Back to Art H 280 table of contents
The History of Art Survey
Lecture 17
Early Byzantine Art
Gardner 326-343
A The Middle Ages
B Early Byzantine Art
Style Period: Early Byzantine Art 527 - 726
1 Justinian as world conqueror, mid-6th, Ivory diptych half
2 Saint Michael the Archangel, early-6th, Ivory diptych half
* Sant’Apollinare in Classe, 533-549 Ravenna
12 Apse, Saint Apollinaris Amid Sheep, 533-549- Ravenna
6 Church of San Vitale, 526-547 Ravenna
7 plan, Church of San Vitale Ravenna
8 interior, Church of San Vitale Ravenna
9 Choir & Apse, Church of San Vitale Ravenna
* Capital and impost block, Church of San Vitale Ravenna
10 Justinian and Attendants, apse, San Vitale, c 547 Ravenna
11 Theodora and Attendants, apse, San Vitale, c 547 Ravenna
3 Hagia Sohpia, Anthemius and Isidorus of Miletus, 532-37 Constantinople
5 interior, Hagia Sohpia, Anthemius and Isidorus of Miletus Constantinople
4 plan and section, Hagia Sohpia Constantinople
13 The Transfiguration of Jesus, monastery of St. Catherine, 565 Mt. Sinai
14 Ascension of Christ, from Rabbula Gospel, 586
15 Virgin and Child Between St. Theodore and St. George, c 600
Monastery of St. Catherine Mt. Sinai
History and Historiography
In 324 Constantine founded a “New Rome” at the Greek city of Byzantium,
and called it Constantinople. By the 5th century Constantinople was the center
of the Eastern Roman Empire, while second center stood at Ravenna in the West.
By the second quarter of the 6th century there was no more Western empire, only
warring kingdoms. The “New Rome” centered in Constantinople was
to last a millenium. Historians of modern times have called it Byzantium, after
the city’s Original name and its empire Byzantine. They called their empire
Rome (“Romania”) and themselves Romans (“Romaioi”).
Though they spoke Greek, not Latin.
Byzantium “resisted successive assaults of Sasanian Persians,
Arabs, Russians, Serbs, Normans, Franks, Venetians, and others until it finally
was overcome by the surging power of the Ottoman Turks . During the long course
of its history, Byzantium was the Christian buffer against the expansion of
Islam into central and northern Europe.”
When it fought the Ottoman Turks it undoubtedly saw itself as a buffer against expansion of Islam, but that was not what it saw itself as when it fought against the Catholic Venetians, Franks and Normans, or against the Orthodox Serbs and Russians, or the Arabs, and Persians. It did not see itself as a buffer against the expansion of Islam when the Crusaders of 1202 put it under siege and conquered it and held it for half a century. Though it is true that the hegemonic Christian histories of the “West” like to see it that way, as if it was always part of an eternal war of Christendom versus Islam. It wasn’t. They Byzantine Empire fought against other Christian nations as much as it did against the Muslim Turks.
Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire at the
end of the 4th century. Justinian proclaimed Christianity New Rome’s only
lawful religion. By his time it was the Orthodox Christian religion:
it was Trinitarian, looking to the “trinity of Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit.” This is the view of Latin Catholicism and Protestant
churches as well. Those with other views are called heretics, the two great
heresies were the Arian, who denied the equality of
all three members of the trinity, and Monopysites,
“who denied the duality of the divine and human natures in Jesus Christ.”
Justinian was as anxious to stamp out unorthodoxy as to crush the non-Christian
cults.
The Byzantine emperors were considered the “earthly vicars of Jesus Christ,
whose imperial will was God’s will. They alone exercised all temporal
power and spiritual authority. As sole executives for the church
and the senate, the emperors shared power with neither senate nor church council.
As theocrats they reigned supreme, combining the functions of both pope
and Caesar, which the Western Christian world would keep strictly separate.
The Byzantine emperors’ exalted and godlike position made them
quasi-divine. Their church was simply an extension
of the imperial court, and the imperial court, with its hierarchies of lesser
and greater functionaries converging upward to the throne, was an image of the
Kingdom of Heaven.” (326)
Once again we have a threatening division between the “West” and the “East.” And again, as in the Greeks versus the Persians, it was a tyrannical “East” facing a “West” with an apparently more autocratic rulership. It was an “East” that lacked a “strictly separate” church and state, and portrayed its rule and its social hierarchy as emanating from god.
These are undoubtedly values that are opposed by democratically oriented westerners of today, including out hegemonic historians, and most of us, east as well as west, would support those values. But they weren’t the values of the European kingdoms of that day. In fact the only substantial difference between rulership in Byzantium and in Italy was the separation of powers between the king and the bishop of the church, which did make some difference, but not a great deal. The church was in some cases able to speak, but since the king normally appointed the bishop, there was little room for exercising any separate authority and both ruled the same sort of hierarchy with absolute control over the wishes of the god they interpreted.
“In practice, the Byzantine emperors’ attempt to make real the ideal
of absolute political and religious unity was a failure.
They ruled over peoples of great ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic
diversity, with varying histories and institutions...Many were heretical
Christians, and Byzantine efforts to force Orthodoxy on them in the interest
of political and doctrinal unity led to bitter resistance, especially
in Monophysite Egypt and Syria. When Islam made its way into the Byzantine Empire
in the seventh century, the disaffected peoples of these provinces gave it ready
support. While religious intolerance lost the great Eastern Provinces,
the same rigid Orthodoxy also eventually severed its last ties to the
Latin Christianity of the West.” (326)
The overall view here incorporates a set of problems that the modern American has been trained to dislike: absolute rule, religion forced upon people, and religious intolerance. The result was the triumph of Islam and conflict among Christians. I don’t think many historians today would argue with the general characterization. What it leaves out is that absolute rule, religion forced upon people, and religious intolerance was also the rule of every Christian kingdom in Europe of the same period. When we finally get to Charlemagne, you will notice that that is how he creates his Holy Roman Empire and exercises his power.
