CHAPTER 4 The Realms of Gold

The fiery vision of the radiant icon simulates in its glittering both the radiant Mother of God and the fiery hour of the Last Judgement.

—B. V. Pentcheva

Byzantine tactile visuality rested on an aesthetic of exuberant surfaces. These present a taste for sensual pleasure stimulated by an abundance of textures, glittering light effects, the sweetness of honey and incense, and sound.

—B. V. Pentcheva¹

These statements, albeit from a highly technical book, do something to convey a common reaction on first acquaintance with Byzantine art. It was Byzantine art that fascinated travelers like Robert Byron and Thomas Whittemore in the early twentieth century (chapter 1), and drew them to the civilization from which it came. In Britain artists from the Royal Academy of Arts were associated with the British School at Athens (founded in 1886), and set about recording and drawing Byzantine buildings. The discovery of Byzantium by the Arts and Crafts movement was very much of the period too.² Walter George, who drew the basilica of St. Demetrius in Thessalonike for the British School at Athens before the great fire of 1917, was taught at the Royal College of Art by the architect and scholar William Lethaby, famous to Byzantinists for his work on Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. In the Ottoman period and until the mid-nineteenth century the mosaics inside Hagia Sophia were plastered over, and after they had been uncovered, restored, and recorded by the Fossati brothers and by W. Salzenburg in the 1850s they had had to be plastered over again.3 Hagia Sophia was still a mosque when the American art historian Thomas Whittemore’s good relationship with Ataturk allowed work to begin on the conservation of the mosaics in 1931. The building was secularized soon after and the work continued for nearly two decades. In 1930 Whittemore had founded the Byzantine Institute of America, initially in Boston but with outposts in Paris and Istanbul, and its work was eventually absorbed into the Byzantine research center at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. The historic study and restoration of the frescoes and mosaics of the Chora monastery (the Kariye Camii), also in Istanbul, was the result of a collaboration between the Institute and Dumbarton Oaks.

Edwin Freshfield (d. 1918), of the British legal family, was another antiquarian and traveler in the Levant, with a wife who had Smyrna connections. He chaired the Byzantine Research Fund at the British School in Athens, and his son, Edwin Hanson Freshfield (d. 1948), was a student of Byzantine law and yet another Levantine traveler. In 1903 Westminster Cathedral in London was completed, designed in Byzantine style (“cheaper than Gothic”).⁴ Co-secretary of the Byzantine Research Fund was O. M. Dalton of the British Museum, whose own book on Byzantine art and archaeology was published in 1911; it is typical of the period that he saw Byzantium’s greatest achievement as lying in its mosaics, architecture, painting, and minor arts.5

Aesthetic responses were central to this discovery of Byzantine art and architecture. Whittemore was a figure who also attracted the attention of writers, including Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh, and Robert Byron belonged to the same set as Evelyn Waugh at Oxford in the 1920s, where they were both members of the notorious but harmless Hypocrites Club.⁶ What Byron hoped for in The Byzantine Achievement was to “quicken the historical emotion” of the reader, “when next obtrudes on his notice the seaboard of the Greeks and its capital city of Constantinople.”⁷ He had an idealized view of Byzantine art that would certainly not satisfy art historians today—his approach was alternately naïve and patronizing, and his points of comparison derived from his own recent experience as an undergraduate at Oxford. Of the monasteries of Mount Athos, he thought, you could study in both date and plan the “exact counterparts of English university colleges,” without the “meanness” of later Gothic.⁸ For Byron, too, as for others in this early period, the aesthetic appeal of Byzantine art was an important element in the enthusiasm with which it was greeted.

Not all Byzantine art was a luxury art. However, the lasting appeal of its use of gold, silver, enamel, and precious stones is also evident from the choice of objects in blockbuster exhibitions and in the admiring reactions of their visitors (figure 7).⁹ The latter represent a response to Byzantine art and architecture that also found expression among the Byzantines themselves, who composed many lengthy and detailed literary descriptions (ekphraseis) of art works or buildings. Light and color, as well as gold and glitter, are key features in these works, and light is the dominant feature in the description of the newly built Justinianic Hagia Sophia by Procopius of Caesarea—when Byzantines described marble, what they emphasized was its sheen and brilliance.10

