Download PDF | The Great Centuries of Painting Byzantine, Painting Historical And Critical Study, By Andre Grabar, 1953.
210 Pages
Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul are the names borne successively by the great city on the Bosporus which was the headquarters of the art dealt with in the present work. While, keeping to the common practice, we call this art Byzantine, we do not overlook the fact that this epithet is very largely a matter of convention and requires some explanation.
Thus it should be understood that when speaking of Byzantine painting we refer to works that chronologically belong to a period during which the city on the Bosporus had ceased to bear the name “Byzantium” and was called ‘‘Constantinople.” In fact, paradoxically enough, Byzantine painting came into being on the day when Byzantium itself ceased—officially—to exist. However, this seeming anomaly need not detain us; actually the epithet ‘“Byzantine” could not be replaced by ‘“Constantinopolitan,” since the former comprises all the art manifestations in the far-flung Empire whose capital was Constantinople, and the latter is confined to the output of the capital itself. It seems hardly necessary to add that the Empire in question was the Christian State which lasted from 330 to 1453, but not the Mohammedan Empire which succeeded it, though the capital (under the name of Istanbul) remained the same.
As applied to painting and to art in general, the epithet “Byzantine” does not always cover the same field, and it seems desirable to clear up this point also before proceeding further. Some have thought fit to limit its application to works produced in Byzantium, i.e. Constantinople, itself and in the area under its direct influence; and to draw a distinction between Byzantine art thus localized and contemporary productions in other art centers of the Empire and neighboring lands. But, given the limitations of our present knowledge and the relatively small number of extant monuments, this method involves insuperable difficulties. How, indeed, can we appraise the characteristics of Byzantine painting in the strict sense of the term during the fourth, fifth and even the sixth centuries, when all we have to go on as regards this early period is a single example of monumental painting (the decorative mosaics of St Sophia) and a single painted book, the Natural History of Dioscorides (at the Vienna library)—which, moreover, is merely a copy of an Alexandrian work? It is only from the ninth century onwards that the distinctive features of the painting whose chief center was the capital of the Byzantine Empire can be determined with any certainty, since it is only then that we have enough works of art, Byzantine and others, to enable us to make the necessary differentiations. Obviously this must not be taken to mean that early Byzantine art lacked characteristics of its own, but it is no easy matter to decide what was specifically Byzantine as against the work, more or less akin to it, produced in Rome, Ravenna, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch, not to mention Salonica and Ephesus, cities which, being in closer touch with Constantinople, may well have come under the direct influence of the art of the metropolis at a very early date.
Thus we have always thought it best to give the term “Byzantine” a wider, more elastic application, and this method will be followed in the present work. In the same way as works of art produced in distant parts of the Empire under Roman government are styled ‘‘Koman,” the epithet ‘‘Byzantine’”’ will be applied to paintings made in countries around the Mediterranean basin subsequently to the transfer of the seat of empire to Constantinople, without implying that these paintings necessanly drew inspiration from Byzantium. True (and here, too, we shall adopt the method followed as regards the art of the Roman epoch immediately preceding it), preference will be given to works which for various reasons seem more closely associated with Byzantium, and we shall leave out of account those which evidently continue or revive local art traditions that had existed prior to the foundation of Constantinople, or which no less evidently were creations of an art remote from the capital. ] have in mind the mosaics in some Italian churches (for example Sts Cosmas and Damian at Rome and the chapel of Sant’Aquilino in San Lorenzo’s at Milan), the mosaic pavements at Antioch and in Palestine, and the frescos in Coptic monasteries. Though these belong to the Byzantine epoch, being contemporary with the political supremacy of Constantinople and produced for the most part in towns and provinces under the rule of Byzantium, they are works which what little we know of Constantinopolitan art during this period justifies us in excluding from the category of Byzantine art.
