Byzantium: a word
draped in exotic mystery, an entity claiming to be the continuation of the
Roman Empire in the east, which lasted for over 1,000 years before being
finally vanquished by the Ottomans after it had withered away to being little
more than the metropolis of Constantinople.
Centre of the
Orthodox east, for the medieval western Christian it was a place of both
decadence and heresy, but also unparalleled riches, especially the spiritual
riches of relics and magnificent churches. For the Orthodox world it was, and
still remains, a dazzling manifestation of a Christian empire, presided over by
God’s anointed, a memory of glory, temporal, intellectual and spiritual, a
place of holy Wisdom venerated in her greatest temple, Hagia Sophia. Straddling
Europe and Asia, it was Christian yet not Catholic but Orthodox, imperial and
hierarchical but not really feudal. Enigmatic, somewhat arrogant, buffeted by
twists of fate and convulsed by constant threats to its very existence, its
significance for the history of Europe has sadly been mainly overlooked.
The study of
Byzantium has been largely left to specialist academics who have had the
instinct to probe beyond the dismissal of the empire by leading figures of the
Enlightenment, who wrote it off as a “disgusting picture of imbecility: wretched,
nay, insane passions, stifles the growth of all that is noble in thoughts,
deeds, and persons. Rebellion on the part of generals, depositions of the
Emperors by means or through the intrigues of the courtiers, assassinations or
poisoning of the Emperors by their own wives and sons, women surrendering
themselves to lusts and abominations of all kinds.”—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History. This prejudice
strongly influenced the place, or lack of it, in the teaching of history in European
schools to the point that even a student of A-level history could have remained
totally ignorant of its existence despite its fundamental importance in
understanding how modern Europe was formed. Only in the last decade of the 20th
century was Byzantine studies rehabilitated and given something of the prestige
of other areas of contemporary research. “Currently, Byzantine studies,
reflecting its classical heritage, is still much more dominated by philological
and art historical concerns than Western medieval history. Still, there are
interesting transformations evident. The French Annales School,
represented by such scholars as Helene Ahrweiler and Evelyne Patlagean has
applied the specific social, cliometric and "long duree"
methodologies to Byzantine studies with some gusto. Purely social history,
without a Marxist slant, is now well established, with Angeliki Laiou among the
most productive writers. The Russian Byzantinist Alexander Kazhdan was
responsible for a whole variety of initiatives, including a willingness to
study religious phenomena in secular perspective. Finally, and much later than
in other areas of historical study, the history of women is now coming to the
fore.”Paul Halsall, ntroduction
to the course in Byzantine Studies at Fordham University, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/
As Halsall intimates,
one area of interest revived much earlier was that of art, in effect its
religious art. This too had been an area which had been much reviled by Western
Europeans, indeed its denigration from the time of the Renaissance preceeded
the general dismissal of Byzantium in the Enlightenment. “A lasting dismissive judgment of the artistic
heritage of the Middle Ages was cast, while the notion of ART was confidently
applied only to the artistic tradition associated with antiquitry and its
post-medieval ‘rebirth’.”
Article by Slobodan Curcic in
Transition to Christianity, ed. Anastasia Lazaridou, Onassis Foundation, 2011. This attitude swept across Europe from Italy,
not least in Russia where under successive Tsars its influence shaped not just
the secular art and architecture of the imperial palaces and the like, but also
that of Church art and its buildings. The dismissal of Byzantine art as
something crude and, in the negative sense, medieval, affected even the Orthodox
world.
The resurrection of Western European respect for the Medieval world began
where it was first lost: with its sacred art and architecture. This was
spearheaded by the Romantic movement, its poets such as Keats, Wordsworth and
Byron inspired by the magnificent ruins, manuscripts and art of a world infused
with spiritual vision rather than the rationalism of the Enlightenment. In the
English speaking world the revival of Gothic and the growth of foreign travel
to exotic places, pushed this Romantic spirit to embrace Byzantium. With their love
of the Orient, the magnificence of Hagia Sophia and the numerous impressive
remains of churches and monasteries across the Byzantine world never failed to
inspire awe and wonder in travelling western Europeans. By the end of the 19th
century, art scholars began to try to understand the role of Byzantine art in
the formation of Western medieval art. As A.L.Fotheringam Jr wrote in 1895, , “To
a student of the Middle Ages it is of extreme importance to understand what
influence Byzantium exercised upon the West during its formative period,
between the seventh and the eleventh centuries, when its civilization,
complete, brilliant, and pervasive, was as a beacon to the crude and groping
West, and was the only great centre of inspiration, although it was often
antagonized and reviled.” The
American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts, Vol 10;
‘Notes on Byzantine Art and Culture in Italy and Especially in Rome’. Fifty years later Kurt Weitzman, the eminent scholar of Byzantine art,
summarised this transition in an article in the same journal: “The preoccupation with Byzantine art has to be seen in the
historical perspective as a rather late link in the revival of various phases
of mediaeval civilization that started in the nineteenth century. Beginning in
the romantic period with a movement for the revival of Gothic art, a more
scientific and systematic investigation of the mediaeval past superseded in the
course of the nineteenth century the emotional approach of romanticism and
expanded backwards into the Carolingian and Romanesque periods. When at a
comparatively late stage Byzantine art and culture were gradually integrated
into the general history of mediaeval civilization, the scholars embarking on
this field came from various camps, each group having a different training and
approaching it from a special angle. This undoubtedly had a stimulating effect
and put research in Byzantine art on a broad basis, but at the same time it
prolonged the process of attaining a comprehensive and coherent picture of the
evolution and significance of Byzantine art.”