[We will have to wait a chapter or two to see if Latin Christianity tried to avoid the separation and how it succumbed to Protestantism, a disaster that never befell the Orthodox church.] We are now treated to the conventional “Western” hegemonic vision of the “Byzantine.”
“The Byzantine Empire’s unity, fragmented from invasions
by hostile peoples and hostile creed, also was regularly disrupted by events
at home: palace intrigues, conspiracies and betrayals, bureaucratic corruption,
violent religious controversy, civil commotions, rebellions, and assassinations.
Yet with characteristic resilience, Byzantium, in three periods of revived energy,
recovered from dismal defeats, disunity, and stagnation. At
those times intelligent, able, and successful rulers in war and peace guided
the state. Under them Byzantium prospered and its culture flourished.
These were periods when the unique stylistic features of Byzantine art and architecture
were shaped and refined.” (326)
So we have the hegemonic model of the problem of monarchy from the democratic point of view. Terrible chaos within the state, which is saved only by “intelligent, able, and successful rulers.” Who somehow stumbled along for centuries longer than any European kingdom.
Under the good rulers we get the “unique stylistic features of Byzantine art” and these were “refined.” Art comes from intelligent rulerships.
Art Historiography
Early Byzantine Art is measured from the Emperor Justinian to the onset of Iconoclasm,
or the Iconoclastic controversy, under Leo III: 527 to 726. Middle Byzantine
runs from the renunciation of the Iconoclasm to the “western Crusaders’
occupation of Constantinople” : 843-1204. Late Byzantine is the period
following the recapture of Constantinople from the Crusaders to its fall to
“the Ottoman Turks and the conversion of many Christian churches to Islamic
mosques” : 1261-1453. These are the three golden ages of Byzantine art.
Wise kings apparently avoid iconoclasm and the destruction of art, and they refuse to be ruled by foreigners of a different religion. The fall to the Roman Catholic Christians is of less religious interest to our authors than the fall to the Muslims.
Under Justinian the empire was reinvigorated and partially restored, as his
generals “drove the German Ostrogoths out of Italy, expelled
the German Vandals from the African provinces, beat the Bulgars
on the northern frontier, and held the Sasanian Persians at
bay on the eastern borders.” At home “Orthodoxy triumphed over the
Monophysite heresy.” Justinian built or restored 30 Orthodox churches
in Constantinople, and more around his realm, defining the Byzantine style.
He also supervised the codification of Roman law in the Corpus Juirs Civilis
(Code of Civil Law) that became the foundation for modern European law
systems.
“Byzantine art is generally, and properly, considered to belong to the
Middle Ages rather then to the ancient world, but the emperors of Byzantium,
New Rome, considered themselves the direct successors of the emperors of Old
Rome.” (327)
That is the hegemonic historians prefer to catalog their work under according to its Christian ideological content rather than its Roman and Mediterranean stylistic form. This is “proper” because it suits our hegemonic ideal, and there is no reason why we shouldn’t, since this ideological shift seems to be the guiding factor behind its essential thrust, which is quite comparable to that we have already seen in Early Christian art and will see in western Europe as well: the continued drive away from naturalism and classicism.
Roman formal imagery did continue: emperors “on thrones holding the orb
of the earth in their hands, battling foes while riding on mighty horses and
receiving tribute from defeated enemies .” (327)
In sum Byzantium is seen as backward medieval theocracy, as most of us learn from the connotations of the adjective Byzantine in common English speech. I am not arguing with that characterization, which I agree with. I am endeavoring to point out that this was not a set of traits peculiar to the Byzantines, but as characteristic of their European peers as well, and that —which our hegemonic education replaces with King Arthur and his knights— will not be diagrammed so clearly. This “Eastern” theocracy is little different than the Western Kingdoms of the day.
The last point to note, in our continuing observation of the “East” and the “West” is that the Greeks (the Byzantines) are now the “East” and the Latins Catholic countries are now the “West.”
B Early Byzantine Art 527 - 7261 Justinian as world conqueror, left
half of ivory diptych,
1’ 1.2”, mid-6th
This is the Barberini Ivory. It is part of a set showing an emperor,
possibly Justinian, riding triumphantly on a rearing horse. a barbarian recoiling
in fear behind him. [Barbarians for the Greeks were those who didn’t speak
Greeks, for the Romans —even these Greek speaking and cultured New Romans—
barbarians were those whom they didn’t rule.] This is a dynamic update
of the “pagan Roman” imagery we have seen in the Marcus Aurelius
style conquering equestrian portrait.
There is a personification of the “bountiful Earth” below and a
“palm-bearing Victory” flying in to crown the emperor. The “clemency-seeking
barbarians at the bottom come from the same source. They bear ivory tusks among
their gifts and come amid lions and elephants symbolizing their foreign derivation.
The panel to the side shows a Roman soldier carrying another statue of Victory,
bearing a wreath. The upper panel shows the Christian god, with two angels,
holding the cross and blessing the emperor.
This is the theocratic military state blessed by god in a very Roman manner.
2 Saint Michael the Archangel, right half of a diptych,
1’ 5”, early-6th c
Here is another ivory panel. Such things were designed to be fit as panels upon
boxes or writing tablets or even church or royal furniture. This foot-and-a-half
tall panel with a representation of the Archangel Michael descending stairs
and coming through an arched passageway, is part of a hinged diptych. The image
of the angel with wings is personified Victories of Greek and Roman [Mediterranean]
classical traditions. Winged-Victories are female figures that carry a palm
branch, symbolic of Victory. Saint Michael carries an orb surmounted by a cross,
symbol of Christianity’s triumph, and a staff. He is depicted in flowing
classical drapery.
