Download PDF | Elisabeth Piltz - Byzantium in the Mirror-The Message of Skylitzes Matritensis and Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Oxford, 2016.
99 Pages
Introduction
All historical research is an effort to transgress the limits of time trying to revive the past. With the help of artistic documents and monuments it is occasionally possible to find a translucent mirror of a past era. Byzantium cannot be reconstructed, but its art provides an intensely vivid picture of its official and otdinary life. We have chosen two monuments indicating this tendency.
The illuminated manuscript of the Skylitzes chronicle in Biblioteca nacional in Madrid in a luxury version is unique. It is the most important preserved document illustrating particular historical events in a secular frame. It introduces us to Byzantium — an empire lasting for more than a thousand years. Its literature and art provide humanity with invaluable treasures. This culture is still living in the Greek Orthodox church. The fusion of Hellenism and Byzantinism resulted in an artistic culture that represents the world as an icon of the divine sphere and confronts the beholder with the divine presence.
By studying this manuscript we are participating in a middle Byzantine historical drama, triumphs, ceremonial life and its dark side, disasters and persecutions. The painters illuminating the manuscript are communicating a message that touches the beholder by its directness and unvarnished character. The period is a drama of war and a drama of artistic culture. The illuminators favour the icon-friends in the struggle that even divides the imperial families in different directions.
During the period of printing of my text a new publication has appeared by Vasiliki Tsamakda, The Tustrated Chronicle of Ioannes Skylitzes in Madrid, Leiden 2002, which presents a distorted version of the interpretation of fol. 10 v, the famous elevation on the shield of an emperor and his co-emperor, an art historical Zopos and not a real event.
Hagia Sophia in Constantinople provides the exclusive opportunity today to experience Byzantium, a mirror of the cultural basis of the medieval Greek society. In spite of being transformed into a mosque, it still proclaims the message of heaven approaching the earth in its dialectical interplay between light and constructive masses. In this building time has stopped and the acclamations of the emperors and the ecumenical patriarchs are still echoing in the walls. Its materialization of the celestial sphere is so impressive that also the aniconic Moslems perceived the message. Its influence on the Ottoman architecture thousand years later is primary.
What we learn from Byzantium is that authentic cultures never die. From all the lost monuments even a fragment illuminates the truth.
Skylitzes Matritensis A 12"-century Action Video
The famous manuscript ir 2: 26 in the Biblioteca nacional in Madrid invites us to Byzantium, a culture very similar to our own and yet very different. The picture — a naked expression of any culture, left to the arbitrary judgment of historians — is a mirror of aspects of social life, world conception, perspective on men, women, children and eternity. When pictures are interpreted as the immediate reflection of a mentality, it is not completely possible to filter away the subjective ideas of the interpreter and the limitations of his mental horizon, determined by his own time. Pictures are fundamental expressions of the human mind. Their content is a function of the form. They are loudly speaking fragments, able to reveal a hidden distant world and to synthesize its categories of thinking and acting in their own rhetorical language. The Madrid Skylitzes is narrative and direct. Apart from some representations of divine majesty it can be grasped by a modern child. The linear drawing is swift, nervous and impressive, its clear vivid colours complementary, reinforcing each other. They are secular documentary pictures. Only with one exception borrowing the languages of representational sacred books with a frame around the scene and a golden background, on fol 80 a. But this exception is not appropriate, as it represents a secular event, the cruel fate of the rebel Bardas who was executed by Emperor Michael IIT in 866 (fig 1).
At the end of the 11 century a high official at the Byzantine court, John Skylitzes, Rouropalates, with care for the material conditions of the palace, and droungarios tés biglés, cavalry captain, composed a chronicle covering the period from Michael I Rangabe (811-813) to the ascension to the throne of Isaac Comnenos (1057-1059). A sumptuous edition with illuminations in a quite modern “action” style was created in the imperial scriptoria in Constantinople. A copy of this original was later produced in Southern Italy, possibly in Palermo. The illuminations are 574 in number and very apt for a presentation in a video sequence. The pictures run in horizontal registers without frames and interfoliate the text. Exceptionally they cover a whole page. Many miniaturists of different traditions have collaborated in the execution. The Byzantine tradition is exposed on folios 9-87 and 227-234 by individual masters. Here and there a pronounced Arabic influence can be noticed, in particular when the scene must be read from right to left. Outside the purely Byzantine folios the princes are no longer represented with a nimbus and the artistic level varies. The colour planes are one-dimensional and the scenes are developed in the foreground of the surface.
A panorama of Byzantine events are “videotaped” before our eyes with a principle of selection not always in concordance with the text, which appears to be quite modern. The general principles of series and comic strips ate used. Every piece of illustration has an explanatory picture text, a legend, in red ink, not always appropriate for the actual scene. Eleven legends are lacking. Consequently they seem to have been added after the illumination.
While the Skylitzes text represents the most important historical events in a chronological sequence, the miniatures pick out certain themes, as it seems, rather deliberately in relation to the text. Like the modern mass-media reportage this method of extracting essential themes favours the spectacular, the dramatic and the thrilling. Favourite motives are coronations, marriages, scenes of war, sieges, exilings, murder, violence, blinding, demonstrations of trophies (which might as well be the decapitated head of an emperor as his drowned body in suggestive colours), executions, torture, exposition of the “Greek fire” (the secret weapon of Byzantium), the martyrdom of iconodules (icon-friends), the pulling down and destruction of icons on the church walls, diplomatic embassies to Bulgaria, to the caliph in Baghdad or to the Abchasians, a tribe only recently gaining place in our conscience thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, everything reproduced with obtrusive realism without censorship or shame. Here mythological personifications are totally lacking, no blessing Christ or Virgin appears at the emperor’s side — a naked secular historical documentation, not filtered or rearranged in relation to reality, unique in its kind, shocking and fascinating.
