Download PDF | Jelena Bogdanovic - The Framing of Sacred Space _ The Canopy and the Byzantine Church-Oxford University Press (2017).
457 Pages
Introduction
Canopies, centrally planned columnar structures, are widely used in religious and royal contexts in various cultures and historical periods—in ancient pagan, Christian, Islamic or Hindu traditions, to name but a few.1 However, their significance and meaning is far from being fully understood. This book examines the importance of studies of canopies from archeological and architectural perspectives as a way to enhance our understanding of the idea of a Byzantine church. The discussion of canopies is focused on Byzantine tradition alone due to two major reasons. First is the need to present the empirical evidence on canopies, which would be difficult to illuminate if done across different cultures. Second highlights how the domed church, essentially an elaborated canopy, emerged as a recognizable building type in Byzantine architecture.
This particularly Byzantine phenomenon of the domed church reveals that its architecture and some of the central features of its interior have the same form, and hence calls for the detailed investigation of the material evidence and the interpretations of its cultural meanings. Canopies as integral features of Christian churches have received frequent but often superficial attention in lexicons, dictionaries, and general studies of Christian art and architecture. These studies tend to single out the formal architectural functions of canopies—as altar canopies (often called ciboria), baptismal canopies, or tomb shelters—or their visual representations in art as architectural backdrops for Biblical, hagiographical, and liturgical narratives and scenes.2 Numerous accounts usually address early Christian, medieval, and later examples in the West, highlighting above all Bernini’s famous baldachin in St. Peter’s in Rome.3 Canopies from the western territories of medieval Europe currently constitute the major corpus for studies of medieval canopies in general. Canopies of the Christian East have not been included in major discussions mostly because scholarship about Byzantine canopies has habitually been limited by the lack of material evidence. This study presents the complex archeological, visual, and literary evidence for canopies in the Byzantine ecclesiastical tradition.
The initial aim of assembling and presenting this information on canopies is manifold: (1) to question how much evidence we actually have and how aspects of this evidence relate to each other for a given period and/or geographic region; (2) to question whether the form of a canopy held significance and meaning; and (3) to examine to what extent canopies were imitative or nonimitative structures, and as such critical for the process of architectural design. To determine whether the main centers of intellectual thought and artistic production may have influenced the notion of canopies, I investigate canopies within the broad scope of Byzantine art and architecture (ca. 300-1500). This broader evidence for canopies comes from structures, which were made or have remained in the territories that were once part of the Byzantine Empire and its commonwealth, based on shared Orthodox Christianity, in the Eastern Mediterranean.4 With full understanding that the early Christian and Byzantine canopies did not develop independently from the better studied examples from Rome and western Europe and that they belonged to the same cultural and church tradition—at least until the ninth century, when the emergence of the Carolingian Holy Roman Empire directly confronted the Byzantine Empire as fully Christianized and the rightful successor of the Roman Empire, or until the official doctrinal split between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches in 1054—my investigation focuses on canopies in churches in the east, while making recurrent references to comparable examples of canopies in the west.5 Such an approach allows for better clarity in the overview as to how many of the canopies definitely belong to the territories directly associated with the Byzantine Empire.
This approach is furthermore critical in the attempts to eventually confirm that canopies were, in contrast to prevailing scholarly opinion, extensively used in the Byzantine ecclesiastical tradition, and that the use of canopies in medieval churches was a pan-European cultural phenomenon, as has been recently suggested by several important publications prepared by Justin Kroesen.6 During my research, I have collected archeological evidence for more than two hundred canopy-like structures, constituting a body of physical data complemented by images of more than five hundred representations of canopies in the visual arts and by testimonies in more than one hundred texts that by using various descriptive and metonymic terms mention objects known as, or surmised to be, canopies. Such extensive material, never previously examined as a whole, confirms the broad use of canopied installations in Byzantine-rite churches and challenges the prevailing opinion that after the so-called transitional period (seventh–ninth centuries), marked by socio-economic and a decline of building monumental, large architecture, canopies as architectural installations ceased to be used. Surviving textual, visual, and above all archeological evidence confirms the prolonged and continual use of canopies throughout the Byzantine realm, both in the main centers of the empire and in its periphery and neighboring countries that adopted Byzantine culture as a model. This wide geographic framework permits a better understanding of concurrent Byzantine architectural developments, not only in Constantinople but also elsewhere. By providing a short overview of the literature and the gaps in current scholarship on Byzantine architecture that often lack discussions of interior furnishings and micro-architecture in general, this book emphasizes the great potential of “soft” archeology and new methodologies in the studies of historical architecture that unveil Byzantine architecture beyond the building as a shelter. An unpublished doctoral dissertation “The ‘Ciborium’ in Christian Architecture at Rome, 300-600 AD” by the late M. T. Smith (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 1968) remains the most critical comprehensive work addressing the subject of early Christian canopies in the West. Her work, complemented by two additional articles, is also essential as it addresses the early Christian canopies in Rome in connection with the pagan and Jewish traditions, making possible insights into further developments within the Western Christian sphere.7 My work also touches on notions of the appreciation of the cultural heterogeneity and of the shared religious values of the Byzantines with Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic traditions and on the long-lasting creative conventions in the Mediterranean.