There are, however, a number of so to speak intermediate works of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries whose connection with Byzantium, though unproven, seems more probable. Cases in point are most of the mosaics at Ravenna and Parenzo, various frescos in Santa Maria Antiqua and other Roman churches of the very early Middle Ages, and also some illuminations in Greek sixth-century manuscripts whose place of origin is unknown. Usually we assimilate these works to Byzantine art, not because we regard them as necessarily inspired by the art of Constantinople (an influence incapable of proof) but because, in various degrees, the art they stand for must have been akin to that of the Byzantine capital. 4 priori we have no difficulty in thus regarding the Greek works of Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, and needless to say the Balkan peninsula—for the obvious reason that Byzantine culture throughout its course was nourished by the traditions and activities of the Greek communities resident in the East-Mediterranean area. But the inhabitants of the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian littorals, the many Levantines who had settled there and even the Latins, were in too frequent contact with the pars orientalis of the Empire and its culture for their Christian art not to be reciprocally affected by that of the Mediterranean cities lying further East, from Salonica and Constantinople to Jerusalem and Sinai. Thus there are grounds for including in the category of works we call Byzantine (though their exact kinship with the art of Constantinople itself cannot be determined) the monumental paintings of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries found in various Mediterranean regions from the Holy Land to Italy inclusively—and even farther West. Faulty though it may be, this method has history to support it. Until the Lombard conquests in Italy and those of the Mohammedans in the East, and even after the seventh century, there was such constant and close intercourse between all the inhabitants of the Mediterranean lands—and notably those which actively promoted the interests of the Church—that the arts prevailing in these regions, and in particular Christian painting, tended constantly to “pool” their programs, forms and technical procedures; or, to say the least, their practices and innovations ran on parallel lines. Needless to say, this did not rule out local idioms; indeed, in the political and even in the religious life of the various countries around the Mediterranean basin, as in their art, we find very different trends operating simultaneously. But beneath these local divergences there was a common basis and a wide one, and thanks to this, though prototypes are not available, we can picture, if not the works themselves, at least the general nature of the painting at Byzantium between the fourth and sixth centuries, in the light of paintings of the period found in other places. Obviously, since no concrete examples of the works created in Byzantium itself are available, we cannot precisely determine in what respects these differed from the other works of the period produced elsewhere. Nevertheless we are justified in holding that the koine, or common language, of Byzantine art and its leading characteristics are revealed outside the capital sufficiently clearly for us to feel assured that in Constantinople too these constituted the basic language of art and can therefore rightly be styled Byzantine.
However, before we attempt to define this language, it may be well to prepare the ground by distinguishing between the two periods mentioned above; for the scope we give the term ‘Byzantine’ is not the same for the earlier period and for that beginning in the ninth century.
FRRST PERIOD
The scope of Byzantine painting during the early phase may be defined chronologically and geographically as follows. Since in the absence of Constantinople as the constant and primordial center of a specific Christian art, Byzantine art as we envisage it would be inconceivable at any stage of its evolution, it cannot be said to have existed before Constantine founded that city (in 330) and the headquarters of the imperial government was transferred—theoretically at the same date—to the new capital. Theoretically, too, the art history of Constantinople begins in 330, when large-scale building was embarked on by the Emperor, and presumably the production of works of art began. But of Constantine’s monuments, as of the other major works of the fourth and fifth centuries, exactly nothing has survived at Constantinople, except the ruined Basilica of Stoudion and the famous city walls (built in the fifth century). Thus our knowledge of the achievements of Byzantine art in the capital itself begins with such masterpieces as St Sophia, St Irene, and Sts Sergius and Bacchus, commissioned by Justinian and Theodora and dated to the middle of the sixth century. Other sixthcentury works were the earliest wall mosaics at Constantinople and the oldest extant illuminated manuscripts made by the craftsmen of Byzantium. But lamentably few examples of these works remain and, to make things worse, between the reign of Justinian and the ninth century (save for a few unimportant fragments of uncertain date) all trace of this art disappears once more.
Still, as already noted, though first-hand knowledge of the painting of the period we call Byzantine under the forms it took in the capital itself is ruled ont, we can learn something about it from monuments in other parts of the Empire. Even outside Constantinople the number of paintings available is relatively small as compared with architecture in particular, and with the works of decorative sculpture, small-scale carvings (in marble, wood, stone and ivory), not to mention statuary, which have come down to us. However, as regards the fifth century, considerable portions of the mosaics have survived at Salonica, in St George’s, in the church known as the Church of the Virgin “‘Acheiropoetos”’ (i.e. not made with hands), and in the Oratory of Christ Latomos. Also at Salonica mosaics of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries can be seen in the churches of St Demetrios and St Sophia. Further north, in Thrace, the ruined sanctuary named the Red Church (near Philippopolis) contains sixth-century frescos, while in the basilica at Parenzo in Istria, on the Adriatic coast of the Balkan peninsula, there exists a group of admirable sixth-century church mosaics.
These are closely affiliated to the mosaics in the churches of Ravenna on the opposite shore of the Adriatic, where so many splendid fifth- and sixth-century wall mosaics can still be seen today: in the Mansoleum of Galla Placidia and the Orthodox Baptistery, fifth-century works; in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, San Vitale, Sant’Apollinare in Classe, and the so-called Arian Baptistery, sixth-century works (with seventh-century additions in the In Classe basilica). At Naples, chief seaport of the west coast of Italy, and the neighboring towns of Campania (Capua Vetere, Nocera, Nola) and also at Albenga on the Ligurian coast there are some fine fifth-century mosaics in baptisteries and martyries. As already observed, the mosaic decorations of this period in the churches of Milan and Rome owe too much to purely local art traditions to call for mention here; exceptionally, however, the mosaics of the triumphal arch of Santa Maria Maggiore (432-440) have more affinities with contemporary works properly styled Byzantine in other Mediterranean lands. Later on, from the seventh to the ninth century, Greek and Levantine ecclesiastical authorities in these cities commissioned church paintings more or less in line with the art of Byzantium. This holds good, also, for a large part of the frescos in San Saba on the Aventine Hill and above all Santa Maria Antiqua in the Roman Forum (especially the seventh- and eighth-century frescos), and also for some murals in the Catacombs of Naples. In these Roman and Neapolitan works subsequent to the sixth century the Byzantine strains can be distinguished from the influences of local Italic tradition more clearly than in the earlier works; indeed we see here the beginnings of a parting of the ways, Latin on the one hand and Byzantine on the other (in the meaning assigned to the latter term from the ninth century onwards), between which hitherto it was less easy to discriminate.