N G Wilson has demonstrated that this type of secular illuminated manuscript belongs to a lost series of manuscrits de luxe produced as gifts to be given away by the imperial court. Two other specimens have been preserved, the Chronicle of Constantine Manasses in the Vatican Library, Vat S/av 2, and a copy of the Russian version of the Chronicle of Georgios Hamartolos in the National Library in Moscow, fo/ 172, no 100. Both depend on lost Greek prototypes. He traces a lost frontispiece that possibly had an image of Christ, the emperor, for whom the manuscript was originally illuminated, and the author, in this case Skylitzes himself. Cirac Estopanan, André Grabar, M. Manoussacas, and Athanas Boshkov have published the miniatures. How complex the interpretation of the pictures is I will illustrate with one example.
On fol 10 v (fig 2) we see two nimbed figures, standing on a shield, carried by beardless eunuchs and acclaimed by two surrounding groups of senators and dignitaries. The right figure crowns the left one. In spite of the ideal space surrounding the scene we must take for granted that it occurs in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Above the picture, placed within the current text, the red legend states: The war between the Romans (ie the Byzantines) and the Bulgarians and the apostasy of Leon the Armenian. The text seems entirely to lack relevance for the picture. In the continuing text where the picture is placed, Skylitzes relates about the abhorred Bulgarian chieftain Krum who killed Emperor Nicephoros I (802-811) and Leon the Armenian is mentioned as a refused pretendent to the throne. What the term “apostasy” implies is not quite clear, however, whether it hints at a revolt or a deviation from the correct Orthodox dogma, in other woftds, an insinuation about the iconoclast tendencies of Leon V, we do not know. The latter interpretation is closer at hand, as the miniaturists of the manuscript are explicitly favouring icons. Consequently the legend does not contribute to the interpretation of the picture.
Cirac Estopanan interpreted the image as Emperor Michael I Rangabe crowned by the patriarch Nicephoros I. But in this picture there is no patriarch and neither Skylitzes nor any other source in fact mentions a patriarch at the coronation. It is only stated that Michael was proclaimed emperor by the people and the senate. No detailed information whatsoever was offered about the ceremony of coronation neither for Michael nor for Leon the Armenian, who usurped the throne after two years and later deposed the patriarch. André Grabar interpreted the picture to imply that Michael is crowning Leon emperor. But nothing of the kind ever took place. The conclusion is, prima facie, that the miniaturist must have relied on other sources than Skylitzes.
Skylitzes’ primary source for the early period of his chronicle is Theophanes, the famous historian of the 9 century. This author has a more vivid sense for the details of ceremonies and provides rather precise and illustrative descriptions of the coronation ceremony. No details, however, are given about Michael’s coronation — how he first was brought to the Hippodrome early in the morning and mote or less against his will was proclaimed emperor by the restless army, the senate and the people. The elevation on the shield in Byzantium was at Skylitzes’ time only a sheer ritual formality, having lost its early direct military implication. After the acclamation he was brought to Saint Sophia, dressed in the imperial attire, where he was finally crowned by the patriarch, who had the duty to make sure that the new emperor really confessed the true Orthodox faith.
We may conclude that two elements have been confused: the elevation on the shield, which, as is implied, was taking place in the Hippodrome and the coronation ceremony, which was later carried through in Saint Sophia, where the patriarch acted as intercessor of the divine. Sometimes in connection with the prokypsis ceremony, with the imperial family appearing on a high tribune to the people. The Varangians used to stand on guard beneath. On this shield two emperors are represented simultaneously who in reality were never elevated together. Co-emperors were not elevated on shields. The normal way of representing this ceremony is seen in the famous Greek manuscript Parisinus 139, fol 6 v from ca 975 (fig 3) showing David on the shield. The ceremony has changed its symbolic content and lost its military implication. Originally the person who was chosen emperor by the soldiers in the field was elevated on a shield and acclaimed. In this version the imperial family and the dignitaries of the state have definite places in the picture. Later, in Theophanes’ relation, it is reported that Michael crowned his Empress Prokopia Augusta and his elder son Theophylaktos co-emperor. The two figures on the image seem a priori to represent an emperor and his co-emperor according to the established scheme showing the imperial family crowned by Christ. At closer inspection the two figures reveal a difference of age. The figure to the right might well be father of the figure to the left. Also the somewhat different costumes reveal that the older one is wearing the particular coronation equipment, divitision, sakkos and chlamys, while the younger one wears the costume of an emperor in majesty, a golden sakkos and Joros. Also the nimbus differentiates the status. The main emperor has a purple/red and the co-emperor a blue nimbus. The blue colour is associated to caesars and sebastocrators, who were closest in rank to the emperor.
A dramatic incident demonstrating how Nordic custom is maintained in Byzantium is shown in fol 208 (fig 4). Scandinavian Varangian mercenaries of the imperial army were campaigning in Thrace, as far as one can understand under their own command. A drunken Varangian soldier tried to violate a married woman, who like an Amazon defended herself with her husband’s knife and killed the offender. The Varangian troup now holds a “bing, a courtroom, and decide according to Scandinavian law (Adamus Bremensis relates that rape of a maiden or married woman was punished with execution). The woman is accordingly awarded the inheritance of the dead soldier. To the left we see the woman killing with a lance instead of a knife, as the source says, and to the right she inherits the possessions of the Varangian.
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