Yet, instead of following the models and methodology of scholars who have studied canopies in Western Europe, I have taken an approach that revises the functional paradigm in order to consider theological texts as a corpus of medieval “philosophy” that informs architecture in the Byzantine realm, and to combine traditional with new methodologies. In particular, I engage with innovative studies that emerged in the 1990s and that consider sacred space—such as the so-called hierotopy by Alexei Lidov and the so-called iconic and spatial “turns” advanced among medievalists by Hans Belting and Myrto Veikou.8 Such a more comprehensive approach takes into account the architectural and design principles that the Byzantines used and offers beneficial trajectories for studies of the creation and reception of sacred space framed by canopies. Major books on Byzantine architecture written by internationally renowned architectural historians such as Ralph Hodinott, Cyril Mango, Richard Krautheimer, Slobodan Ćurčić, Thomas Mathews, and Robert Ousterhout provide three-dimensional reconstructions of churches or floor plans with delineated locations of specific interior fittings, yet seldom discuss canopies and their relation to church design in greater detail.9 Archeological reports occasionally mention canopies, frequently reduced to traces of their original appearance and setting within churches, and related journal articles mostly highlight carved fragments of canopies within discussions of architectural sculpture. Among numerous texts that reveal the existence of canopies in Byzantine-rite churches across vast territories and chronological spans are those written by scholars such as Andre Grabar, Laskarina Boura, Jean-Piere Sodini, Catherine Vanderheyde, Angeliki Mitsani, and Øystein Hjort.10 The majority of Byzantine canopies are difficult to date and to locate accurately within their original settings because most of them only survive in fragments, while stylistic analysis is critical for establishing the centers of their production, yet often ineffective for precisely tracing regional differences. Imbued with symbolic meanings, the abundant visual evidence for canopies in Byzantine paintings is complementary material in researching the meaning of canopies, yet cannot be taken as verifiable documentary evidence of actual objects.
In this study I follow a new generation of scholars who, by working with small scale, portable objects such as lamps or utensils, emphasize the need for more subtle interdisciplinary approaches in the research of material culture in Byzantium. For example, Maria Parani has successfully revealed how images of portable objects can certainly provide clues about their material reality and meaning, apart from references coming exclusively from textual sources.11 Texts in Byzantine Greek and other languages used in the Mediterranean are vague and often deemed as confusing and convoluted, especially because medieval writers were not primarily interested in material topics but rather in spiritual ones. Therefore, archeological evidence and visual representations of canopies remain invaluable references to the examination of the role of canopies in Byzantine-rite churches. Examining the context of Gothic churches, François Bucher defined micro-architecture as miniature architectural structures frequently used as church furnishings, such as altar canopies, font canopies, saintly shrines, and reliquaries.12
The Framing of Sacred Space further aims to foster studies about micro-architecture, which significantly lag behind the studies of monumental architecture despite the fact that the emphasis of Byzantine architecture was placed on its interior, spiritual space with church fittings critical in its articulation. These structures provided performative frameworks for liturgical services and paraliturgical devotional practices while at the same time they evoked Biblical architecture and space such as the Heavenly Jerusalem, the paradisiac Fountain of Life, or the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Expanding upon the definitions of micro-architecture as miniature architectural structures, micro-architecture here implies structures that assembled by a minimal number of basic architectural elements convey the sense of framed space, while their micro-architectural qualities are here understood not primarily in terms of humanbased size, but rather in terms of their relative scale to the sacred space in which they are found, such as churches, and which they denote, such as the Heavenly Jerusalem. This book highlights the canopy that by virtue of its physical form represents a basic microarchitectural framing device in the Byzantine religious context. At the same time, this study challenges studies of Byzantine architecture that are limited to detailed formal typological discussions of floor plans and church design. The examined material suggests how a deepening insight into the total cultural context of ecclesiastical settings may significantly expand our current scholarly perception of canopies in Byzantium beyond merely physical evidence to include the memory image of a canopy as an architectural frame for sacred space.