The architectural frame squares with the panel and the figure’s full frontal
pose flattens him out on the surface. But there are remnants of the modeling
that indicates the mass of a body beneath the drapery, and a rounded face with
subtly modeled hair that suggest the classical naturalism of earlier Mediterranean
traditions. He seems solid at the top, with that head and the foreshortening
of his arms, yet floating below as his feet dangle above the stairs.
The sum is an insubstantial spatial setting that rejects the rationality and
naturalism characteristic of the classical Mediterranean. This handsome angel
floats in a symbolic space, free from the physical constraints of the material
world.
* Sant’Apollinare in Classe, c 533-539 Ravenna
Sant’Apollinare in Classe was constructed two decades after Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, a few miles to the south. We are examining it here for two reasons. First to remind ourselves of the standard form of the Early Christian basilica, which it shares with Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo and nearly every other early large church to survive from this period in Italy. On the exterior it is a plain brick structure with one of the earliest round bell towers to survive.
It has the standard elevated central nave and lower side aisles, separated by an open colonnade of widely-spaced columns, covered by a timber roof. There is narthex entrance across the entire front, and three aisles. The apse is constructed over a crypt that once held the remains of Sant’ Apollinaris, who was martyred here. These remains were removed to Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo in the 9th century.
This was the period of Justinian’s conquest of the Italian peninsula, which resulted in the assertion Justinian’s clerics and administrators over some of the local culture. This structure has a number of features that suggest either the activity of artisans from Byzantium itself or the incorporation of motifs current there. The apse, which is semicircular inside, has a polygonal exterior. The capitals, are also of a characteristic the region of Constantinople. These capitals carry dosseret blocks, a sort of second bracket capital. [I am confused by this last point, which is a standard convention of architectural history. All the structures I know of with dosseret blocks are in Italy. I know of none from further east.]
13 Apse, Sant’Apollinare, Saint Apollinaris amid Sheep,
c 533-549
The glory of the church is its brilliantly glowing mosaic that fills its apse,
finished at the time of the church’s dedication in 549. The apse is framed
in the triumphal arch that precedes it, with Christ in a medallion
flanked by the symbols of the four evangelists, symbolized by a winged eagle
(John), angel (Matthew), lion (Mark) and ox (luke) in a rainbow colored sky.
Below that columns of 12 sheep (the apostles) issue from the Bethlehem and Jerusalem
to climb the hill of the apse amid colorful clouds. The palms of paradise fill
in the spandrels.
Below, in the semi-dome of apse, answering columns of sheep march toward Sant’Apollinare,
who is remembered for preaching to his flock. The subject is Apollinaris preaching
a vision of the transfigured Christ. The entire design is centered upon the
jeweled cross of Constantine (symbol of the transfigured Christ) that floats
in a starry heaven in a jeweled frame, between the prophets Elijah and Moses
whom Christ envisioned at the event. The hand of god reaches down from above.
The face of Christ appears, almost invisible, at the center of the cross. Below
are three sheep symbolizing the three disciples who accompanied Christ to the
foot of the mount of the Transfiguration. Sant’ Apollinaris is shown in
the Early Christian pose of an orant, praying with his arms out to each side.
The overall ground of the composition is a glowing gold. Constantine is supposed
to have erected just this sort of cross on the hill of Calvary to commemorate
the martyrdom of Christ.
A comparison of this Byzantine composition with the earlier mosaics in the tomb
of Galla Placidia (c 425 CE, 11-15) reveal the direction of stylistic development
over the century in between. Where the earlier work sets the shepherd down within
a landscape, this one offers us isolated symbols floating abstractly against
the gold ground. Forms are flat, silhouette cutouts, lacking modeling of shadows.
Space is suggested by registers rising up above the ground line of the frame,
but there are few overlaps, each separate plant or animal separated against
the gold.
The entire scene signifies the sanctity of the church and the power of the mass
held upon the altar below. As the twelve sheep coming to hear Sant’Apollinare
echo the twelve evangelists above mounting to heaven, the mass at the altar
below is the pathway for the earthly flock. The sacrament celebrated upon the
altar takes place beneath the symbolic representation and above the crypt filled
with the bones of martyrs. “Thus the mystery and the martyrdom were joined
in one concept: The death of the martyr, in imitation of Christ, is a triumph
over death that leads to eternal life. The images above the altar present a
kind of inspiring vision to the eyes of believers. The way of the martyr is
open to them, and the reward of eternal life is within their reach.” (339)
The design isn’t merely a decoration to ennoble the structure and entertain the congregation, it is an evocation of the very purpose and meaning of the sacrament they participate in during the mass at the alter.
6 Church of San Vitale, 526- Ravenna
In 493 Theodoric, the king of the Ostrogoths and ruler of all Italy and most
of the Balkans, took Ravenna to be his capital. The Ostrogoths were to hold
it until it was captured by Justinian’s general Belasarius in 539. The
church of San Vitale was begun by the Bishop Ecclesius just after Theodoric’s
death, with the financing of Julianus Argentarius—Julianus the banker.
When we look to San Vitale, we see a great new monumental church begun in the time when the Ostrogoth court was modeled much on that of Justinian and the Eastern Roman Empire, and it seems this church to strongly represents a vision of church structure and symbolism much aligned with that in Constantinople. The structural alignment is revealed by the churches layout and disposition of masses and spaces, largely developed under Ostrogothic rule. The full symbolic development, manifested in the structures mosaics, was completed under the direct rule and interest of the emperor Justinian himself. It was a startlingly different sort of church architecture than the basilican type previously established, and one even more richly encrusted with imagery of Christian transcendence.
The central-planned layout of San Vitale contrasts significantly with the longitudinal basilica standard in the other churches of the Italian peninsula. It develops a quite different conception of church architecture that was to have a long a illustrious life within the world of Christian church forms and liturgy. In time the central plan church was to become as characteristic for the Greek Orthodox rite the basilican plan was for the Roman Catholic rite.