A high proportion of surviving Byzantine art is religious. This does not mean that the Byzantines were all religious themselves; rather, it tells us about patronage and how art was commissioned.¹¹ Impressive silverware and ivory objects remain from the late antique period, some of them clearly commissioned by the wealthy elite,¹² though the members of the later Byzantine aristocracy were more likely to commission an illustrated psalter or found a church or a monastery. Among the finest examples of late Byzantine art are the frescoes and mosaics commissioned for the Chora monastery in Constantinople already mentioned, by the early fourteenth-century writer, statesman, and courtier Theodore Metochites. But of the many glittering examples of luxury religious art from Byzantium, the extraordinary treasures looted by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and now in San Marco, Venice, are hard to match, as was clear from the reaction when they were included in the winter of 2008–9 in a major Byzantine exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. Many visitors found them hard to understand, but nearly all found them breathtaking. One can easily understand why some Byzantinists, including some art historians, wish to distance themselves from such an approach.

Figure 7. A gleaming icon: St. Michael, tenth century, now in the Treasury of St. Mark’s, Venice. ■ Photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv München. Reproduced with the permission of the Basilica di San Marco, Venice

In the words of Gilbert Dagron, “Byzance n’entre pas aisément dans les schémas d’une histoire de l’art ordinaire [Byzantium does not fit easily into the categories of conventional art history].”13 Byzantine art presents problems for modern audiences and modern interpreters alike, and we need to ask what this apparent exceptionalism means.¹⁴ The difficulty is compounded by the fact that contemporaries often praised the realism of objects when it is their very unfamiliarity and apparent stylization that many modern viewers find attractive. Nor is it clear that the terms the Byzantines used for color correspond easily with ours.¹⁵ The Byzantines also developed a sophisticated theory of perception very different from our own. To a western eye their art seems formulaic and lacking in perspective; the famous early icon of St. Peter from the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai has recently been described as “extraordinarily skilled” but also as “clearly two-dimensionalized,” with “flatness” a “defining feature.”¹⁶ This “flatness” in Byzantine icons has commonly been seen as intensely spiritual.¹⁷ In addition icons often presuppose a narrative or theological subject matter that has to be decoded before it can be understood. Last, the Byzantines themselves engaged in an intense debate about the relation between word and images, eventually resolved at the end of the iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries in favor of images, when the ninth-century declaration known as the Synodikon of Orthodoxy included the veneration of religious images as one of the markers of Orthodoxy. It is striking that the term “the triumph of Orthodoxy” was used to denote both the resolution of this struggle and the liturgical feast that was established to commemorate it (chapter 5).¹⁸

In a recent book Michael Squire explains what he sees as a strong contrast in modern attitudes to western medieval and Byzantine art in terms of the absence in Byzantium of the western legacy of the Protestant Reformation and its privileging of the written word.¹⁹ In contrast, Byzantium not only declared images equal to texts but went even further and privileged the image, claiming that words could lie but images conveyed the truth. This was not an easy position to maintain. It involved explaining why neither the Scriptures nor the Fathers had expressed this doctrine (some had even opposed religious art); appeal had therefore to be made to the force of an “unwritten tradition.” Arguments in the first phase of the quarrel over religious images in the eighth and early ninth centuries focused on the danger of idolatry and the difference between worship and mere veneration—a necessary precaution at a time when enthusiasm for religious images could easily lead to excess. Writing from the monastery of St. Sabas near Jerusalem, which was by then within the Umayyad caliphate, John of Damascus drew up an authoritative and cautionary set of guidelines. Church councils in 754 and 787 first condemned and then justified the veneration of religious images, marshaling a vast and ever-more sophisticated barrage of arguments and authorities. But the affair was not dead. Another council hostile to images followed in 815, and the defense of images became more technical and more philosophical, appealing to prototype and archetype and to sophisticated theories of representation.20 The leading defenders of images in this period, Theodore, abbot of the Studios monastery in Constantinople, and the patriarch Nicephorus, were remembered later as the canonical heroes of official attitudes. They were depicted in icons showing the end of the controversy in 843 as the “triumph” of Orthodoxy, and when the issue was revived in the eleventh century (chapter 5; and see figure 9 later) they were the authorities to whom appeal was made.