For example, in this work, the Tomb of Christ is considered as a seminal object for understanding Byzantine canopies and the messages they conveyed despite the fact that architecturally speaking this still partially preserved object is not a canopy, strictly understood as an open columnar structure. Similarly, another critical building in Byzantine religious thought, the Temple of Jerusalem, was only creatively recreated in Byzantine art and architecture as a canopy and certainly was not originally built as such. Probably the best-known Byzantine canopy (also named ciborium in Greek texts), that of St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki, was not an open columnar structure either, but rather an aedicula-shaped miniature building with engaged columns comparable in form to the Tomb of Christ. Hence, this book shows how like many canopies seen in illuminated manuscripts or wall paintings that denoted sacred space, the canopy in a Byzantine-rite church became a spatial, visual, and literary topos. Simultaneously, essential architectural elements that constitute a canopy as architectural parti were potent carriers of multifold religious messages in the Byzantine world.
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
How did the Greek speaking Byzantines refer to canopy-like structures? An attempt to answer this seemingly simple question in Chapter 1 reveals that there is not a single and absolute answer, and that a critical reassessment of the applicability of the currently used term ciborium is needed. Moreover, the plethora of original late antique and medieval accounts on canopied structures provides two distinct bodies of evidence. One is critical for proof about the existence of actual canopies in Byzantine tradition; the other for understanding culturally determined ways of their perception. This chapter develops an analysis of the different idioms, arguments, and rhetorical strategies the Byzantines used to describe and discuss canopies in their churches. It compares the modern academic conventions of naming and describing canopies as ciboria with conventions that are related to the Byzantine tradition. The formulaic nature of ekphrasis, encomium, and other rhetorical devices allowed the Byzantines for complementary but non-hierarchical treatment of texts and structures. Such an analysis links some of scholarship’s evident lacunae and misunderstandings to the inception of Byzantine studies and its antiquarian approach starting in the sixteenth century and solidified by positivistic scholarship since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
My research shows that the Byzantine Greeks used the word ciborium (in Greek κιβώριον) less often than we previously thought. Moreover, the word ciborium occasionally denoted various entities, not only canopies, in contexts outside of Christian ecclesiastical architecture. Textual accounts that employ Greek versions for the word ciborium are various, ranging from poems and texts on magic, to teaching resources such as grammars and lexicons, to hagiographies and highly complex theological writings. The term with its variant meanings remained in use until the fall of the Byzantine Empire; and yet, its meaning might have been different depending on the type of discourse or specific time-period in which it was used. Furthermore, those writers who employed the word κιβώριον recurrently provided an extended explanation of what a ciborium was. Potentially, the word was strange to the Byzantines as well, and the necessary explanation of ciboria resulted from a conflation of various pre-Christian sources, usually Hellenistic pagan and Jewish. At the same time some other, overlooked descriptive and metonymic words may have referred to canopies in the Byzantine tradition—such as πύργος [pirgos] meaning tower; οἰκίσκος [oikiskos] “small house”; ορόφιον [orophion] referring to roofs, usually domical ones; ἁψῖδα [apsida] with its meaning for the arch and vault; references to four columnar structures such as τετρακίονος [tetrakionos] and τετράπυλον [tetrapylon]; various terms for religious curtains such as τετράβηλον [tetravēlon], καταπέτασμα [katapetasma], παραπέτασμα [parapetasma], and πέπλα [pepla]; or the relatively obscure term κουβούκλειον [koubukleion, kouvouklion], referring to various rooms, chests, burial and funerary installations. Though used very little in Byzantine scholarship, the modern term canopy is the most applicable one for this study as it points to the basic architectural form behind all these various terms used in Byzantine texts.