There were rare examples of central-planned martyrium turned into churches that preceded the creation of the developed central-planned church. We’ve seen Santa Costanza, developed out of the Mausoleum of Constantia. There was also one major central-planned monumental church in Italy that preceded San Vitale. That was San Lorenzo in Milan, the major church of the former Roman and Ostrogothic capital. San Lorenzo (c. 355- or 370) was composed of a double shelled central plan, which is the form developed in San Vitale. There was an important central planned church begun a more or less the same moment as San Vitale in Constantinople, the palace church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus. There were other central planned churches in Istanbul over the preceding century, but these have been lost. When our book says (p 333-334) that San Vitale was “unlike any other church in Italy,” but “like Justinian’s churches in Constantinople” it is forgetting San Lorenzo and supposing the controversial proposition that San Vitale was begun after Saints Sergius and Bacchus.[Should I be giving you the plans for San Lorenzo and Saints Sergius and Bacchus? e-mail me.]
7 Plan, Church of San Vitale Ravenna
The plan of San Vitale is built around two concentric octagons.
The inner one rises to a tall central dome over eight broad clerestory windows.
The outer, circling aisle rises two majestic stories, to provide an upper gallery
but not so tall as to block the clerestory. Looking at the plan we see the open
octagon at its center surrounded like a flower by eight petaled shaped rounded
niches separating them from the outer aisle. The entrance narthex spreads across
two sides of the octagon, at a surprisingly asymmetrical angle with the chancel,
that suggests a possible shift from an earlier program. Its major plane
lines it up with the usual north-south cardinal grid; as the chancel lines up
with the direction of Jerusalem.
The chancel is developed in three distinct structures, the vaulted choir ending in a semicircular apse and a pair of flanking chambers, which are much more prominent on the exterior than the interior.
8 Interior, Church of San Vitale Ravenna
“San Vitale’s intricate plan and elevation combine to produce an
effect of great complexity...A rich diversity of ever-changing perspectives
greets visitors walking through the building. Arches looping over arches, curving
and flattening spaces, and wall and vault shapes seem to change constantly with
the viewer’s position. Light filtering through alabaster-paned windows...”
My own response to the church is more confused and enthralled than this reasonable judgment. I find the spaces a combination of clear geometric clarity, strongly visible on the exterior and when we look at the plan, to disappear as we pass through the narthex into the hall. First there is shift in axis: whichever passage we take we have to turn to look toward the apse. And whatever path we take, we pass through a series of ambiguous spaces and vistas. Unlike the simple layout of the basilican plan with its direct procession of pillars and planes to the arch framed altar in apse, the welter of piers and columns, arches and niches here are somewhat bewildering. And this may be its intent.
The interior organization of the central plan take the eye up to the heavens before it can focus directly on the altar. And it keeps directing the eye away from the altar and around the space with no place to rest. The result is a more richly active visual experience and yet one that is much more difficult to discipline.
In class I will take you on a bit of a tour through this experience.
The logic of the design is most visible from the exterior and the plan. The central plan seems particularly well suited to the Orthodox liturgy being developed at Constantinople. Where the basilican plan suits the processing of the priests through the congregation in the hall to the altar where the mass is celebrated, the Orthodox liturgy separates the clergy more distinctly from the congregation and the Eucharist is celebrated out of sight from all but the officiating clergy.
In the central plan church the clergy are gathered in the center before the altar and the congregation around the periphery. The women are segregated from the men. In a two leveled church such as San Vitale the women looked on from the floor above while the men looked on from the surrounding aisle. The altar was set-back deep in the chancel. (In later times a special screen was built into the architecture to shield the altar from view. The two small chambers flanking the chancel were the prothesis and the diaconican, where the priests regalia, the gospels and the elements for the Eucharist were stored, before being introduced into the hall by special processions called-for in the liturgy.
Capital and impost block, Church of San Vitale, Ravenna
Thus the architectural form of the central-planned church seems to emanate from the Orthodox liturgy developed in the Greek church centered at Constantinople. There are also elements of the structures actual details that also seem to derive from the eastern region, which—as I have mentioned—held particular prestige for the Ostrogothic court. There are records surviving to indicate that the columns and capitals of San Vitale were actually imported from workshops in the Proconesian (?) islands of Greece (?).
The column capitals were simple wedge shaped “basket” forms with relatively flat profiles decorated by linear reliefs sharpened by deep, drill crafted backgrounds. They own nothing to the previous classical traditions. There is some controversy as to the source of the so-called dosseret block, the second capital placed placed above the design. Many historians trace them to the east, since they only occur in Byzantine style architecture, but they are common only in Italy, and not in the eastern realm of the style. Their ultimate source is earlier Roman architecture.
9 Choir & apse, Church of San Vitale, c 547, Ravenna
In the fashion of the times, the plain brick exterior of San Vitale opens into an interior paneled throughout on the lower levels by richly veined marble. These are replaced by mosaic in regions surrounding the chancel and the altar. There the mosaics code the light in the gold of a heavenly world peopled mainly by the personages of the old and new testament.
If the structure of San Vitale, with its quite unique dome of earthenware pots under a timber roof is the work of the northern Italian artisans of Ravenna, the rich mosaics of the interior appear, because of their subject matter to be the work of Justinian’s time. They form a unified set of designs including commanding images of Justinian and his empress attending and participating in the celebration of the Eucharist.
The decorations of the spandrels and the insides of the arches are filled with portraits of church fathers, centering on Christ over the entrance to the chancel. The chancel’s walls mix scenes including most prominently on lunettes with the Old Testament sacrifices of Abraham and Abel.
Christ between Angels and Saints (2nd coming),
c 547, San Vitale
The apse holds an image of the Second Coming with Christ perched upon the orb
of the world, flanked by angels presenting on one side Vitalis the martyred,
patron-saint of the church and Ecclesius the bishop who inaugurated its construction.
