through chosen themes may allow greater consistency of choice of materials, but distort the period by underestimating the amount of change. The solution here has been to work chronologically, and to impose 'periods' on the full range of Byzantine art history, while admitting that the boundaries are artificial and may overlap. Over a long period of time it emerges that Byzantium sometimes looked to the east for ideas, sometimes to the west, sometimes both ways at once.
The problem of writing about Byzantine art is to indicate both the immensity of the field and the manifold contribution of art-historical literature to its understanding. At the same time, it always seems like a subject in its infancy: there is much to do and no agreement even about the questions or the methods appropriate to this field. My main acknowledgement in this book is perhaps less to the many people who have helped me in all sorts of ways and more to a recognition of all the previous (and current) writers in this field, with their remarkable diversity of interests and methods. In keeping with a book on Byzantium, they will remain anonymous here, although they all know that it is real individuals that make a way of thinking and looking. There has been too little space to do any more than indicate lines of thinking and to expose the material that needs explaining. Until recently, Byzantine art history put a premium on describing and dating its materials.
This for a long time privileged the study of illuminated manuscripts above other art forms, since the miniatures and all the codicological aspects of books made the medium the most amenable one in which to establish precise dates and contexts. But for most people the definitive encounter with Byzantine art will not be the handling of an illuminated book (even if this happens in a remote Orthodox monastery), but to enter into the charismatic space of a decorated church where it is art that controls and orders both mood and thought. It is paradoxical, therefore, to enter Byzantine art through a book, except that it can remind us that Byzantines, too, wanted to write down and record for us precisely that they felt these same emotions on entering the supreme achievement of the whole period, the church of St Sophia at Constantinople.
Manuscript illustration of Constantinople on 22 April 1453. Voyage d'Outremerby Bertraus de la Brocquiere. Fifteenth century. The vista of Constantinople is from the west, showing the city under the final siege of the Ottoman Turks. The western perception was of a fortress city protected by sea and massive land walls. The Golden Horn is on the left. The buildings are here represented in western styles—even St Sophia has been transformed into a Gothic cathedral.
To modern eyes, the life of Jesus Christ marks the turning-point in world art history. He was born at Bethlehem before 4 bce and baptized in the river Jordan in 28 or 29. He died at Jerusalem in 30 or 33. His short period of intensive public activity (one year at the least, five at the most) in the Roman province of Palestina was charismatic enough to launch a new religion, distinctive for being monotheistic but without too remote a godhead. While the growth of Christianity may not be the single cause of the fall of the Roman empire in the west, its spread challenged existing social codes and attitudes and offers one clue to the radical transformations of GrecoRoman art. The political centre where the conversion of the ancient world crystallized was Constantinople [I]. Its citizens saw themselves as Romans, reborn after baptism into a Christian cosmos on earth. The rest of the Mediterranean world soon imagined Constantinople as a kind of fantastic Eldorado. Its history and art are the keys to understanding the processes of the 'rebirth' of ancient art, if that is how to describe the changes. Yet this period and this culture are widely regarded as the most intractable—the most 'Byzantine'—in the history of art. This cannot be true: the survival of much of the art of this society, as well as its literature, offers exceptional opportunities for understanding the period and its aims and attitudes. Many Byzantine churches with their original decoration survive, and in St Sophia we can even stand in the great interior created in the sixth century, and see the same mosaics that the Byzantines, too, watched glittering in sunlight and candlelight. A monastery church like Hosios Lukas still today has its daily services in an eleventh-century interior and monks who keep up the same patterns of perpetual worship that the Byzantines knew in their daily experience [81]. Ina sense, therefore, Byzantine art remains a living art, although it began 2,000 years ago. This heterogeneous display, where one church may offer a single experience through art produced at different times and in different circumstances, is a problem for western art history as it undercuts the standard method-
ologies which emphasize chronology and progress. One perpetual issue is to recognize where there are continuities and where there are differences from the ancient world, and how to explain them. Equally, from a modern perspective, some features of Byzantine art have survived in western art, others seem different and remote. This perception, too, needs assessment. It appears to dissolve the highly negative interpretation of Byzantine art first set out in 1550 by the painter Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) in -his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors which has since been the dominant view in much scholarship: that the arts of antiquity 'died' in the Dark Ages, only to be revived by Giotto in the thirteenth century.