Italy is the only one of all the Mediterranean lands in which a fairly large number of monuments have come down to us in good condition; as for the mural mosaics and paintings of the period from the fourth to the seventh century in countries that were for a long while (or still are) under Mohammedan rule, we have no satisfactory ocular evidence to go on. There can, however, be no doubt that painters dwelling in Asia Minor, Syria, the Holy Land and Egypt played an active part in the decoration of churches, since the most copious and detailed accounts we possess of paintings of this kind relate to churches in these areas. It was here that the themes of mural paintings were most diversified and artists most inventive; and this seems natural enough when we remember that from the fourth to the seventh century it was in these countries that Christendom, in all its manifestations, had its most active and influential centers. Whether we have in mind contemporary developments of “high theology” and the liturgy, or the beginnings of monasticism, the cult of relics and the great vogue of pilgrimages amongst all classes of the population, or the creative fervor that gave rise to the apocryphal writings and Christian iconography of the Holy Land—in all these fields we find that it was mainly in the lands east of Byzantium that the chief manifestations of these forms of Christian zeal took place—and in all alike art played an active part. It was also in the East that races with a long cultural tradition, though not so prosperous as they had been in the Empire’s golden age, were anyhow immune from the invasions which, throughout this period, played havoc with Western Europe and its social and economic structure. A long-lasting peace and relatively widespread welfare certainly favored the activities set forth above and the progress of the arts of Christendom in the Byzantine East.
Thus it seems almost preposterous that, for the period from the fourth to the seventh century, all we should have to go on is the mosaic decoration of a single church, the Justinian basilica of Mount Sinai, which escaped destruction owing to the remoteness of the monastery and the Moslems’ veneration of it; and (apart from a few fragments) two painted apses, frankly rustic in conception, in Christian mausolea of that faraway region, the Great Oasis of Egypt. However, in support of what the records have to tell us, excavations in Palestine, Transjordania, Syria, North Mesopotamia and Egypt and town clearances made at Damascus have brought to light some fragments and groups of paintings of various kinds which testify, if indirectly, to the wide extension of this art in the eastern provinces of the Empire before the Moslem conquest. Sometimes, in houses and Christian sanctuaries—at Antioch especially—but also in Early Christian churches in Palestine and Transjordania, we find mosaic pavements of the pre-Byzantine and Byzantine epochs, and these are obviously projections as it were upon the floor, of paintings on vaults and ceilings. Or, again, as in Dura-Europos and TunaHermopolis (Egypt), we find second- and third-century mural frescos of various kinds, prefiguring Byzantine painting. And, finally, in Ommiad palaces and mosques—whose builders owed much to the art of Byzantine Syria—there are painted walls that reflect more or less faithfully the last phase of the Byzantine painting of pre-Islamic Syria, that is to say sixth- and seventh-century art. A collation of the indirect evidence we gather from these sources with the decoration of a Christian church under the Ommiad jurisdiction (the eighth-century Bethlehem mosaics) confirms the fact that what we have styled the koine of first-period Byzantine painting extended to the most easterly provinces of the Empire, and that large-scale monumental painting flourished in these regions.
We should probably have more evidence pointing in this direction, were it not for the total disappearance of the small objects of art adorned with painting which would have remedied the dearth of large-scale pictures, and which prove so helpful when we try to trace the course of Christian iconography or the ornamental arts, and even decorative sculpture. But, as regards the countries east of Byzantium, panel-paintings and illuminations of the period are almost as few and far between as mosaics and frescos, and the exact dates, and notably the provenance, of such few works as remain are often highly dubious—a circumstance which obviously detracts from their historical, if not from their artistic significance. Thus there is a small group of icons painted on wood in the wax (encaustic) technique, most of which have been discovered on Mount Sinai, or came from it (in the Treasury of Sinai, Kiev Museum and Santa Maria Nuova, Rome). These certainly throw light on the origins of that special kind of painting on wood which had such a remarkable flowering at Byzantium and, by way of Byzantium, in Russia after the ninth century. But the exact age of the Sinai icons is hard to fix, in view of the few points of comparison available and the rude craftsmanship of some. Their place of origin is equally uncertain, given the probability that Sinai served merely as a place of refuge for these icons as it did for some sixth-century mosaics. Quite possibly it was in Egypt rather than in Palestine that, under the form of icons, the technique and characteristics of the Roman portrait held their own the longest.