Christ presents a wreath of victory to Vitalis, while Ecclesius is shown presenting
the church, in the shape of a model,
The arrangement recalls the New Testament prophesy of the end of the world:
“And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great
power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together
his elect form the four winds, from the uttermost part of heaven” (Mark
13:26-27).
10 Justinian and Attendants, apse, c 547, San Vitale
Beneath, on the inner walls of the apse are the brilliant mosaics depicting
the entrances into the choir and the Mass itself of Justinian and his empress.
It was a particular embeddedness of the empire within the church that marks
the Byzantine, and particularly Justinian’s, unification of the two. Unlike
the separation between the bishops of Rome and the emperors of the empire, the
church and the state were integrated in the east. And Justinian shows his intimate
integration into the very act of the Mass here, as we know of it from written
descriptions that have come down of the rituals at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
Justinian here is shown at the center flanked by his attendants. He is distinguished
by the royal purple of his garment and the halo behind his head, indicating
a godlike status. The figure on his left is labeled Maximianus, the Bishop responsible
for completing the church. The figure between them may be Julianus Argentarius,
the financier. There are three groups of attendants. There is the army covered
by the shield, with the chi-rho monogram of Christ; the imperial administrators
with purple stripes on their robes; and the church administrators bringing the
incense, the gospels and cross to the mass.
There is some question about why Maximianus is taller and a bit in front of
Justinian on the ground line, while the emperor is clearly in front of him and
everyone else as indicated by the overlappings. The answer may be in the attempt
to show a balance of power between state and church. But since it is we
who try to divide those things, not the Byzantines, who saw the two as indivisible,
this is not definite. There is no background setting given to the figures
so they may represent an activity taking place in the sanctuary itself. Justinian
is shown carrying a golden basket, the patten which holds the host
for the Eucharist, and may serve as a cover for the chalice during the communion.
11 Theodora and Attendants, apse, c 547, San Vitale,
On the opposite wall is the pair for the emperor’s presence in the presence
of his empress, Theodora, one of the more renown women to come down to us in
history. She is depicted as part of the same ‘offertory procession, as
the bread and wine of the Eucharist are brought forward an presented.’
If Justinian is the “priest-king” carrying the patten, she has a
comparably elevated status bearing the golden chalice of wine.
Theodora isn’t quite as elevated as her husband, but she comes close. She too is garbed in imperial purple, with a halo around her head. She too has court officials on her right as well s a set of female attendants on her left. None of the figures in the Theodora panel is as large as those in the Justinian panel, and more important, these figures are set into a specific interior, marked by the shell niche around the empress, the cloth hanging to one side and the screened doorway toward which they seem to be moving. The presence of the doorway and the fountain before it as well as the official holding up the curtain to let them enter, may indicate the fact that she is not actually going to be allowed into the choir itself. Where Justinian holds his bowl before him, she seems to be handing the chalice toward the male figures on her right who will be allowed into the space of the ritual. She is exalted as the empress, but she is kept in her place as a woman.
The style is notably abstract, the figures all fully frontal, elongated, and
linear. There are no cast shadows and hardly any modeling. We are as far from
the illusionism of the high Roman classical style as we are going to get. It
is an art of conceptual diagrams. Though even within this set of conventions
there are portrait references to the particular features of the major figures.
The reality is that neither the emperor or the empress ever visited San Vitale
or Ravenna. Their images there are representative of their symbolic place in
the Mass, in this particular monumental church.
Once he his armies took possession of Ravenna, Justinian had the churches there purged of the Arian heretical influences he say in Theodoric and his successors and decorated in a manner suited to his own theological and —as we have seen— imperial interests.
Theodora is remembered as a highly controversial figure. She was the daughter
of a circus performer (keeper of bears). She, like her mother was an actress.
And actresses of her time were often prostitutes—as has been common throughout
much history and across many cultures down to the present day. The profession
was so well-established in her day that there was a law against senators marrying
actresses. To be able to marry her Justinian had the laws rewritten, and so
his elevation to emperor initialed the elevation of a former prostitute to empress.
Our books comment on their later faithfulness is a touching reminder that idealism isn’t dead. I don’t doubt it. Why should I? I just wonder why who needs such legitimizing?
She has been immortalized by the historians of her day for her role in current
imperial politics. She was apparently one of her husband’s major advisors.
His historians have left us a picture of her as a brilliant woman who counseled
wisely against flight during an Nika uprising in 532.
But she was a woman and there have always been those ready to pillory any woman who rises too high or exercises power. So we have also been left polemics against her, in Procopius’s Secret History, mentioned by Slatkin, and comments indicting her for the Monophysite heresy. We might question ourselves while wondering at her sexual history, about double standards and the sexual history of the emperors of her day with their armies of concubines.
The great metaphor for the Christian turn
Hagia Sophia, Constantinople’s great church of Holy Wisdom, is now a museum. From the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman’s, in middle of the 15th century until the creation of the modern state of Turkey in the 1920s, it was a mosque. Walking there today is the art historian’s manner of reading ancient documents in their original languages. One passes into and through one of the great spaces of design history, created to serve the developing Orthodox Christian church and its faith. If the Arabic inscriptions, still hanging on great plaques high on its walls, and the giant minars anchoring it to the Islamic world of the Ottomans show us how much things may be changed over time, the great open spaces of the interior and their arrangement and articulation still have much to tell us of the interests and intentions of the church for its followers in the 6th century, a millennium-and-a-half ago.
Our text’s discussion begins with the idea that the “sense of weghtlessness, of miraculous suspension in midair,” in the Saint Michael ivory, “is also characteristic of the most important monument of early Byzantine art, albeit in a very different way.” (329) The point I take and follow is the denial of earthbound material reality in the developing Christian tradition, that separates it so strongly from the more substantial grasping after the wealth of this world in previous imperial creed. The Romans were about taking control of the value of material production, and they show that in their most gigantic surviving structure, the Pantheon, with its dramatic articulation of structural strength (10-50 & Plato’s Cave) The Pantheon’s pier and pillar supported dome of grided coffers is a diagram of structural strength and power. The interior of Hagia Sophia (12-5 & Plato’s Cave) dematerializes form in a quite opposite way, indicating it seems to us today, the Christian focus on the heavens of the metaphysical next-world, that denies the significance of the one we are in and urges us to focus on a heavenly eternity instead.