In the case of Byzantium, in contrast with the west, the reaction against depicting the divine in art came early, and it failed. This failure, seen conversely by the Byzantines as the “triumph” of images, was celebrated in highly tendentious versions of the controversy produced by the successful iconophiles. Just how much they manipulated the narrative has been recognized in recent scholarship, and amounted at times to the deliberate fabrication and interpolation of texts.²¹ The victory over iconoclasm was also illustrated visually, most famously in the illustrated psalter known as the “Khludov” psalter, which contains gloating depictions of the failed iconoclast attack on images.²²

Influenced by the relatively recent recognition of the level of tendentiousness in the central contemporary texts, revisionist scholarship downplays the wider political and social impact of the “iconoclastic controversy.”²³ Many bishops and monks were willing to change their positions, especially in its later stages. All was indeed not as it has seemed. But the lengthy debates and intensive literary production from the period ensured that a highly theoretical and self-conscious contemporary discourse developed in relation to Byzantine art. Anxiety about religious images was felt well before the “iconoclast era,” which Leslie Brubaker has defined as beginning only in AD 680. How could saints be recognized? Were images of Christ true likenesses? These were questions Christians increasingly asked themselves in the sixth and seventh centuries, a period when they also questioned whether the saints really had power after their deaths. The latter anxiety has been highlighted recently by several scholars.24 It was debated by contemporary authors in theological terms, and this spilled over into the debates about the status of religious images. One of the questioners in the seventh-century collection of “Questions and Answers” by Anastasius of Sinai suggested that it was angels, not the saints, who were responsible for visions of the saints in churches and at their tombs.²⁵ It was but a small step from appearances of the saints and the Virgin in dreams and visions to anxieties about their representations in visual art, or, conversely, to an appeal to visions as a means whereby the likenesses in icons could be verified.²⁶ Elsewhere the same Anastasius appealed to the visual as a means of verification of the real suffering of Christ on the cross, and to material signs in preference to texts, on the grounds that texts could be falsified.²⁷ Religious images also had an uncanny tendency to spawn copies of themselves: images of images of images. No wonder the risks from mistaken identity or impersonation were so high when the truth of visual likenesses was a matter of such deep concern.28

These anxieties built on still deeper fears. During the iconoclast and iconophile debates of the eighth and ninth centuries the supporters of images identified their enemies as “Jewish”-minded or “Saracen”-minded. The triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 was also proclaimed as the triumph of Christianity over Judaism, and this too was illustrated in visual art.²⁹ The intense arguments about images were accompanied by a virulent anti-Jewish tone in contemporary writing. John of Damascus’s defence of religious images followed seamlessly on from a spate of Christian Adversus Iudaeos apologetic texts in which a detailed repertoire of arguments was deployed to counter the supposed Jewish accusation of idolatry. As created objects, religious images naturally took their place in the late seventh century alongside the wood of the cross and other examples within this anxious and hostile anti-Jewish discourse, in which appeal was made to the Old Testament for counterexamples of alleged idolatry on the part of the Jews: the ark, manna, the tablets of the Law. It also reflected an existing and much wider anti-Jewish tone in written texts.³⁰ Jews also feature in several of the contemporary tales told about miraculous images, and among the illustrations in the ninth-century Khludov psalter, carefully aligned with the appropriate Psalms, we find illustrations of Jews attacking the icon of Christ.³¹ Taking together the surviving preiconoclastic texts and the posticonoclastic productions of the iconophiles, it is not hard to detect a steadily growing anxiety about the status of images. Iconophiles hoped and believed the arguments of the eighth and ninth centuries had put this to rest, but the extraordinary effort that they put into rewriting the record post eventum suggests that they still felt it necessary to make quite sure that this was the case.

The theorizing of likeness in Byzantium during and after the iconoclastic controversy took place within the specific context of religious images and their theological justification. But the interplay of word and image in Byzantium extended much more widely. The fact that Byzantines themselves often wrote about visual art or architecture, and the terms in which they did so, present special problems of interpretation: did they perceive art in the same way as we do now, and in the instances when we can compare textual and artistic representations, what is the relation between them? According to Leslie Brubaker, they are quite different: “words and images communicate differently: words describe, images show.”32 Not everyone agrees with this position, and the existence of an already large secondary literature suggests that there is something to explain. According to an alternative formulation, “Art and text, the interface between images and words, is one of the oldest issues in art history” and “the dynamic between art and text in Byzantium is essential for understanding Byzantine society, where the correct relationship between the two was critical to the well-being of the state.”³³ In the same introduction, Liz James also says that “any discussion of art and text in Byzantine culture needs also to engage with the nature of Byzantine written sources as verbal,” and asks whether art needs text.34 It seems clear at any rate that art historians need texts and “text historians” need art history.