What is Byzantine Art?
The most frequent answer to this question is probably 'religious icons’, and the Byzantines might have said the same (but in Greek), ‘holy icons’. They meant by the word eikon any kind of image in churches; and since care, devotion, and vast resources were lavished on the production of these objects, it makes sense to call these working images 'art'. So the art of the Byzantine period can be conceived as above all a religious art. It is distinctive enough to have spawned our everyday use of the word 'icon' as something above and beyond a mere portrait. Byzantine art spans more than 1,000 years, and was centred on a Christian society based in Constantinople, which was dedicated in 330, and was the capital of a Christian empire until 1453 when its religious landscape and art became Islamic [2].
Icons were at the centre of Byzantine art and life. They were seen and venerated by all those who identified themselves as belonging to the culture. They were made to last for eternity, outliving humans, yet serving the beliefs and attitudes of their producers and audience in all sorts of ways. For a significant time in Byzantine history, the icons were at the centre of a burning dispute over what kind of imagery was admissible under God's law, and their production and veneration was banned by the iconoclast emperors. The end of this dispute, which declared that hostility to Christian figurative icons was heresy, meant that ever since, all Orthodox Christians show their faith by kissing icons.
Byzantine art was (more accurately is) one of the most solemn and elevated modes of religious expression ever developed. Icons can manipulate viewers and create an atmosphere more potent than most other art forms. Byzantine icons had a functional as well as an aesthetic aim: they were made as props in the face of joy and sorrow, happiness and pain. They received the prayers and veneration that passed through them to the 'other' world that they symbolized, and they were expected to reflect the powers of God. Each icon had to maintain its power for century after century. An icon in a church was available in what was for Byzantines a second home, the meetingplace of an ex-
29 EARLY BYZANTINE ART 330-527
tended family. In these circumstances, artists developed a mode of expression intended to endure beyond the topical and the individual moment. The consequent 'timelessness' of Byzantine art is one of its distinctive features, and bv definition is found in all its periods of production. While there is an obvious interpretation—that artistic conformity offered spiritual comfort through familiarity and at the same time confirmed the unchanging truths of Christianity'—yet the con-stancv of Byzantine art through repetition and copying, rather than ni >veltv and surprise, will need a fuller explanation m terms 1 it the ways in which Bvzantine society functioned. What is clear is that the symbolic language of icons had to be as durable and familiar as the regular celebration ot the Christian liturgv in church. Yet under the stereotypes a chronological treatment of Bvzantine art reveals changing forms of expression and the emergence of new subjects.
If Byzantine art represents a major and influential ‘period’ of world art, our study will gradually expose its 'character’, and clarify its features, including those appropriated by other cultures, such as Renaissance Italy The study of Byzantine art over the last 100 years has produced many approaches and definitions. Sometimes these reveal a formal approach and definition (‘Byzantine art is a style or mode of expression’), sometimes a cultural approach (‘Byzantine art is an evolved type of classicism’), sometimes a political approach (‘Byzantine art is the art of Constantinople, the capital of the eastern Roman empire’), and sometimes an approach concerned with the history of spirituality (‘Byzantine art is the art of the Orthodox church’). Some scholars avoid as essentialist the question, 'What is Byzantine art?’ and question whether the 'props' for religious devotions and Christian worship merit the name 'art' at all, and indeed whether their producers are artists in the same sense as an artist todav. This pluralism is salutary, and is a caution that the way to survey the period is to start with a minimal functional definition of our subject.
The simple definition of Byzantine art is that it was the art of a community based in Constantinople between 330 and 1453. The small town of Byzantium was renamed by the reigning Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 330 and this date marks the beginning of its history as an imperial residence, dominated by the Great Palace. Byzantine art has frequently been defined as the art of Constantinople, making it an imperial art, the continuation of Rome, but situated in the east and separate from the medieval art of the west. The Byzantines themselves colluded with this, calling themselves Romans and keeping the trappings and institutions of empire. The official titles of the emperors were inscribed in Greek: Autokrator, and later Basi/eus; sometimes Basileus Romaion, ‘Emperor of the Romans’, and sometimes Pistos en Christo Basileus, ‘Faithful in Christ Emperor'. The usual art-historical periods derive from imperial dynasties—Constantinian
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