Is this just a happy metaphor of the modern historian or a useful way to think about the way people construct the monuments by which they celebrate their lives and their interests? It is certainly true that Hagia Sophia’s form is in large part the result of its designer’s —the patrons, as well as the architects and craft workers they employed— basic attempt to impress their peers and populations. That is the ruler’s continual need and prerogative. The very size of the structure, which no spirituality or religion require, is impressive in that regard. Still, however cynical the ruler’s for the Byzantine church and state may have been, they had some belief and commitment to the faith they spent much of their time expressing. They had a variety of esthetic forms available for constructing their church. Whether or not they held the same meaning for the metaphor of dematerialization we see now, did they not intend the effect we identify to be interpreted as we have? Does this interpretation not suit their intentions and interests?
One major goal claimed for art historical study is to identify and understand the deep significances of the cultures of our past. Turning away from the conquest and control of the material world toward a supposed world of the spirit, seems to be the central motive of Mediterranean history at this historical moment. This does seem to explain the embrace and development of the mystical “Eastern” cult of the metaphysical we recognize in Christianity. This is not a new thought, it is—as mentioned earlier—the one of the essential messages of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The vastly successful rationalist-materialistic empire of Rome fell through the turn of its people —rulers and ruled— away from conquest of the material world toward the emotional-metaphysical , material-denying, empire of Christianity.
That is how we may interpret the abandonment of illusionistic representation, and that is how we may interpret the focus of church architecture, particularly in Byzantium, on a dematerialization of its structure and a growing emphasis on the use of light.
3 Hagia Sohpia, Anthemius of Thralles and Isidorus of
Miletus, Constantinople , 532-537
Hagia Sophia is regularly discussed in the hegemonic literature before San Vitale, in order to demonstrate that the Byzantine style emanates from Byzantium. What a chronological order teaches us in this regard it that the Byzantine style was developed across the Greek Orthodox Christian world, which had its center in Byzantium, or Constantinople as it was also called, but not its only source of esthetic ideas. If a relationship exists between the two churches it may be that the potential of San Vitale, in development by Justinian’s rival, was a spur in the side, encouraging him to build a more spectacular church that Hagia Sophia is.
Hagia Sophia was designed by a pair of artists. Anthemius of Thralles was the
architect; Isidorus of Miletus was his structural engineer, his dome designer.
They did their work for Justinian (527-565) the last great Roman Emperor and
one of the Orthodox church’s major architects. It is one of the world’s
great buildings, and stands with the Pantheon and Saint Peter’s among
the largest architectural spaces created by human hands, before the development
of structural steel, a millennium-and-a-half later.
Hagia Sophia is a domed central hall covering an area of around 107’ by 253,’ that bulges out trough the arcades and passages on all sides. The dome, which is the key feature, the structure is built to display, is 108’ in diameter, reaching 180’ above the floor. The room is taller than it is wide and nearly as tall as its length. Though it actually narrows as it rises, it has the effect of a great vertical space that expands. Though its dome is significantly smaller than that on the Pantheon—at 142’ in diameter and height—, the space it covers is vastly greater, as is the height of its dome. Where the Pantheon encloses one within powerful walls of mortar, Hagia Sophia seems to open up through its airy colonnades, arches, and windows.
The great hall was reached after passing through a broad atrium, now missing, and a pair of narthex halls. One then passes through a pillared opening to a hall nearly as long an American football field, surrounded by filigree of pillars, arched passages, and windows. The predominant shapes are great rising window-filled arches supporting quarter-domes and semi-domes, rising up in a crescendo to the great dome floating over a brightly lit wreath of 40 windows. It is a spectacularly lit, airy space. Every surface is decorated by rich marbles and windows, pillars and windows, openings and mosaics.
It is as unlike the Christian basilica of Italy, as one can imagine. Where structures like Santa Sabina are composed around a few major forms: deep rectangular rooms ending in an arch framing a semi-circular apses, this is a hall of so many shapes one can never fix on any long enough to hold it simply in the mind. It is just a great, multi-faceted burgeoning extravaganza. In this bubbling ambiguity it goes beyond even San Vitale, the one building whose prior adoption of the central-planned form may have been in its designer’s minds.
At the far end from the entrance was the altar, in an apse facing southeast, the direction of Jerusalem. That apse rises up to a semi-dome, buttressed by semi-domes on each side, the three together supporting a gigantic semi-dome answering the one over the entrance. The two reach up to be joined by the crowning, light wreathed central dome, that Procopius described as like a canopy “suspended by a chain from heaven.” On the sides are colonnades supporting colonnades supporting flat walls filled with windows. The structure is a mixture of brick and stonework. The massive piers in the center of the hall are stone, but the mass of interior chambers and walls and domes are brick. All the domes are flatter, and so more vulnerable than circular would have been.
The walls were covered with mosaics, all of which were covered over by the Ottoman’s with plaster, except for the winged seraphim in the pendentives, which the Muslims left as archangels: Gabriel, Michael, Raphael and Israfil. Most of the interior spaces are covered by groin vaults. The second story, that rings the open hall is the gynaeceum, or women’s gallery. Women and men were separated during the mass.
The original dome collapsed in 558, to be replaced five years later by one not only stronger but less flat. [That one was partially repaired in the 9th century and again in the 14th.]
The external dimensions, that enclose all the buttressing side-gallery chambers and entrance porches spreads out over 220’ by 340’.