As for paintings in books, that is to say miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, only one is extant which undoubtedly was made in Constantinople (in the early sixth century). Unluckily for the student of Byzantine art, the vignettes in this book, a copy of the Materia Medica of Dioscorides, are merely replicas of Hellenistic illustrations prior to the founding of Constantinople—with one exception, the portrait of Julia Anicia, the noble Byzantine lady who commissioned this copy (dated to approximately 500 A. D.). Perhaps the Greek ‘‘Cottonian Genesis’’ also hailed from Constantinople; but only some charred fragments of this are extant (in the British Museum). Of outstanding interest are three fine illustrated books of high aesthetic value—the Vienna Genesis, the Rossano Gospel Codex and the ‘‘Sinope fragments’ in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. All have that purple ground whose high aesthetic qualities we shall deal with later, and, judging by the style, are sixth-century productions; we can but guess, however, at their provenance, nor can we be sure it was the same for all three books. True, it may well have been Constantinople, but this is mere conjecture. A few illuminated pages in other Greek manuscripts, also of an early date, complete this all-too-meager list, unless we—tentatively—include some series of miniatures belonging to this period but known to us only by way of ninth- and tenth-century copies or imitations (Psalters, the ‘‘ Job” and ‘‘Joshua”’ Rolls). We are much farther from Byzantine art properly so called when we come to the miniatures in a fifth-century Chronicle of Alexandria, and those in a small group of Gospels in Syriac—to begin with the Florence Gospel, whose script is dated to 586. Here, anyhow, we have the advantage of being able to assign these works to specific localities (Egypt, Northern Mesopotamia); none the less this art, though confirming in a general way the extension of the kozné of the period as far as the banks of the Nile and the Upper Euphrates, does no more than illustrate certain local forms assumed by this artistic lingua franca and has very little to tell us about the painting in the great cities of the Near East.
Thus the indisputably Byzantine paintings known to us are too few to justify any definite conclusion as to the specific characteristics of Byzantine pictorial art in the period from the fourth to the seventh century. We can at most discern some of its aspects, those which were common to most Mediterranean painting of this period.
SECON D® PERIOD
A tter the ninth century things are very different; the works of art available are both numerous and varied, their study is rewarding, and it is easy to distinguish in Byzantium itself, in the Near East and in Western Europe, local schools of painting, each pursuing a well-defined aesthetic trend peculiar to itself. This crystallization of specific idioms in several contemporary art centers was, it would seem, a slow and gradual process, which began in the sixth and seventh centuries. (In this context reference may be made to what was said above as to Roman frescos; this holds good for Coptic painting, which at a very early stage detached itself from the parent stem the art of classical Antiquity—, and also for Armenian painting, which followed closely in its wake. This emancipation was yet more pronounced in Irish painting, which in any case was less concerned with Mediterranean traditions.) In the eighth and ninth centuries the bricf flowering of Carolingian painting, even in its imitations of ancient works, and despite the variety of styles practiced by its guilds of craftsmen, was from start to finish quite different from that of the Byzantines; nor have we the slightest trouble in distinguishing between them. From now on the gulf between Byzantine and Latin artists rapidly widened; whenever in the tenth century the Ottonian painters assimilated a Byzantine prototype, they changed it out of recognition, and by the twelfth century Romanesque aesthetic was employing a repertory of forms so rigidly defined that when attempts were made (e.g. in the Rhineland) to imitate contemporary Byzantine paintings, these merely brought into greater prominence the divergencies of Romanesque procedures. The gap between Byzantine and Latin art tended to widen as time went by, and when the Gothic age ensued in Western Europe its painting embodied so many recent and significant discoveries of the Latin art world that contemporary Byzantine painting (unvarying in its basic principles) had the air of a survival from a bygone age. This time-lag had a curious effect; 1t enabled Italian thirteenth- and fourteenth-century painters to link up for a moment with the Byzantines and make important borrowings from them. Like the humanists of a somewhat later period, they extracted from this conservative art its residue of classical Antiquity; for though artists had now before their eyes the ancient sculpture recently unearthed in Italy, they had nothing as yet to go on as regards the painting of the ancient world. Thus it was only in Italy, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that more or less active intercourse developed between Byzantine art in the strict sense and the native art of the Latin peoples.