Much attention has been drawn to the way in which Byzantine visual art itself incorporates texts—often the names, or abbreviated names, of those depicted, but sometimes also longer texts. Why was it felt necessary to identify the subject matter, even when it might be thought to be obvious? Then there is the case of epigrams written about works of art, and finally, the many rhetorical descriptions of art works known as ekphraseis. Much has been written about all these, and I do not wish to add to it here.³⁵ How far do ekphraseis express the way in which Byzantine art was actually perceived, and what do they tell us about the viewer? There was nothing new in the Byzantine period about ekphrasis, the rhetorical description of works of art; it was a taste inherited from poetic models from the classical period and from the rhetorical practice of the Second Sophistic, which was so influential on Byzantine high-style literature. “Vividness,” or energeia, was the touchstone of a successful rhetorical ekphrasis, achieved by stylistic means but also connected with an understanding of perception set out in the third-century Eikones of the Elder Philostratus. But as we now know, this text was itself an “artfully composed representation of viewing” rather than a pattern for describing art works, while ekphrasis aimed less at describing an object than at rivaling painting “using its own resources.”³⁶ Byzantine ekphraseis are not straightforward descriptions. Whether of secular or religious objects, they demonstrate both the enormous influence on Byzantine writing of rhetoric and the Second Sophistic and the intimate relation in Byzantium between rhetoric and visual art. Rather than taking them as direct responses to the art works in question (as has often been done), as indications of a theory of viewing, or as expressive of the responses of a contemporary viewer, each example needs to be subjected to its own detailed literary critique. Only then can it can be used (if at all) to interpret the artwork in question. Do art and text work in parallel, then, or should we not rather say that they are intertwined?

As in other matters, too, interpreting visual art in Byzantium is made more difficult by its complex and ongoing relation with earlier historical periods. As I argued in chapter 1, appreciation of Byzantine literature has been impeded for decades by the emphasis placed by traditional scholarship on mimesis, translated as “imitation.” According to this view, which is only now coming under serious scrutiny, Byzantine literature and Byzantine culture more generally were inherently derivative and unoriginal. Byzantium also suffers in the judgments made of its visual art, even if not in the same way. Like other Byzantine writers, the authors of ekphraseis inherited rhetorical strategies and assumptions from the writers of the Second Sophistic who remained their literary models. Unlike ourselves, they evidently felt that there was no awkwardness in applying the same tropes and terminology to what seems now to be the very different visual art of Byzantium.

At a deeper level, interpreting the art of Byzantium suffers from the modern confusion of periodization between “Byzantium” and late antiquity, a period in whose visual art many of the same issues arise (figure 8). Byzantium is not an autonomous subject, in other words. On the one hand, late antiquity (otherwise referred to as “early Byzantium”) has been seen as an “age of spirituality,” in which visual art not only became progressively more religious, but more religious in a specific way. On the other, features and issues that are found in the art of Byzantium have been shown to have roots not merely in late antique but also in Roman art.³⁷ As with the search for a “Byzantine” identity, discussed in chapter 2, Byzantium cannot be taken in isolation either from its roots in the Roman imperial period or from late antiquity.

Figure 8. Not all Byzantine art was sacred: these undignified male dancers are carved on the lid of a bone casket. ■ Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Scholars dealing with Byzantine literature are visibly struggling, not only with the dominant concept of imitation, much discussed in other fields of literary theory, but also with the undeniable habit of Byzantine authors to draw explicitly on classical models, to incorporate direct quotations, and to use archaizing vocabulary.38 All this also applies to Byzantine writers on visual art, which itself engaged with its past on many different levels. But finding citations and parallels is one thing; interpreting their use is quite another. Like the abundant recent scholarship on the Second Sophistic, many recent contributions about Roman art are also vital for the understanding of Byzantine literature and art.