On the exterior there are more changes than on the inside, though the original effect is still visible. To visualize it, we have to eliminate from our consideration the four great minars and the domes of surrounding tombs, added by the Ottomans, and the immense buttresses added by the Byzantines themselves, to shore up the dome. The original effect was a much cleaner geometry, pierced everywhere by windows. Compared to the simple and easily rationalized rectangularity of the Italian basilica (10-80, 11-7 on the outside; 11-8, 11-16, 10-81 on the interior) it was a bubbling efflorescence of full, half and quarter domes (12-4, 12-5 and Plato’s cave). It is a drab, plaster and paint covered brick. The brick domes are covered wood and sealed with a sheet of lead.
Both the eastern and western basilica are austere, geometric brick structures that entered reveal richly jeweled interiors. But where the overall effect of the early Roman Catholic cathedral is one rationalized space, the overall effect of the Orthodox cathedral is a more difficult to grasp effulgence of wall disintegrating lights.
“What distinguishes Hagia Sophia from the equally lavish revetted
and paved interiors of Roman buildings such as the Pantheon (10-50) is the special
mystical quality of the light that floods the interior.” (331)
“Light is the mystic element.” “Pseudo-Dionysius, perhaps
the most influential mystic philosopher of the age, wrote in The Divine Names:
“Light comes from the Good and...light is the visual image of God.”
Hagia Sophia’s “floating dome of heaven” rests on
pendentives, curving global sections that bridge smoothly
between the vertical of the corner piers and the circular base of the dome.
It is one of the two main means of moving from a square base to a circular form
to support a dome. They were used earlier in the Iran and this region, but this
is the first use in a really large building that has lasted. The Romans built
their circular domes over circular plans, e.g., the Pantheon. It is the use
of pendentives that the smooth transitions from the vertical to the horizontal
is accomplished.
The ring of the dome’s base rises off a continuous smooth circle springs from four great corner piers. The thrust of the weight of the dome is spread to the flanking semi-domes and walls through the pendentives. Their engineering is so subtle that the walls are left to fill up with windows, and even the semi-dome is pierced with windows.
The result is a vertically organized central-planned building with a
longitudinal axis. It is a domed basilica, with a tall window lit nave,
flanked by lower side aisles.
The Orthodox Liturgy
Buildings forms are explained by the uses they are designed to accommodate.
Thus the dramatic half-round of the theater and the arena seating of the amphitheater.
Hagia Sophia was designed to accommodate the Orthodox mass, celebrating
“the sacrament of the Eucharist, in spiritual reenactment of Jesus’
Crucifixion. Processions of chanting priests, accompanying the patriarch (bishop)
of Constantinople, moved slowly to and from the sanctuary and the vast nave.
The gorgeous array of their vestments (compare 12-35) rivaled the interior’s
polychrome marbles, metals, and mosaics, all glowing in shafts of light from
the dome.
The nave of Hagia Sophia, as in all Byzantine churches, was reserved for the
clergy not the congregation. The laity, segregated by sex, were confined to
the shadows of the aisles and galleries, restrained in most places by marble
parapets. The complex spatial arrangements allowed only partial views of the
brilliant ceremony. The emperor alone was privileged to enter the sanctuary.
When he participated with the patriarch in the liturgical drama, his rule was
again sanctified and his person exalted. Church and state were symbolically
made one, as in fact they were. The church building was then the earthly image
of the court of Heaven, its light the image of God and God’s holy wisdom.”
(333)
“At Hagia Sohpia the intricate logic of Greek theology, the ambitious
scale of Rome, the vaulting tradition of the Near East, and the mysticism of
Eastern Christianity combined to create a monument that is at once a summation
of antiquity and a positive assertion of the triumph of Christian faith.”
(333)
This is a moving description of the liturgy for the emperor and particularly Justinian. There was a liturgy of not, already discussed for San Vitale above which made many of these same major points, aside from those which peculiarly applied to the royal liturgy. And to most masses, which took place without the presence of the Emperor. The focus on the clergy to the exclusion of the laity, the sacraments for the priests alone with the mystery taking place out of the congregation’s sight, behind the curtains of the iconostasis, were all standard.
13 The Transfiguration of Jesus, monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai,
c 565
A Christian monastic movement began in Egypt in the 3rd century spreading
from there throughout the Christian world eventually. It began with a migration
to the wilderness to escape the distractions of civic life. By the fifth
century monastics were banding together for more regulated lives in
monasteries, walled to separate themselves from secular life and as self-contained
as possible. Though the fact is, they were always connected in some ways to
the world around them, usually through economic means to support their members.
The monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt was built by order of Justinian between
548 and 565. to protect the monks and the pilgrims to the base of the hill where
they believed god had spoken to Moses. By the mid-fifth century
Christ’s mother Mary had been officially recognized by the
Orthodox church as the “Mother of God”
or Theotokos (bearer of God).
The apse mosaic probably dates to 565. The subject is the Transfiguration of
Christ. Jesus appears in a blue mandorla (full body halo) flanked by Elijah
and Moses. At Christ’s feet are John, Peter and James. Portraits of saints
and prophets are contained in the medallions that surround them in the frame.
The figures are all rather stately and frontal. But the three deciples are in
interesting and unusual poses with a frantic air of awe and amazement, gesturing
as orants. “gesticulating...[in] frantic terror.” There is no landscape
setting. only the gold field and a blue to green to yellow rainbow ground line.
It is the world of mystical vision.
The style is consistent with most everything we have seen of the Byzantine:
stylization and diagram having replaced the illusionism of the classical Mediterranean
past. The drawing is sharp and the figures sometimes quite striking in their
fierceness.
14 Ascension of Christ, from Rabbula Gospels, 586, 1’1”
The Rabula Gospels, written in Syriac by the monk Rabula of the monastery of
Saint John the Evangelist at Zagba, Syria contains paintings dated 586 CE. The
Ascension of Christ is depicted with Christ in a mandorla supported by winged
angels over a set of onlookers, including an anonymous crowd a pair of haloed
, winged angels and a centrally placed woman with a halo in raant pose. She
wears a dark blue gown and is therefore likely his mother Mary. The image has
a decorative frame. The likeness of the frame to mosaic geometry suggests to
some that the image may be copied from a mosaic.