This chapter also highlights the awareness of the Byzantine intellectual elite to the changing and interrelated multi-layered terminology pertaining to canopies in the Byzantine church as a carrier of complex theological ideas that were deeply associated with the materialization, meaning, and perception of such architectural installations. Turning more specifically to the archeological evidence, Chapter 2 establishes the prevalence of canopies in Byzantine churches—their quantity being far greater than previously thought—and then suggests that Byzantine canopies, though formulaic in execution, indeed, perhaps because of their generic imagery, were readily adapted for diverse contexts. This chapter details the use of altar canopies as well as canopies over baptismal and holy water fonts, over ambos and other types of church furnishings, and over tombs, shrines, relics, and icons. With the increasing interest in the so-called “soft” archeology that documents architecture not only as buildings but also carefully analyzes traces of their original settings, including various fittings and material evidence that can hint to a better understanding of religious space, new discoveries of canopies from the Christian East are additionally presented. Recently Anastasios Antonaras published archeological findings from the Church of Hagia Sophia in Thessaloniki, which revealed the remnants of a medieval bronze canopy, hence also expanding discussions on their materiality.13 Namely, the majority of surviving canopies from the Christian East are early examples made of fine-quality stone. Some of them were made of silver or cast in bronze, decorated with gems, semi-precious stones and glass, and sometimes gilded. Textual evidence confirms that wooden canopies may have been more common despite only a few later extant examples. Even in cases when canopies were made of wood, it is likely that many of them would have been gilded and sheathed in silver, gold, or other precious materials.
The decoration and inscriptions on canopies reveal their potency to act as carriers of various spiritual, proprietary, and votive meanings. Yet, the function of medieval architectural installations, including canopies, cannot fully explain their form, decoration, or meaning. Canopies of similar form did not necessarily have parallel functions in Constantinople, Thessaloniki, or elsewhere in the Byzantine domain; furthermore, canopies of similar function and location within the church proper may not have had the same form and decoration in every Byzantine church. The same is true of the spatial arrangement of canopies of the same form, function, and decoration. These can be seen most vividly through analysis of the various examples of altar and baptismal canopies, the most numerous groups of preserved canopied installations. Chapter 3 demonstrates that Byzantine architectural design was deeply human oriented, which resulted in a peculiar version of place-making, whereby the canopy, despite its generic design, within the church space articulated singular place identity. Being most closely related to human presence and experience, canopies also effectively promoted spirituality, salvific messages, and a variety of Christian religious beliefs. Several case studies exemplify the contextualized use and experience of canopied installations, all the while highlighting how both individually and culturally constructed meanings were variously related to each other, occasionally independently of official religious or administrative directions.
The analysis highlights the third-century Dura Europos baptismal canopy, the earliest canopied installation acknowledged to serve exclusively Christian purposes because the sacrament of baptism is unique to Christians. Specific examples of Byzantine canopies preserved in situ on the island of Paros and in Kalabaka, Greece, provide insights into the complexities of place-making by focusing on canopies in their original church settings and by making references to comparative structures in Constantinople and elsewhere. In 2010, I had the opportunity to provide expertise for the acquisition of a heretofore unknown and unique monolithic early Christian canopy from the Middle East for the Royal Ontario Museum, which granted me the rights to discuss it in this publication and to ask the questions raised when the original setting remains unknown. The reconstruction of the multiple canopies and their placement in the major Byzantine church, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople—which set the standards for Byzantine religious architecture—reveals the heretofore understudied, multi-focal topography of the Byzantine church as a re-creation of spatial settings and their meanings for various church practices articulated by canopies within an individual church. A critical feature of canopies is their micro-architectural quality, which brings to light the essence of design practices in Byzantine religious architecture. Chapter 4 examines various canopies as columnar and vaulted installations and relates them to the meaning and form of the canopy as a basic spatial unit of the Byzantine church. The analysis highlights how altar canopies, for example, resulted from, among other factors, the complex circumstances of diverse liturgical needs, devotional practices, and movement-directing channels within a given church and may have originated from various concepts related to funerary (funerary altars and tomb canopies), civic (tetrapyla and imperial canopies), and sacred architecture (shrines and sacrificial altars). Specific case studies include the canopied shrines of Old St. Peter’s in Rome and related early Christian churches in the wider Mediterranean, as well as of St. Euphemia in Constantinople, St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki, and Blessed Loukas in Boeotia. As I move from specific examples to larger trends within Byzantine domains, canopies are examined within their broader context, which includes prevailing theological concerns, piety, and liturgical practices, as well as generalized contemporary social attitudes and economic conditions for their creation and maintenance.