In the East the line of demarcation is no less clearly definable than in the West. Of the Christian arts which had flourished hitherto in Asia little remained after the Arab conquest; the work produced in lands ruled by the Mohammedans, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, has an aesthetic utterly different from the Byzantine. For there, too, as in Europe, the Mediterranean artistic komné of the past was translated into the local languages, all the more unlike the idiom current in Byzantium in that Greek influences in Asia were countered by an ascendancy of Islamic arts, Arab and Persian. The only non-Moslem arts that held their ground effectively were those existing on the periphery of the Mohammedan world, in Armenia and Georgia. The evolution of mediaeval Armenian art proceeded on much the same lines as that of Byzantine (this is especially true of Armenian painting); in both we find a similar handling of stock themes and motifs appertaining to the artistic koimé of the close of Antiquity, and moreover their activities ran parallel in time. However, though the repertory was the same, the Greeks and Armenians almost always gave it quite different aesthetic interpretations; thus it is relatively easy to distinguish between their respective outputs.
The position of Byzantine art as regards the art of the Georgians was similar, but with a slight difference due to the fact that, being of the same religious persuasion, the Georgians could borrow more freely and easily from the Byzantines. In a far greater measure this dependence on Byzantine art made itself felt in the painting of the countries inhabited by Orthodox Slavs: Bulgarians, Serbians, Russians and (a little later) Rumanians. Indeed the painting in these countries stemmed directly from various trends of Byzantine art, with the result that the geographical frontiers of the latter are less distinct in these regions. But since in the Slav countries, especially in Russia and to a less extent in Rumania, no real emancipation from Byzantine art took place until after the fall of the Eastern Empire, the task of distinguishing between Byzantine paintings and Slav and Rumanian paintings is largely superfluous, unless we approach the subject from the angle of the local political and ethnical factors conditioning the evolution of the aesthetic of mediaeval art. From the purely aesthetic angle, all the painting of the Slavs and Rumanians, and up to a certain point that of the Georgians, remained Byzantine until the close of the Middle Ages, and underwent only very slight modifications in these countries. In fact the new artistic koine of the close of the Middle Ages throughout Eastern Europe was not only created in the first instance by Byzantium, but constantly replenished by Byzantium.
When after this general survey of mediaeval Byzantine painting we examine it more closely, we find that it falls into several categories. First there are the great wall mosaics, crowning achievement of Byzantine art throughout its course. A small number of these can be dated to the ninth and tenth centuries, but the majority belong to the eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth. Though the extant works represent but a tithe of the products of this prolific and long-lived art, we have the advantage of being able to see original works, not copies, and to feast our eyes on the masterpieces of artists resident in the capital and employed by the Emperors and connoisseurs of the day.
Alongside the mosaics, fresco painting was currently employed for the decoration of mediaeval Byzantine churches, and owing to its greater flexibility this medium gave the artist more scope for original creation. Judging by surviving fragments, the walls of the churches in Constantinople must often have been covered with paintings, but it is chiefly in the provinces and above all in countries to which Byzantine art had spread that the finest and most complete fresco sequences can be seen today. In faraway Cappadocia we find a long series in the most archaic style, while in Greece and Cyprus, in Serbia, Russia and Bulgaria rustic works in a purely local style are juxtaposed to superb paintings that reflect the twelfth- and thirteenth-century creations of the metropolis. In the following century this art made exceptionally rapid strides and dozens of churches with fresco cycles dating to this period still exist in Constantinople, Salonica, Mistra and Crete, and above all in the Slav countries. Numerically anyhow, these late murals—in the lineage of the monastery decorations of the period of the Turcocracy, on Mount Athos and elsewhere—constitute the bulk of Byzantine painting.
It is only in the manuscripts that we find a like abundance of paintings, but most of the illuminated Byzantine books and the finest works in this technique belong toan earlier period. Seemingly the illustrated manuscript came into fashion at Byzantium at the close of the ninth century and reached its apogee in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. To this period may be ascribed almost all the masterpieces of the Byzantine miniaturists and the best illustrations in a popular vein. Following the temporary domination of Constantinople by the Crusaders (1204 to 1261), the miniature, as being essentially a luxury art, fell into a decline; all the same many fine works of this kind were produced up to the mid-fourteenth century. Greek scribes had the regrettable habit of never noting down the place of origin of their manuscripts, and this complicates the problem of the historian when he seeks to ascertain their provenance. However, for various reasons, many of them can be assigned to Constantinople. Throughout the Middle Ages the ablest craftsmen worked for the Emperors in the capital and a fairly large number of illustrated books deriving from their scriptoria (certainly the best of the period) are extant. Others existed in the various monasteries of Constantinople and the neighborhood; also in Patmos, on Mount Athos and the Bithynian Mount Olympus. But the conditions under which these mediaeval provincial scriptor1a functioned] were quite different from those under which the Western illuminator worked; almost a ways, though in varying degrees, they were subject to the direct influence of the leading craftsmen’s schools in the capital and of prototypes emanating from these. This indeed is what prevented the growth of autonomous local schools of Byzantine miniaturists on the lines of those in the West of Europe. On examining the picture sequences produced by the Byzantine illuminators we find that they bear less resemblance to the work of independent creative artists than to that of members of a family stemming from the same ancestor. This was only to be expected when we consider that the two distinctive features of Byzantine culture were, firstly, the centripetal structure of the monarchic state, its framework, and, secondly, the respect invariably accorded to traditions of the past. Unlike mural painting, the work of the illuminators found relatively little favor in the outlying countries into which the Byzantine aesthetic was diffused; and in any case the period of its diffusion in Eastern Europe synchronized more or less with the decadence of the miniature, even in the metropolis itself.