Byzantine Art and Scholarship in America, Kurt
Weitzmann . Source: American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Oct. -
Dec., 1947), pp. 394-418. Weitzman was himself to make
an enormous contribution to Byzantine studies, and to the rehabilitation of
Byzantium as fundamental reference point
in the development of European Art. During the latter part of the 20th
century Weizman, Grabar and other scholars established that “in its art and architecture, Byzantine culture
was genuinely, and despite itself, innovative and capable of producing works of
great beauty.” Halsall, Introduction to the course in Byzantine
Studies at Fordham University, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/
In
essence the Byzantine world, and hence its art and architecture, were intensely
spiritual, a fruit of a Christian world-view which saw reality through the lens
of the incarnation of the Divine Logos and his life-giving death and
resurrection. Matter, for Christians, matters. The paradigm of the
Transfiguration established a particular appreciation of the visual, and in
particular light, as a means of the interaction between humanity and God. While
the Byzantine empire crumbled into non-existence more than 500 years ago, its
viewpoint endures to this day particularly, though not exclusively, within the
world of Orthodoxy, where not just the outward form of its liturgy directly
relates to the Byzantine world but its art also reflects a fundamental way of
looking at reality that is as comprehensible today to an Orthodox Christian as
it was to his or her Byzantine forefathers. This view of reality is most
conscious when it comes to the icon: “The icon is one of the aspects of divine
revelation and of our communion with God. The Orthodox faithful assembled in
church for a liturgy establish contact with the Heavenly Church by the
intermediary of their icons and liturgical prayers” Michel Quenot, The Icon – Window on the Kingdom, SVS
Press 1991, p.12. Iconography is at the very heart of Byzantine art, perhaps the jewel
in its crown, the very essence of all that Byzantium came to stand for. It is
certainly its most enduring legacy, still a living art form of deep spiritual
resonance found in churches across both eastern and western Europe, and indeed
wherever the Christian church has established a presence, be that in Africa or
Oceania.
Despite this enduring
appeal, and indeed the profound influence it has had on the development of
Western art, its origins have remained something of an enigma. Grabar, one of
the early art historians to understand their significance for the history of
art as a whole, concluded after a life-time’s research that “it is not possible
to define the precise moment when Byzantine painting was born." Byzantine and Early Mediaeval Painting by M.
Chatzidakis and A. Graba. 1965. p.3
Why has their origin
been so elusive?
Firstly, a civil war
fought over the place of icons in Byzantine churches, raged violently, and with
repeated moments of devastating destruction, across the Byzantine Empire for
150yrs. The Byzantine empire tore itself apart, during which time the iconophiles, who saw icons as profound
theological manifestations of faith in the incarnation and thus essential to
its life and worship, fought off ‘image breakers’, who saw in icons a work of
the devil which broke the first of the Ten Commandments. Engulfing the empire
with varying intensity between its outbreak under the Emperor Leo III in 725AD,
and the eventual triumph of the iconophiles in 843AD, it resulted in not only the
destruction of almost the entire corpus of early iconography, but by the end
the mental landscape by which they were understood had been radically developed
and re-shaped. This dearth of examples makes the traditional art critical
method almost impossible to follow because it investigates origins in terms of
comparisons. When there is a real paucity of examples to compare the method
grinds to a halt.
At the same time
during this period the sense of an empire of Byzantium, rather than of Rome,
had consolidated itself. The iconoclast controversy came in the aftermath of
the loss of the great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, as well as Jerusalem, the
spiritual heart of the empire, so that by the end of the 9th century
Byzantium had no rivals within the borders of the empire either economically,
politically or spiritually. It had become, in this sense, the Empire. A cursory
look at the ecclesiastical prominence of Constantinople gives apt evidence of
the process. In 325AD the town was the seat of a minor bishop, with no
theological or spiritual significance, while Rome, Alexandria and Antioch were
universally recognized as pre-eminent due to the apostolic credentials of their
founding apostles and the vitality of their theological schools, all of which
mirrored their economic and cultural grandeur. By 451AD, at the council of
Chalcedon, Constantinople was finally raised to the status not just of a
patriarchate but as one second only to Rome. To this day the bishop of
Constantinople styles himself “His
Most Divine All-Holiness the Archbishop of Constantinople New Rome and
Ecumenical Patriarch”. At the same time Jerusalem, which was very much a pliant
off-shoot of the imperial establishment, was raised to the status of a patriarchate.