Most importantly, Chapter 4 emphasizes the concepts of design of the Byzantine church based on the micro-architecture of canopies on a micro-scale defined by the human body and the church building to which they belong. Specific architectural solutions reveal the various spatial relations and meanings between different canopied installations. In particular, the following relations are examined: between canopies for altars, tombs, and saintly shrines; between altar canopies, templon screens, and proskynetaria; between canopied phialai outside the church and vaulted chambers that served as phialai inside the church; between ambo canopies and two-dimensional omphalos disks in the nave of the church; and finally the spatial and symbolic merging of imperial canopied thrones, canopied settings for the veneration of relics, and those canopies with funerary associations as well as their further transposition into domical canopy bays of church narthexes and exonarthexes or canopied and domed chapels in the galleries above narthexes. This chapter ends with an explanation of how domed bays in Byzantine churches were architectural canopies and had a crucial role in the modular transposition from domed basilica to various Middle-Byzantine solutions. Above all the longstanding nine-square problem in architectural design is revealed in the articulation of Byzantine church design and in particular in the prominent, so-called cross-in-square Middle Byzantine church. The multiple relations between various canopied installations and settings in the church point to the dynamic process of architectural modular design based on canopies as spatial units that also allowed for singular rather than generic experience of space. Hence, canopy emerged as an efficient spatial and symbolic unit in articulating the nine-square grid design, which in turn provided an impressive variety of solutions in Byzantine church architecture. When juxtaposed with the conventional studies of Byzantine architecture that examine various floor plans as defined and systematized in the twentieth century, the major contribution of the consideration of the canopy in the nine-square grid design is in revealing a more plastic understanding of the Byzantine church typology and adjusting the previously set chronological taxonomy that placed Hagia Sophia at the pinnacle of Byzantine accomplishments followed by architectural decline. On the contrary, in this proposed innovative understanding of Byzantine church design, the essential role of a canopy is in asserting the continual links between late antique and medieval Byzantine architecture, while at the same time the Middle and Late Byzantine churches can be understood as architecturally and symbolically mature rather than inferior solutions. The sophisticated and complex concepts of total design of the Byzantine church based on canopies of different scales are examined in Chapter 5.
The Byzantine church centered on the micro-architecture of canopies, as structures assembled by a minimal number of basic architectural elements to convey the sense of framed and specified space, allow for the expansion of their scale beyond a micro-scale based on human size to include a macro-scale relative to the space in which they are found and which they denote. Two ultimate architectural models for the embodiment of heavenly and earthly Jerusalem in a Byzantine-rite church are the Temple and the Holy Sepulchre. By focusing on Hagia Sophia as a building that set ideals for Byzantine architectural design, these two concepts and related architectural models are especially highlighted: first, the Biblical architectural models carried on the level of ideas—the Ark, the Tabernacle, the Temple, Heavenly Jerusalem—and second, the Tomb of Christ and the complex of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as seminal Christian sites that palpably carried the pervasive salvific messages from the holy land and holy places to the Byzantine believers. Throughout, I emphasize the inseparability of the material and spiritual aspects of canopies as carriers of meaning. Although the medieval sources— archeological, visual, and textual—may independently yield different conclusions, the potency of the canopy as a device for framing sacred space expands towards these different types of evidence in a corresponding way. The triumphant micro-architecture of the Tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, the seminal building for the testimony of the New Covenant, is detailed through several lines of investigation to reveal its overarching significance in Byzantine-rite churches. In this chapter, we reconcile, for instance, why Byzantine theologians often describe the altar canopy as a symbol of Christ’s tomb and yet testimonies about the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem compare it to another piece of liturgical furniture, the ambo.
The typological links between the Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, the Temple, and the Tomb of Christ in the Holy Sepulchre establish organic architectural, tectonic, symbolic, and sacred ties between the Old and New Covenants within Byzantine domed churches, which are essentially large-scale canopies. At last, I summarize the major findings of this study in the conclusion, revealing the canopy as a spatial and symbolic unit of sacred space. By emphasizing the phenomenon of canopies as essential architectural and ontological constructs in the Byzantine church, the study calls for wider discussions about the additive and modular design processes in the Byzantine domain and beyond.
The book claims that such a design was based on a canopy as a spatial unit and diagrammatic architectural parti rather than the reproducible precise two-dimensional imagery of floor plans and cross sections, which we use today when studying Byzantine architecture. The formal and conceptual integrity of canopies emphasizes the fine merging of the total design of Byzantine churches within canopies, inclusive of their form and associated values. Because canopies as micro-architectural structures are on the verge between architectural and sculptural installations, they simultaneously highlight the tectonic and aesthetic qualities of a Byzantine church. When captured in their memorable imagery and their dynamic relations to the sacred space, canopies reveal the diagrammatic reasoning behind their creation, which in turn alters our perceived aesthetics and the meaning of Byzantine churches.
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