From the ninth century on, Byzantine religious sentiment fostered the development of panel-painting in the form of icons on wood. Probably the craftsmen’s workshops specializing in this genre were located chiefly in the monasteries, but few Byzantine icons previous to the fourteenth century have survived, and it is only in the light of later works produced in Greek, Russian and other workshops that we can judge what the iconography and the prevailing forms of the earlier icons may have been. But here we must walk warily; conservative though it was, the art of the icon must certainly, like the other arts, have undergone considerable changes. When all is said and done, the aesthetic qualities of the icon can be effectively determined only in the light of works belonging to the end of the Byzantine period and especially Greek and Russian works subsequent to the Turkish conquest of Byzantium—which 1s why they are only briefly discussed in the present volume.
On the other hand we have included, tentatively, a few specimens of Byzantine enamels. Usually such work is ranked among ‘‘minor” or ‘‘applied” arts, but these epithets are pointless where Byzantine artists are concerned. After all, do not mosaics and illuminations—though unquestionably rating among the outstanding achievements of Byzantine art—fall, respectively, into the categories of “‘applied’”’ and “minor’’ arts? The truth is that the Byzantines were particularly sensitive to the intrinsic beauty of the materials they handled, costly metals, polished marble and precious stones, and delighted in the novel and colorful effects obtained by juxtaposing them. In these so to speak ‘‘symphonic’’ works the painting proper is often associated with techniques which we are tempted to assimilate to goldsmiths’ work (examples are two icons of the Archangel Michael in the Treasure of St Mark’s at Venice); nevertheless, aesthetically all these elements form an organic whole. It should be noted in this connection that the modern notion that one species of art is inherently “‘superior’’ to another meant nothing to the Byzantines; they had a scale of values of their own, in which the costliness and rarity of the materials employed and the difficulties in manipulating them ranked high. All these conditions were eminently satisfied by enamel work, whose technique was probably mastered at Byzantium at an early date, and whose flowering synchronized with that of the de-luxe illuminated book (tenth to twelfth centuries). Its prestige was clearly bound up with polychromy in general, and above all with a prevailing taste for polychrome decoration employing several techniques simultaneously. By a judicious use of enamels for figures and ornamental details in the larger decorative works, together with inlays of gold and precious stones, the artist achieved a highly effective over-all integration of the composition. For enamel-work has this in common with the stainedglass window, with translucent cabochons and gold ornaments (as well as with mosaics), that the light striking through its surface is refracted at different angles and becomes amazingly ‘‘alive.’’ Undoubtedly the sheen of the colors in enamel-work far surpasses that of ordinary painting, and in this respect enamel-work has the same aesthetic qualities as those of metals, glass and crystal. None the less the enamels may properly be included in the realm of Byzantine painting.
PROGRAMS BEFORE ICONOCLASM
The status assigned to art varies greatly from one cultural group to another. In Byzantium art was given a leading place; indeed it was in this field, more than in any other, that the Byzantine contribution to world culture found its fullest expression and showed the most originality. Needless to say, this does not mean that Byzantine painting was ever called on to depict the life of Byzantium; in fact, from the documentary angle, its value is but trifling. Its field of action lay elsewhere. What then was it that the Byzantine world asked of this art which it cultivated for so long a period? As usual, it is by examining the ‘‘programs”’ of the works of art produced that we can best determine its social function.
It is obvious that the countries and communities which we style Byzantine were at their inception and over a long period those of the ancient Roman Empire, and, subsequently, of its Eastern moiety. The functions there assigned to art seem to have been much the same as those obtaining before the transfer of the capital to the Bosporus, and so far as painting is concerned, we find that the taste for it was widely diffused, extending not only to the humblest ranks of society but to the remotest corners of the Empire. A great number of craftsmen’s workshops catered for this vast public, more or less capable of appraising a work of art, who, following the fashion of the times, had their houses and mausolea decorated with frescos, the floors of private houses and public edifices with mosaics, and who also commissioned portraits. The repertory of these craftsmen (who were first and foremost decorators) included imitations of famous ancient pictures on literary, mythological or homiletic themes, and sometimes of a talismanic order. Though the copyists and their patrons were fully aware of the original significance of these subjects, they treated them with scant respect, sometimes as mere decorative motifs. In this repertory were some cycles of pictures which a little earlier had been inspired by living and active religions—for example the Dionysiac cycles—but these too were incorporated in the common stock of motifs d’agrément popularized by the new techniques of reproduction. Lastly, during the Early Period of Byzantine art one of the minor functions of pagan art, the illustration of scientific treatises, held its ground to some extent, since a great many schools of medicine, law and philosophy still flourished in the big towns of the Empire, where these illustrated manuals certainly found readers capable of appreciating them.