There are a number of unaccounted for departures from expectations in the picture.
First, of all this is a scene not mentioned in the Rabbula Gospels. Second,
the text that does mention the ascension mentions nothing about the presence
of Mary. Then there is the rising in a mandorla over a fiery chariot carrying
symbols of the four evangelists. . The text specifies only clouds. All these
contradictions suggest to our authors that this is a copy of a painting in a
lost monument.
Why a painter in an important monument would be more likely to paint something contradictory is not clear here. What is referred to, without stating it is that most compositions from the ancient world are conventional ones repeated over and over many times in slight variations. They do mention one close to this one found on pilgrim’s flasks from the region of Palestine. What isn’t clear is why the invention of an unusual work should be working on a grand scale rather than a small one. From my experience I’d expect the opposite. There is a fairly convenient solution to the inconsistency between the image and the Ascension described in the texts. That is that this is not the Christ’s Ascension, but a symbolic representation of his manifesting himself to Mary and others. It could illustrate a poem or some other vision not from the New Testament at all. Such images are not uncommon.
As a work of art, I think its only value for us is its age and uniqueness, not its esthetics. It is only interesting because it is a very early painting survival.
15 Virgin and Child Between St. Theodore and St. George,
Monastery of St. Catherine, 6th-early 7th c, 2’3”, Mt. Sinai
The Virgin and Child between St. Theodore and St. George is interesting because it is a church icon. Its technique is the encaustic on wood practiced in Roman times. Icons are an important and constant companion to Orthodox observance. Orthodox Churches are filled with them. There they are the objects of veneration through direct touching and particularly kissing.
Though the reality is that few from this early time have survived because most
early icons were destroyed in the Iconoclastic controversy of the 8th - 9th
century (728 - 843 CE). The subject here is the Theotokos with the Christ child
flanked by a pair of saints and backed up by a pair of angels. The figures are
frontal and solemn. Their halos flatten out what little mass is drawn on their
heads. Though there is a bit of modeling of the heads.
The combination of rich patterns in the gold leafed elements of the Virgin’s throne and the architectural details and halos and the abstract figures and boldly staring, stylized figures is typical of Byzantine art.
ICONS
Icons are portable panels painted with Theotokos, Christ or saints.
They are taken quite personally by their worshipers. They were controversial,
however, with some worshipping them as if they contained special powers and
others rebuking them for idolatry.
Having watched icon worship in modern Greece, and as a specialist in Brahmanical worship, I can’t find any difference between much icon worship and idol worship.
ICONOCLASM 726-843
From 726 to 843 the Orthodox church not only banned the creation of
icons, but attempted to destroy all that existed, as if they were violations
of the 2nd Commandment, not to take idols in worship. Icon worship was particularly
popular among the Monopysites of Syria and Egypt.
The step occurred against a background of troubling chaos in the empire. In
611 and 617 the Sassanian Persians took possession of important cities of Antioch,
Jerusalem and Alexandria. The emperor Heraclius won the region back in 627,
but then had to face the rise of the Arabs under the banner of their new religion
Islam. Conquering Sassanian Persia, the new opponent was soon at Byzantium’s
very door, threatening Constantinople itself.
This set up a militarized Christian Greek state against a similarly militarized Islamic Arabic one.
The Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, lost two thirds of its territory,
including much of its population and wealthiest resources. This chaos is one
of the things it was attempting to deal with when Leo III prohibited the worship
of images of any sort, out of the belief that the setbacks to the empire were
a punishment from god for idolatry within the nation. For the following century
the manufacture of icons was almost entirely stopped, and those images which
already existed were destroyed in large numbers. Many mosaics at Hagia Sophia,
for instance were destroyed, though some were only plastered over, and a number
have recently been exposed by the Turkish curators of the structure in the later
twentieth century.
In their place images were substituted for by non-figurative symbols that already
existed: the cross, the empty Throne of Heaven, the cabinet of scriptures, and
stylized animal, plant and architectural motifs. The imagery and art of Byzantium’s
Iconoclastic Period resembled the imagery of early Islamic culture, which it
bordered and which drew—with the same aniconic
(non-figurative-image) zeal—on the same sources.
The truth of empires was that it was not a centralized state of people with many interconnections, but rather a set of distinct cultures connected by a military power. The Romans had conquered the various regions of the eastern Mediterranean long back and the Eastern Roman Empire continued that rule. In earlier Roman times besides being required to pay taxes to the Roman state and maintain the Roman army that collected those taxes, they were required to follow some particular Roman laws and maintain temples for the gods of Rome and to trade with Rome. Under the Christianized Roman Empire of Constantine and his successors they were required to maintain special status for their Christian communities and pay their taxes to the Christian Byzantine State. But these various regions were not all Christian themselves, nor did they generally speak the Latin language of Rome or the Greek language of Constantinople except in trade or for select legal and governmental issues.
When they were offered a way out of Byzantine power by conquest of another competing empire local regions and cultures had little choice. Like the Jews of Israel, who revolted in the First century of the common era, they could protest only at their peril. The Jews were defeated by Titus and dispersed throughout the empire. The few Muslims who lived under Byzantine sanction before the eruption of Arab conquest in the 7th century, lived under Christian rule. When the Arab conquest brought the entire region under Arab rule, Muslims received special protection. The majority of people in these region were likely less concerned with the religion of their conquerors than their economic policies.
Muslim historians see the Iconoclasm coming as a very direct response to the defeat of Byzantine forces by Muslims who were strictly anti-iconic. As the best explanations for any historical phenomena involve myriad reinforcing and interrelated causes, not single causes, this is certainly an important one.