Seen in this light, Byzantine art loses some of its exceptionalism. Its interpretation also falls within an overall move among art historians away from style and iconography toward issues of representation, semiotics, and the responses of “the viewer.” But the question has been further complicated by the fact that in earlier historiography the period we now call late antiquity was inexorably associated with a hermeneutics of decadence and decline. How then could Byzantine art be viewed except as further evidence of inferiority? These ideas were the context against which the aesthetes and travelers discussed earlier were so fascinated by their discovery of Byzantine art in the early twentieth century: the exotic appeal that it exercised on them involved what for them was a daring rejection of conventional classicism. Yet it was an art historian, Alois Riegl, who developed a groundbreaking rejection of “decline,” precisely in relation to the early Byzantine or “late antique” period, and thereby initiated the current more positive view of late antiquity.³⁹ How to link the interpretation of the art of late antiquity with that of the later centuries of Byzantium presents a challenge. In relation to visual art at least, to claim that “Byzantium” began only in the seventh century or thereabouts (chapter 1) risks cutting off some of the most important and best-known examples of Byzantine art: it clearly does not work.

Certainly the connection of Byzantine art with the intense arguments that went on about Orthodoxy and authority throughout the Byzantine period (themselves constituting a debate about truth and the status of communication) produced a particularly dense amount of theorizing and textual commentary, bequeathing to modern interpreters a range of intriguing problems. It was one of the legacies of the eighth-century and ninth-century theoretical debates about images that visual art was for Byzantines not only a central topic within the discourse of religious orthodoxy, but can itself actually be said to have constituted Orthodoxy. Art, especially in the form of icons, became a form of religious exegesis. It therefore needed to be interpreted itself, and the level of anxiety about true representation led to the development of rules, or at least conventions, for artists, even if they were never as clear-cut, or as strictly observed, as used to be believed. Recognition of the agendas lying behind many individual works designed to expound and claim their various versions of orthodox doctrine, and their capacity to enunciate complex theological themes in visual terms, has been part of the move among Byzantine art historians toward a highly contextual exposition and away from the stylistic analysis. To be a Byzantine art historian at this juncture requires a highly sophisticated theological awareness combined with the deployment of complex and often obscure theological texts. And since so much Byzantine writing of this kind remains imperfectly edited or is even unpublished, this means that they must be philologists, theologians, and liturgists, too.

I have been concerned here with images and the intellectual theory of representation. But icons also communicated in other ways. There is no doubt about their spiritual effects on viewers, and they could also constitute an important part within a sacred space that involved liturgical performance, incense and perfume, sound, touch, and visual perception. More than that, icons could themselves be “performative,” as in the case of the great icons of late Byzantium and their associated rituals—some acquired an animated and miraculous life of their own.40 This was also recognized in the dressing of icons with veils and silk, and their encasement in covers made of precious metals. It was a development licensed by the theological and intellectual debates of the eighth, and especially the ninth, century. At the same time, it needs to be recognized that many icons and other examples of visual art in Byzantium were inevitably quite routine or clichéd: not every icon had “a simple aesthetic beauty,”⁴¹ not every work can be a masterpiece, and not every work reached the level of complexity that I have suggested. But it remains true that visual art in Byzantium requires exegesis as well as aesthetic appreciation,⁴² and that in many cases the object itself constitutes an exegetical reading of its subject.

So far this chapter has dealt mainly with religious art in Byzantium, and especially with visual art. In contrast with the approach I have just described, some art historians prefer to cast their subject in terms of a discussion of “material culture.” This is partly due to unease with theological agendas and with the overrepresentation of Orthodox approaches in the secondary literature on Byzantium. Another motive is the desire to find an alternative to aesthetic judgments; yet another stems from the aim of locating these artifacts in the realm of production, exchange, and economics. Crafts, artisanal production, and production techniques also belong to the subject matter of Byzantine art history, as do the roles of patrons, donors, and patronage. Given the discursive turn in art history, as well as the volume of Byzantine theoretical writing about images, it is not surprising if the already vast literature on icons has proliferated (and been given priority in this chapter). But the great increase in archaeological investigation and the vast amount of data now available for the eastern empire, especially in the earlier period, also invite more technical, as well as more quantitative, approaches to material culture.

The availability of archaeological data also invites an interdisciplinary methodology, especially drawing on anthropological literature. Here the new interdisciplinary field of “material culture studies” may well have some lessons for Byzantinists.43 Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, published in 1998 (chapter 2),⁴⁴ proposed an arresting interpretation of material objects in given cultures, including artworks, as themselves constituting agents in social life; it would be interesting to see this applied to the material culture of Byzantium.

Art historians are not the only ones who have problems in interpreting Byzantium. The discipline of art history has played an important and central role in the development of Byzantine studies, and publications in this field account for a large proportion of the whole. But Byzantine art history cannot be left to its own specialists. It cannot stand alone.