As employed in monumental decoration, this painting ventured beyond the strict confines of the pagan arts only when dealing with astrological or prophylactic themes. It usually figured in dwelling-houses or public buildings (e.g. Baths) and was doubtless to be seen at its most ornate and majestic in the great public edifices built by the emperors and in the ‘‘Sacred Palace” of the sovereigns themselves. But of all this splendor little has survived except some mosaic pavements, the best of which are at Antioch and in the Great Palace at Byzantium. None of these works is later than the sixth century, but we may be sure that this non-religious art continued to exist at Constantinople in the Middle Ages. Still, as we shall see, its program must have undergone a progressive shrinkage.
It was in the Palace of the Emperors that, from the early days of the Roman Empire, an unashamedly pagan art, intended purely for the pleasure of the eye and to create an atmosphere of luxury, flourished alongside a propagandist art based on the theory of ‘‘the divinity that doth hedge a king”’ and serving the interests of the ruling House. The programs sponsored by this official art were as precisely defined as the ends to which it was applied, and owing to the wide diffusion ensured it by all-powerful monarchs, this propagandist art had come, even before Constantine, to bulk large in the artistic output of the age. Located at the very heart of the Empire and therefore easily controllable, it was eminently a ‘‘directed’’ art, its directives issuing from the throne itself and, having learnt from long experience the best methods of expressing certain elementary ideas (e.g. victory and power) that appealed to the masses, was well equipped for the Empire-wide propaganda that was required of it. All forms of art were enlisted in the service of this “imperial idea.”” In painting it found expression in mural frescos and mosaics, paintings on wood and on canvas, and it crept into the illustrated books. Both the cycles of pictures and individual pictures in all these groups can be differentiated from similar productions of the pagan past and should be assimilated, rather, to religious art, since they too were called on to bear witness, and served doctrinal ends.
But, with the triumph of Constantine, a new patron of the arts came on the scene and rapidly took precedence of all others, such was the scope of its artistic activities and the geographical area they covered. This new patron was the Christian Church, which Constantine’s initial support and subsequent imperial edicts placed in a highly favorable position for intervening in the artistic evolution of the Empire—and even, perhaps, obliged it thus to intervene, given the fact that in the Roman world it was taken for granted that any art in the grand manner should “represent” the important institutions of the day and keep them in the public eye. Hitherto the Church had paid little heed to art, but now the Church Triumphant felt called on to provide itself with an architecture and iconographical system worthy of its new eminence, and to draw up the first Christian repertories which, from the fourth century onward, were added to those of pagan and imperial art (described above) and very soon thrust them into the background. Endowed with copious funds provided by the imperial government and the rulers themselves, the Church made an entrance into the field of art that was all the more spectacular in that she had started from nothing or next to nothing. For, in the first centuries of the Christian era, it was almost always private individuals who commissioned the decorations of their tombs; though it is possible that from the third century onward, the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome as in the East (at Dura, for example) sometimes took the initiative in enlisting the services of artists.
Thus naturally enough the Church authorities, when faced by the necessity of creating a great Christian art that neither the Gospels nor the early Fathers of the Church had contemplated, accepted guidance from the art around them. True, their aim was to extract from heathen art all that might be used for the advancement of the Christian Faith, its prestige and the grandeur of its ritual; nevertheless of the many methods by which this might have been done (and by which it was subsequently done) they selected only a few, those which best accorded with the feelings of all devout believers after the triumph of Christianity in the Empire, and also with the methods currently adopted by officially sponsored forms of art whose mission it was to shore up and to propagate an ideology.
Thus a program was drawn up which, though not exclusive, was followed more or less invariably for several centuries and in which (as in all countries at the close of Antiquity) painting played a leading part. Painters were called on to decorate the interiors and sometimes the facades of churches. Other sacred edifices, martyries and baptisteries, were adorned in the same way; in fact these decorations may have slightly preceded those of the places intended for eucharistic reunions, that is to say the churches. Moreover painting was still lavishly employed in the Christian mausolea. In the fifth century (if not earlier) painting made its first appearance in Christian books, shortly after the portraits, done from the life or retrospective, of saintly personages, heroes of the Faith, painted on veils or panels. Meanwhile, in all the various kinds of Christian monumental painting, purely decorative elements predominated; sometimes their sole function was that of embellishing the ‘‘House of God” and its outbuildings on the same lines as the palaces, using the same techniques and producing a similar effect of sumptuous display. It was in fact from the Imperial Palace and an art enlisted in the service of the divine empcror that the big mosaics in the churches drew inspiration for the apses and the ‘‘triumphal’’ arches in which an effigy of God loomed large, invested with the temporal majesty of the deified monarch. To start with, only a vision of God in his celestial abode figured on the wall behind the altar. In the sixth century, however, with the enlargement of the choir, scenes and historical figures to which a eucharistic symbolism was imparted were represented, while on the walls of the nave, besides the purely iconographic decorations, were depicted selected episodes (their range was limited) from the Old or the New Testament, or both together. Despite the persistence of allegorical motifs (the Lamb of God and sheep) and symbolic devices (the cross and monogram of Christ), much recourse was had to Bible stories. These historical pictures may be assimilated to the quotations from the Old Testament and Gospels so frequently employed in sermons and the liturgy; while, in their general appearance, the compositions in the apses have a literary parallel in the emperors’ triumphal panegyrics.