Meanwhile, on the theological front, the theological schools of Alexandria and
Antioch were warring over how to understand the way in which Jesus was both
fully human and fully Divine, a controversy over whether Jesus had one or two
natures. A complex theological and political wrangle, it resulted in the
patriarchates of both Alexandria and Antioch in formal schism with
Constantinople over dogma, an alienation that endures to this day between the
Orthodox and Oriental churches. This was consolidated when in 641AD Alexandria
was conquered by the Arab armies, which had happened to Jerusalem three
years earlier, and Antioch five years
earlier. Conquest took these ancient and prestigious cities, and their
patriarchs, permanently out of the empire altogether. Thus we can say very
clearly that the empire in the 6th century was a very different
reality than at the end of the 9th.
Yet among art historians
there is an assumption that the place of Constantinople in the life and culture
of the Byzantine Empire remained constantly the same from the outset: i.e.
effectively a city with an empire rather than an Empire with a capital.
"Byzantine art spans more than 1000 years and was centered on a Christian
society based in Constantinople, which was dedicated in 330, and was the
capital of the Christian Empire until 1453 when its religious landscape and art
became Islamic." Robin
Cormack, the Oxford History of Ar:t Byzantine Art. 2000. For these critics it is "Constantinople,
the greatest city in the world, to which Byzantine art owes not only its
supremacy but also its homogeneity." Byzantine and Early Mediaeval Painting by M.
Chatzidakis and A. Grabar. 1965. Here we have the
consensus of the art historical world which has held sway for half a century,
and held to by some of the most eminent, learned and respected experts in the
field. And while it is true that after the defining crisis of surviving the
Islamic attacks and the civil war over images Byzantium really was culturally
and spiritually centered on Constantinople, this was certainly not the case in
its initial, earlier period.
By making this
mistaken assumption about the earliest period of the Byzantine empire, the art
historians have been trying to build their understanding of the origins of its
art on false foundations, and so it is not surprising that they have come up
with a blank as to the origins of iconography. Their preoccupation with
Constantinople has prevented any serious evaluation of other possible places of
origin. "In the field of Byzantine art and literature, it is frequently
assumed that the capital of the empire, Constantinople, served as the model and
set the standards for the other cities of the Empire. As a result, the artistic
developments and achievements of the various regions within the Empire are
viewed as a reflection of innovations and creative movements that originated in
Constantinople despite the frequent lack of physical evidence in the capital.
In the not so distant past, the same hypothesis pervaded the scholarship of the
Roman Empire. However, scholars have now successfully challenge the long-held
notion that the provinces of the Roman Empire were influenced solely by the
developments in Rome and incapable of artistic innovation. A similar change in
approach is only recently begun to occur in byzantine studies." Karen C. Britt, 2001 AIAR Fellows' Reports
2000-2001 This is the observation of an archaeologist
rather than an art historian, but the insights of experts such as Brett need to
be taken into consideration if we are to make an accurate evaluation about the
milieu in which icons and Byzantine art in general came into existence, an
evaluation which should give us the possibility of postulating as to the time
and place at which the form of Christian art came into existence. At the very
least it is imperative to begin to look beyond the walls of Constantinople for
the birthplace of iconography. Grabar wrote in 1965 that “it is not possible to
define the precise moment when Byzantine painting was born", a
conclusion which is hardly surprising if he and his fellow scholars were, as
Brett and others are now suggesting, looking in the wrong place.
Thus on two grounds the
traditional art historical method is flawed in attempting to investigate the
origins of iconography and the time and place of its birth: a lack of
comparable examples and a flawed assumption about the preeminence of
Constantinople. A final weakness is its lack of willingness to look at
iconography ‘from within’, that is to examine its spiritual essence and the
essential elements necessary for the transformation of pagan art with Christian
themes, to a truly Christian art with an integral form. As iconography is still
a living art integral to a living faith tradition examination of that
spirituality offers another avenue for understanding how and when iconography
came into being. What elements are enduring and essential to distinguishing
iconography from other religious art, and what cultural/spiritual elements are
essential to it? These then open other questions such as when and where such
elements emerged in the Byzantine world, and where was there a convergence of
such elements in a context which was conducive for iconography to emerge?