While deriving from funerary art, the picture sequences in baptisteries provide the earliest examples of a rapprochement between historical scenes and abstract patterns serving as iconographic counterparts of the liturgy, and in them we find the first symbolical interpretations of the functions of places of worship. Whereas the picture sequences in the martyries (shrines for the cult of holy relics) stemmed from the age-old traditions of the Christian tombs. Subsequently, above all in the East, the martyries approximated more closely to ordinary churches and their depictions of the scenes basic to man’s salvation (that is to say episodes from the Gospel narrative, notably Christ’s Birth, Passion and Resurrection) prepared the way for the church decorations of a later period.
Though there is no conclusive evidence, it would seem that this monumental art, which spread over the whole of Christendom between the fourth and sixth centuries, originated chiefly in Rome and Palestine, and that Byzantium did no more than adopt and propagate it. It is particularly difficult to trace the origins of those specific forms of this art which seem unlikely to have derived from the great centers of the Empire, and also have no clear association with the Holy Places of Palestine. The paintings in the martyries and tombs during the Byzantine era probably carried on local traditions which were perhaps anterior to Constantine. Likewise the picture cycles based on apocryphal anecdotes of the lives of Christ and the saints may also have reflected local cults beyond the control of the central ecclesiastical hierarchy. Seemingly, however, it was in Palestine that they were given their iconographical interpretation, and thus, as regards their origins, they link up with the most ‘‘official’’ and ubiquitous Gospel themes (e.g. the Women at the Tomb and the Ascension).
Only very rarely do we find pictures motivated by spontaneous personal piety, as against paintings of time-honored types. Nevertheless some pictures of this kind exist; these are the ex-voto works whose more or less simple iconographical content is usually of a personal order (mosaics at St Demetrios of Salonica, frescos at Santa Maria Antiqua and on the wall of an ‘“‘hagiasma”’ at Salamis in Cyprus).
Being more fragile than the buildings, the early Byzantine painting was now so thoroughly obliterated everywhere that the few, widely scattered specimens available fail clearly to reflect the territorial shrinkage of the Empire after the Arab conquests in the seventh century and those of the Seljuks in the eleventh. But the fact must not be blinked that, from the middle of the seventh century on, Egypt and Syria were no longer provinces of the Empire, nor dominated by the art prevailing in it. The “dark ages” of Byzantium were beginning and, from the viewpoint of Byzantine art history, they lasted for over two centuries—from Herachus (611-641) to Justinian II (685-711) —the period of the terrible wars with Islam, the Slavs and the Bulgarians. Then, from Leo III (717-741) to Theophilus (829-842), came the period of Iconoclast domination. True, the art of painting never died out completely at Byzantium; it was only the depiction of sacred figures that the Iconoclast ban on “‘imaging”’ brought to an end. But all the works of that period have disappeared, some owing to the zeal of the Iconoclasts, and the rest (those with which these “‘heretics’’ replaced them) owing to that of their adversaries, who triumphed in 843.
Thus we know very little of the course of painting in this period. It would seem, however—judging by the few fragments of mosaics (St Demetrios at Salonica) and of frescos (Greek works at Santa Maria Antiqua and San Saba in Rome) which have survived—that the lay-out of church decorations changed a good deal in this obscure period between the age of Justinian and that of the Iconoclasts. Votive pictures proliferated on church walls as independent units, thus obscuring or obliterating the notion of wall decoration as an organic whole, and, by the same token, extended the use of sacred iconography to monumental painting. To this period may probably be assigned the first church decorations composed of religious scenes placed end to end: some depicting Gospel incidents, others (the great majority) saints, episodes in their legends and services rendered by them to individual Christians.
It was probably these iconographic miscellanies that the Iconoclasts objected to above all. But instead of replacing them with plain monochrome surfaces (as in Protestant churches and Moslem mosques), they replaced them with another species of paintings, which likewise had its ‘‘program’’: that of the secular art of the palaces, which (as we have seen) comprised elements of the monarchic cycle (examples of which could be seen in the eighth century in the Palace of Constantinople) and also the paintings, very similar in composition, with which Ommiad Mohammedan princes had recently adorned their new residences, to such brilliant effect.
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